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62569_H25OYX58_6 | How would you describe Gunther as a villain? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | He's likely been successful in the past, but he's clearly conquerable. | He's so universally despised that he has to work alone. | He's a classically funny villain, like what you'd imagine in children's movies and comedies. | He's fairly irresponsible and ruthless. | 0 |
62569_H25OYX58_7 | Based on your interpretation of the passage, of the following options who do you think would most likely be interested in reading it? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | A luddite who thinks even discussing technology is frustrating. | A well-read teenager with a penchant for thrilling adventure stories. | An avid reader of romance novels set in sci-fi locations. | An elementary schooler who likes outer space. | 1 |
62569_H25OYX58_8 | How would you describe Click's primary motivations? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | He was originally focused on filming, but he was also focused on survival efforts. | He was solely focused on filming the events and didn't contribute much else. | He wanted to help beyond filming but only ended up hurting the mission further. | He was focused on filming the events at first, but when he realized he needed to pitch in he forgot all about filming. | 0 |
55933_Z0IEX9MS_1 | Which best describes Peggy's relationship with her parents? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | Her parents love her and support her, but want her to be practical as she enters an unpredictable career path. | Her parents love her but don't truly think she'll be a successful actress because of how hard it is to get a big break. | Her parents love her so much that they're willing to support her reckless career choices. | Her parents trust her and love her but don't think that New York is the safest place for her because of her limited life experience. | 0 |
55933_Z0IEX9MS_2 | What narrative role does Jean play in the story? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | She serves as encouragement to Peggy and gives the reader more reason to believe that Peggy has good acting skills. | She serves as a deterrent to keep Peggy in the area because Jean loves her so much. | Jean serves as proof that Peggy will likely succeed in life because Peggy has such a solid friendship with her and relationships are important to success. | She pushes Peggy to pursue her dreams, so that Peggy doesn't have to end up being a teacher like Jean. | 0 |
55933_Z0IEX9MS_3 | Before Peggy's parents reveal their decision, was it obvious that they would let her move? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | Totally. Her parents sounded supportive in every possible way and they had the resources to get her multiple auditions in New York. | Not at all. Her parents had to argue about it for a while, and she was feeling nostalgic around her neighborhood so it looked like she was going to stay in town. | Not entirely. But, their conversation with Peggy along with Jean's conversation with Peggy supplied strong evidence that they would say yes. | Totally. Peggy had won so many awards and participated in so much theater that it would have been horrible parenting to make her stay. | 2 |
55933_Z0IEX9MS_4 | How would you describe the tone throughout the passage? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | It went from highly excited to mildly calm. | Calm at the beginning, tense through the rest. | While there was some uncertainty and excitement, it was relatively tranquil throughout. | Uncertainty filled the passage, though it became calm at the end. | 2 |
55933_Z0IEX9MS_5 | Which of these sets of descriptions best describes Peggy? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | She's dedicated, bold, and pretty | She's talented, unwise, and creative | She's reserved, strong, and caring | She's reasonable, unobservant, and bold | 0 |
55933_Z0IEX9MS_6 | What is one potential moral of this story? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | Believing in yourself and advocating for yourself can open doors. | Pursuing one's dream is difficult and often involves too much risk. | Acting as a career should be more well respected because of how difficult it is to enter the industry. | Sometimes dreams prevent you from enjoying what's right in front of you. | 0 |
55933_Z0IEX9MS_7 | Why was Socks a part of this story? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | Technically Socks helped Peggy pass the time, but Socks also gives us more of an idea of what Peggy's life at home is like and how wonderful it is. | Peggy talks to Socks about all her major life decisions. | Peggy might reconsider staying home because of how much she loves Socks. | She only helped Peggy pass time while her parents made a decision. | 0 |
61499_93EZLOIH_1 | Generally, which of the following best describes Brian's character? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | Dutiful, oblivious, and practical | Smart, kind hearted, and humorous | Practical, humorous, and laid-back | Dutiful, meek, and persistent | 0 |
61499_93EZLOIH_2 | Generally, which of the following best describes Crystal's character? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | Kind, quiet, and persistent | Naive, fun, and brave | Focused, bold, and charismatic | Focused, meek, and understanding | 2 |
61499_93EZLOIH_3 | What is one potential moral to this story? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | It's good to take risks and expose yourself to the world every once in a while. | Often individuals are corrupt, and conceal their corruption well. | Sometimes your worldviews might be wrong at first, but what matters is that you change your actions and views according to the information you have. | Adventure is a fun and worthwhile endeavor. | 2 |
61499_93EZLOIH_4 | How would you describe the changes in tone through the passage? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | From detached to intense | From excited to calm | From scary to tranquil | From calm to depressing | 0 |
61499_93EZLOIH_5 | If it did, how do you think Brian's opinion on the rebellion changed throughout the passage? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | He's secretly a rebel from the start, but breaks his ties from the rebellion by the end. | He's a conformist at the start, a rebel at the end. | He's a rebel throughout, but questions his loyalties throughout the passage. | He's a conformist throughout, but he's enticed by the idea of being a rebel at the end. | 1 |
61499_93EZLOIH_6 | Which is the best summary of this story? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | A man realizes his obliviousness and shifts his morality as a result. | A man secretly infiltrates rebel forces to hinder their mission. | A man loses hope for his world and gives up in the fight for justice. | A man prevents rebel forces from overwhelming his community. | 0 |
61499_93EZLOIH_7 | What do you think is most likely an accurate description of the rebellion? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | It's probably on the right side of history, given the violence of the opposition. | It's only a disruption, stopping it is what will maximize the good in the world. | It's just as bad as what it's fighting, a peace treaty is the most likely and the best solution. | It's widely supported and few oppose it. | 0 |
61499_93EZLOIH_8 | Do you think there is a romantic connection between Brian and Crystal? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | Absolutely not. They both hate each other, they're only working together out of necessity. | Probably. Both share similar personalities that work well together. | Unlikely. They both have known each other for a short period in which no thoughts about romance were genuinely addressed. | Definitely. They've been through a lot together and care about each other deeply. | 2 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_1 | What were the two main goals of the Quest III ship in this story? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | To survey galaxies for non-human life forms and return to Earth safely. | To scout for new worlds to live in and return to Earth safely. | To stay away from Earth for 900 years during a major world war and to return back safely. | To return safely to Earth and return with new raw materials for technological research. | 1 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_2 | How would you describe Captain Llud's character transformation across the entire Quest III journey? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | He was excited at first and became jaded over time. | He was consistently excited throughout because they found a new habitable planet early on in their mission. | His only priority was taking care of his family, so the mission's success/failure didn't really impact him much. | He was never really excited about his job, but he became excited at the thought of returning home. | 0 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_3 | What characteristics best describe Captain Llud in the present part of the story? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | Jubilant, humorous, and jaded | Scared, quiet, and humorous | Jolly, excited, and tired | Tired, defeated, and confused | 3 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_4 | At what moment in the story did the characters seem to have the most hope? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | When Captain Llud was looking at old photographs of his crewmates and reflecting on his long journey with people he cares for. | When the group started to return to Earth and things looked like smooth sailing. | When the group found a potentially human-friendly planet to inhabit. | When the group landed on Earth and walked around on grass for the first time in 10 years. | 1 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_5 | At what moment in the story did the characters seem to have the least hope? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | When they realized the oxygen supply was extremely low. | When they realized it was impossible to contact the other Quest ships. | When they were about to crash into a comet. | When they were mid-communication with the violent ships. | 3 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_6 | What is the overall shift in tone from the start of the passage to the end of the passage? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | From calm to frantic | From happy to calm | From frenzied to calm | From depressed to hopeful | 0 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_7 | What would've happened if Captain Llud tried to turn around and change course from Earth? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | They probably would've been shot at and the passengers would've died eventually with low resources. | They would've tricked one of the ships into housing all of the passengers and flying home on that ship instead of the Quest III ship. | They would've been left alone by the Earthen ships and accepted once they discussed matters some more. | The Earthen ships would've trapped and invaded the Quest III ship and held the passengers hostage. | 0 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_8 | Of the following, which is the best plausible explanation for the behavior of the Earthen ships? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | Since the Quest III trip promised to locate more planets, the current Earthens didn't trust them when they learned of their success because of how unlikely it was. | Since the Quest III trip promised to locate more planets, the current Earthens didn't trust them when they learned of their failure. | Since the Quest III trip promised to locate more natural resources, the current Earthens didn't trust them when they learned of their failure. | 900 years passed on Earth. The populations were different enough that the Quest III Earthens scared the current Earthen population. | 3 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_9 | If you had to recommend this reading to someone else, of the following options who do you think would most enjoy it? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | A sci-fi nerd who loves discovery of alien species and new planets as major tropes | A sci-fi nerd who loves intense and tragic stories | A commercial airplane pilot who wishes they were an astronaut | A sci-fi nerd who loves stories about family and happy endings | 1 |
63899_JTX7XLEN_10 | From the information the story provides, do you think you have a good sense of the personalities of Captain Llud's crew? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | Probably. There were good descriptions for all of the side characters, including Captain Llud's son. | No. Llud barely spoke to anyone on the ship at all, he was even ignoring his son so we really didn't get to see a good glimpse of anyone's personalities. | No. Llud was well-described, and some of the side characters had detail, but none of them really stand out too much. | Yes. All of the characters felt incredibly real, and they all care deeply about Llud. | 2 |
63919_NSBYQCZW_1 | Why is David Corbin on the ship in the first place? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | He has to direct his crew to an area with potentially large amounts of natural resources. | He has to direct his crew to an area with potentially habitable planets. | He's a doctor who has to tend to the other crew members who were medically sedated. | He has to direct his crew home to Earth on the tail end of their intergalactic voyage. | 1 |
63919_NSBYQCZW_2 | Of his fellow crew members, who does David seem to have the most concern for and why? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | Karen, because she's a female crew member and because she has a bad reaction to being awoken. | John, because he relies on him to be his right-hand man. | John, because David first wakes him up with the apparatus and is unsure how safe the apparatus is to operate. | Karen, because she's his wife and he only remembers this with time. | 0 |
63919_NSBYQCZW_3 | What is one potential moral of this story? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | Trying to find more habitable planets is a pointless endeavor. | Working together as a team and having hope can lead to more effective results. | Taking drastic actions without thinking them through is very risky. | It's best to trust your instincts and to not trust the technology around you. | 1 |
63919_NSBYQCZW_4 | Of the following, which personality traits best describe David? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | Attractive, witty, and charismatic | Smart, calculating, and cautious | Bold, quiet, and dumb | Focused, funny, and attractive | 1 |
63919_NSBYQCZW_5 | If David had entirely forgotten his life prior to the mission, what would've happened? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | He probably would've done a bad job at healing his crew. | He probably would've failed to wake up the rest of his crew. | He probably wouldn't be able to fly the ship very well, leading to dangerous outcomes. | He probably would've flirted with Karen a bit more. | 2 |
63919_NSBYQCZW_6 | If Karen remains in her current state long-term, what would most likely happen? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | She probably wouldn't be able to create, transform, or assess compounds very well. | She probably would avoid any advances from David or the others because she's less trusting of any of them. | She'd probably end up learning how to do someone else's job instead so she can help the crew out in some way. | She'd probably try to exit the ship at the first planet they land on so she doesn't deplete the ship's resources more than needed. | 0 |
63919_NSBYQCZW_7 | Why did everyone have to wake up? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | Everyone had to help fly the ship so it wouldn't crash into the G type star. | Everyone worked in pairs in the same position so they needed their partners. | Everyone had their own job on the ship that needed doing. | Everyone remembered small elements of what was going on and wanted to keep the information to themselves. | 2 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_1 | Why didn't Tremaine automatically include the state law enforcement in his investigation? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | He thinks the state law enforcement officers are all incredibly rude. | He thinks the state law enforcement officers are all incredibly dumb. | He's unsure of how serious the investigation is, and he doesn't want them stepping on his toes. | He's unsure of how serious the investigation is. | 2 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_2 | Did the questions Tremaine needed answers to get resolved? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | No. He still doesn't know where the transmission is coming from. | No. He thinks that Miss Carroll is behind this out of spite for Mr. Bram, but he's not quite sure. | Yes. Mr. Bram was the cause of the transmission, so Tremaine's question has been answered. | Probably. Mr. Bram is certainly evil, so Tremaine knows for sure where this investigation will lead. | 0 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_3 | Of the following options, which set of traits best describes Tremaine? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | Athletic, attractive, and quiet | Smart, kind, and determined | Charismatic, dumb, and athletic | Unreasonable, attractive, and bold | 1 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_4 | Of the following options, which best describes the relationship between Tremaine and Jess? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | They hate each other but are working together in their investigation. | They're childhood friends and they ran into each other and caught up for old times' sake. | They knew each other growing up and are temporarily working together. | They're hindering each other's ability to succeed in the investigation. | 2 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_5 | If Tremaine didn't go see Miss Carroll, what would've happened? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | He wouldn't know how crazy Mr. Bram is and he wouldn't know the true culprit of the transmissions. | He wouldn't know what thing scares Mr. Bram and Miss Carroll wouldn't have given him the item. | He wouldn't know about the thing that scares Mr. Bram. | He wouldn't have the item that Miss Carroll gave him and he wouldn't know how mean she thinks Mr. Bram is. | 1 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_6 | If you were to recommend this story to someone else, of the following options who'd enjoy it the most? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | Someone who loves true crime and murder mysteries. | Someone who loves white-collar crime and historical fiction. | Someone who loves mysteries and small-town gossip. | Someone who loves small-town gossip and romance. | 2 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_7 | What is the most likely reason why Tremaine confides in Jess about the case? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | He knows that Jess is already two steps ahead of him and he wants to catch up. | He trusts Jess to an extent, and he knows that Jess might have information that could help. | He knows that Jess might compete with him even more if he doesn't try to work together. | He's friends with Jess and cares about his well being because he's staying in the town with all of this crime. | 1 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_8 | Of the following options, which could best describe the moral to this story? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | The histories of small towns are interesting and often involve murder and other significant crimes. | Working entirely by oneself can be great if one is smart and connected. | Teamwork is good for solving problems, and not working as a cohesive team can lead to obstacles. | Sometimes crimes are hard to solve and it's good to realize that some will never be solved fully. | 2 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_9 | Of the following options, which seems to be Tremaine's biggest asset in his investigation? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | His history with the town. Folks knew him and were more willing to help him like Miss Carroll, and he knew how to motivate people, like he did by bribing the record keeper for help. | His good looks. They help him flirt with women like Miss Carroll and the librarian, so he could get more information. | His strength. He was able to bust down the door at Mr. Bram's home and catch him in the act of transmitting data. | His ruthlessness. He was strict enough to draw boundaries with the state police that helped his investigation significantly. | 0 |
52844_ZW8X7FHT_10 | Which best summarizes this story? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | A private investigator tries to find a transmitter which allows him to save his hometown from certain danger. | An investigator travels to his hometown to find conflict between the transmitter-using youth and the local and state police forces. | An investigator travels to his hometown to locate a transmitter with an unknown use. | A man seeks justice for a town plagued by a harmful transmitter. | 2 |
62569_9USYPSLM_1 | What is the relationship between the two main characters? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | Patrolman and Bodyguard | Patrolman and Filmmaker | Filmmaker and Bodyguard | Patrolman and Target | 1 |
62569_9USYPSLM_2 | Why does Click suspect that the meteor strike wasn’t accidental? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | The meteor was quiet and stealthy. | Gunther had thrown meteors before. | The meteor was unusually hot and glowing. | The gravity threw them out of orbit. | 2 |
62569_9USYPSLM_3 | Who does Click refer to as the “Big Producer?” | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | His boss at Cosmic Films | The Captain of Luna Base | A Higher Power or God | Gunther | 2 |
62569_9USYPSLM_4 | What would have happened if Click’s camera broke in the crash? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | Irish would have died on impact. | They would have returned immediately to Luna Base. | They would have caught Gunther faster. | They would have continued to believe the monsters were real. | 3 |
62569_9USYPSLM_5 | Why didn’t the proton gun hurt the monsters? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | The monsters ran too fast. | The proton gun was damaged in the crash. | The monsters had thick, resistant skin. | Irish wanted to negotiate a peace. | 2 |
62569_9USYPSLM_6 | What is the meaning of “palaver” in the passage? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | Fuss about Click’s constant filming | Rambling, idle talk | Unnecessarily elaborate escape plan | Peace negotiations with Gunther | 1 |
62569_9USYPSLM_7 | How does Gunther maintain his hold on power? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | Brute force | Money | Benevolence to his guards | Tricks of the eye | 3 |
62569_9USYPSLM_8 | Referring to the passage’s title, who was the “Monster Maker”? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | Click | Human imagination | Gunther | Irish | 1 |
62569_9USYPSLM_9 | How was Gunther defeated? | The Monster Maker
By RAY BRADBURY
"Get Gunther," the official orders read. It
was to laugh! For Click and Irish were
marooned on the pirate's asteroid—their only
weapons a single gun and a news-reel camera.
Suddenly, it was there. There wasn't time to blink or speak or get
scared. Click Hathaway's camera was loaded and he stood there listening
to it rack-spin film between his fingers, and he knew he was getting a
damned sweet picture of everything that was happening.
The picture of Marnagan hunched huge over the control-console,
wrenching levers, jamming studs with freckled fists. And out in the
dark of the fore-part there was space and a star-sprinkling and this
meteor coming like blazing fury.
Click Hathaway felt the ship move under him like a sensitive animal's
skin. And then the meteor hit. It made a spiked fist and knocked the
rear-jets flat, and the ship spun like a cosmic merry-go-round.
There was plenty of noise. Too damned much. Hathaway only knew he was
picked up and hurled against a lever-bank, and that Marnagan wasn't
long in following, swearing loud words. Click remembered hanging on to
his camera and gritting to keep holding it. What a sweet shot that had
been of the meteor! A sweeter one still of Marnagan beating hell out of
the controls and keeping his words to himself until just now.
It got quiet. It got so quiet you could almost hear the asteroids
rushing up, cold, blue and hard. You could hear your heart kicking a
tom-tom between your sick stomach and your empty lungs.
Stars, asteroids revolved. Click grabbed Marnagan because he was the
nearest thing, and held on. You came hunting for a space-raider and you
ended up cradled in a slab-sized Irishman's arms, diving at a hunk of
metal death. What a fade-out!
"Irish!" he heard himself say. "Is this IT?"
"Is this
what
?" yelled Marnagan inside his helmet.
"Is this where the Big Producer yells CUT!?"
Marnagan fumed. "I'll die when I'm damned good and ready. And when I'm
ready I'll inform you and you can picture me profile for Cosmic Films!"
They both waited, thrust against the shipside and held by a hand of
gravity; listening to each other's breathing hard in the earphones.
The ship struck, once. Bouncing, it struck again. It turned end over
and stopped. Hathaway felt himself grabbed; he and Marnagan rattled
around—human dice in a croupier's cup. The shell of the ship burst,
air and energy flung out.
Hathaway screamed the air out of his lungs, but his brain was thinking
quick crazy, unimportant things. The best scenes in life never reach
film, or an audience. Like this one, dammit! Like
this
one! His
brain spun, racketing like the instantaneous, flicking motions of his
camera.
Silence came and engulfed all the noise, ate it up and swallowed it.
Hathaway shook his head, instinctively grabbed at the camera locked
to his mid-belt. There was nothing but stars, twisted wreckage, cold
that pierced through his vac-suit, and silence. He wriggled out of the
wreckage into that silence.
He didn't know what he was doing until he found the camera in his
fingers as if it had grown there when he was born. He stood there,
thinking "Well, I'll at least have a few good scenes on film. I'll—"
A hunk of metal teetered, fell with a crash. Marnagan elevated seven
feet of bellowing manhood from the wreck.
"Hold it!" cracked Hathaway's high voice. Marnagan froze. The camera
whirred. "Low angle shot; Interplanetary Patrolman emerges unscathed
from asteroid crackup. Swell stuff. I'll get a raise for this!"
"From the toe of me boot!" snarled Marnagan brusquely. Oxen shoulders
flexed inside his vac-suit. "I might've died in there, and you nursin'
that film-contraption!"
Hathaway felt funny inside, suddenly. "I never thought of that.
Marnagan die? I just took it for granted you'd come through. You always
have. Funny, but you don't think about dying. You try not to." Hathaway
stared at his gloved hand, but the gloving was so thick and heavy he
couldn't tell if it was shaking. Muscles in his bony face went down,
pale. "Where are we?"
"A million miles from nobody."
They stood in the middle of a pocked, time-eroded meteor plain that
stretched off, dipping down into silent indigo and a rash of stars.
Overhead, the sun poised; black and stars all around it, making it look
sick.
"If we walk in opposite directions, Click Hathaway, we'd be shaking
hands the other side of this rock in two hours." Marnagan shook his mop
of dusty red hair. "And I promised the boys at Luna Base this time I'd
capture that Gunther lad!"
His voice stopped and the silence spoke.
Hathaway felt his heart pumping slow, hot pumps of blood. "I checked
my oxygen, Irish. Sixty minutes of breathing left."
The silence punctuated that sentence, too. Upon the sharp meteoric
rocks Hathaway saw the tangled insides of the radio, the food supply
mashed and scattered. They were lucky to have escaped. Or
was
suffocation a better death...?
Sixty minutes.
They stood and looked at one another.
"Damn that meteor!" said Marnagan, hotly.
Hathaway got hold of an idea; remembering something. He said it out:
"Somebody tossed that meteor, Irish. I took a picture of it, looked
it right in the eye when it rolled at us, and it was poker-hot.
Space-meteors are never hot and glowing. If it's proof you want, I've
got it here, on film."
Marnagan winced his freckled square of face. "It's not proof we need
now, Click. Oxygen. And then
food
. And then some way back to Earth."
Hathaway went on saying his thoughts: "This is Gunther's work. He's
here somewhere, probably laughing his guts out at the job he did us.
Oh, God, this would make great news-release stuff if we ever get back
to Earth. I.P.'s Irish Marnagan, temporarily indisposed by a pirate
whose dirty face has never been seen, Gunther by name, finally wins
through to a triumphant finish. Photographed on the spot, in color, by
yours truly, Click Hathaway. Cosmic Films, please notice."
They started walking, fast, over the pocked, rubbled plain toward a
bony ridge of metal. They kept their eyes wide and awake. There wasn't
much to see, but it was better than standing still, waiting.
Marnagan said, "We're working on margin, and we got nothin' to sweat
with except your suspicions about this not being an accident. We got
fifty minutes to prove you're right. After that—right or wrong—you'll
be Cosmic Films prettiest unmoving, unbreathin' genius. But talk all
you like, Click. It's times like this when we all need words, any
words, on our tongues. You got your camera and your scoop. Talk about
it. As for me—" he twisted his glossy red face. "Keeping alive is me
hobby. And this sort of two-bit death I did not order."
Click nodded. "Gunther knows how you'd hate dying this way, Irish.
It's irony clean through. That's probably why he planned the meteor and
the crash this way."
Marnagan said nothing, but his thick lips went down at the corners, far
down, and the green eyes blazed.
They stopped, together.
"Oops!" Click said.
"Hey!" Marnagan blinked. "Did you feel
that
?"
Hathaway's body felt feathery, light as a whisper, boneless and
limbless, suddenly. "Irish! We lost weight, coming over that ridge!"
They ran back. "Let's try it again."
They tried it. They scowled at each other. The same thing happened.
"Gravity should not act this way, Click."
"Are you telling me? It's man-made. Better than that—it's Gunther! No
wonder we fell so fast—we were dragged down by a super-gravity set-up!
Gunther'd do anything to—did I say
anything
?"
Hathaway leaped backward in reaction. His eyes widened and his hand
came up, jabbing. Over a hill-ridge swarmed a brew of unbelievable
horrors. Progeny from Frankenstein's ARK. Immense crimson beasts with
numerous legs and gnashing mandibles, brown-black creatures, some
tubular and fat, others like thin white poisonous whips slashing along
in the air. Fangs caught starlight white on them.
Hathaway yelled and ran, Marnagan at his heels, lumbering. Sweat broke
cold on his body. The immense things rolled, slithered and squirmed
after him. A blast of light. Marnagan, firing his proton-gun. Then, in
Click's ears, the Irishman's incredulous bellow. The gun didn't hurt
the creatures at all.
"Irish!" Hathaway flung himself over the ridge, slid down an incline
toward the mouth a small cave. "This way, fella!"
Hathaway made it first, Marnagan bellowing just behind him. "They're
too big; they can't get us in here!" Click's voice gasped it out,
as Marnagan squeezed his two-hundred-fifty pounds beside him.
Instinctively, Hathaway added, "Asteroid monsters! My camera! What a
scene!"
"Damn your damn camera!" yelled Marnagan. "They might come in!"
"Use your gun."
"They got impervious hides. No use. Gahh! And that was a pretty chase,
eh, Click?"
"Yeah. Sure.
You
enjoyed it, every moment of it."
"I did that." Irish grinned, showing white uneven teeth. "Now, what
will we be doing with these uninvited guests at our door?"
"Let me think—"
"Lots of time, little man. Forty more minutes of air, to be exact."
They sat, staring at the monsters for about a minute. Hathaway felt
funny about something; didn't know what. Something about these monsters
and Gunther and—
"Which one will you be having?" asked Irish, casually. "A red one or a
blue one?"
Hathaway laughed nervously. "A pink one with yellow ruffles—Good God,
now you've got
me
doing it. Joking in the face of death."
"Me father taught me; keep laughing and you'll have Irish luck."
That didn't please the photographer. "I'm an Anglo-Swede," he pointed
out.
Marnagan shifted uneasily. "Here, now. You're doing nothing but
sitting, looking like a little boy locked in a bedroom closet, so take
me a profile shot of the beasties and myself."
Hathaway petted his camera reluctantly. "What in hell's the use? All
this swell film shot. Nobody'll ever see it."
"Then," retorted Marnagan, "we'll develop it for our own benefit; while
waitin' for the U.S. Cavalry to come riding over the hill to our
rescue!"
Hathaway snorted. "U.S. Cavalry."
Marnagan raised his proton-gun dramatically. "Snap me this pose," he
said. "I paid your salary to trot along, photographing, we hoped,
my capture of Gunther, now the least you can do is record peace
negotiations betwixt me and these pixies."
Marnagan wasn't fooling anybody. Hathaway knew the superficial palaver
for nothing but a covering over the fast, furious thinking running
around in that red-cropped skull. Hathaway played the palaver, too, but
his mind was whirring faster than his camera as he spun a picture of
Marnagan standing there with a useless gun pointed at the animals.
Montage. Marnagan sitting, chatting at the monsters. Marnagan smiling
for the camera. Marnagan in profile. Marnagan looking grim, without
much effort, for the camera. And then, a closeup of the thrashing death
wall that holed them in. Click took them all, those shots, not saying
anything. Nobody fooled nobody with this act. Death was near and they
had sweaty faces, dry mouths and frozen guts.
When Click finished filming, Irish sat down to save oxygen, and used it
up arguing about Gunther. Click came back at him:
"Gunther drew us down here, sure as Ceres! That gravity change we felt
back on that ridge, Irish; that proves it. Gunther's short on men. So,
what's he do; he builds an asteroid-base, and drags ships down. Space
war isn't perfect yet, guns don't prime true in space, trajectory
is lousy over long distances. So what's the best weapon, which
dispenses with losing valuable, rare ships and a small bunch of men?
Super-gravity and a couple of well-tossed meteors. Saves all around.
It's a good front, this damned iron pebble. From it, Gunther strikes
unseen; ships simply crash, that's all. A subtle hand, with all aces."
Marnagan rumbled. "Where is the dirty son, then!"
"He didn't have to appear, Irish. He sent—them." Hathaway nodded at
the beasts. "People crashing here die from air-lack, no food, or from
wounds caused at the crackup. If they survive all that—the animals
tend to them. It all looks like Nature was responsible. See how subtle
his attack is? Looks like accidental death instead of murder, if the
Patrol happens to land and finds us. No reason for undue investigation,
then."
"I don't see no Base around."
Click shrugged. "Still doubt it? Okay. Look." He tapped his camera and
a spool popped out onto his gloved palm. Holding it up, he stripped
it out to its full twenty inch length, held it to the light while it
developed, smiling. It was one of his best inventions. Self-developing
film. The first light struck film-surface, destroyed one chemical,
leaving imprints; the second exposure simply hardened, secured the
impressions. Quick stuff.
Inserting the film-tongue into a micro-viewer in the camera's base,
Click handed the whole thing over. "Look."
Marnagan put the viewer up against the helmet glass, squinted. "Ah,
Click. Now, now. This is one lousy film you invented."
"Huh?"
"It's a strange process'll develop my picture and ignore the asteroid
monsters complete."
"What!"
Hathaway grabbed the camera, gasped, squinted, and gasped again:
Pictures in montage; Marnagan sitting down, chatting conversationally
with
nothing
; Marnagan shooting his gun at
nothing
; Marnagan
pretending to be happy in front of
nothing
.
Then, closeup—of—NOTHING!
The monsters had failed to image the film. Marnagan was there, his hair
like a red banner, his freckled face with the blue eyes bright in it.
Maybe—
Hathaway said it, loud: "Irish! Irish! I think I see a way out of this
mess! Here—"
He elucidated it over and over again to the Patrolman. About the film,
the beasts, and how the film couldn't be wrong. If the film said the
monsters weren't there, they weren't there.
"Yeah," said Marnagan. "But step outside this cave—"
"If my theory is correct I'll do it, unafraid," said Click.
Marnagan scowled. "You sure them beasts don't radiate ultra-violet or
infra-red or something that won't come out on film?"
"Nuts! Any color
we
see, the camera sees. We've been fooled."
"Hey, where
you
going?" Marnagan blocked Hathaway as the smaller man
tried pushing past him.
"Get out of the way," said Hathaway.
Marnagan put his big fists on his hips. "If anyone is going anywhere,
it'll be me does the going."
"I can't let you do that, Irish."
"Why not?"
"You'd be going on my say-so."
"Ain't your say-so good enough for me?"
"Yes. Sure. Of course. I guess—"
"If you say them animals ain't there, that's all I need. Now, stand
aside, you film-developing flea, and let an Irishman settle their
bones." He took an unnecessary hitch in trousers that didn't exist
except under an inch of porous metal plate. "Your express purpose on
this voyage, Hathaway, is taking films to be used by the Patrol later
for teaching Junior Patrolmen how to act in tough spots. First-hand
education. Poke another spool of film in that contraption and give me
profile a scan. This is lesson number seven: Daniel Walks Into The
Lion's Den."
"Irish, I—"
"Shut up and load up."
Hathaway nervously loaded the film-slot, raised it.
"Ready, Click?"
"I—I guess so," said Hathaway. "And remember, think it hard, Irish.
Think it hard. There aren't any animals—"
"Keep me in focus, lad."
"All the way, Irish."
"What do they say...? Oh, yeah. Action. Lights. Camera!"
Marnagan held his gun out in front of him and still smiling took one,
two, three, four steps out into the outside world. The monsters were
waiting for him at the fifth step. Marnagan kept walking.
Right out into the middle of them....
That was the sweetest shot Hathaway ever took. Marnagan and the
monsters!
Only now it was only Marnagan.
No more monsters.
Marnagan smiled a smile broader than his shoulders. "Hey, Click, look
at me! I'm in one piece. Why, hell, the damned things turned tail and
ran away!"
"Ran, hell!" cried Hathaway, rushing out, his face flushed and
animated. "They just plain vanished. They were only imaginative
figments!"
"And to think we let them hole us in that way, Click Hathaway, you
coward!"
"Smile when you say that, Irish."
"Sure, and ain't I always smilin'? Ah, Click boy, are them tears in
your sweet grey eyes?"
"Damn," swore the photographer, embarrassedly. "Why don't they put
window-wipers in these helmets?"
"I'll take it up with the Board, lad."
"Forget it. I was so blamed glad to see your homely carcass in one
hunk, I couldn't help—Look, now, about Gunther. Those animals are part
of his set-up. Explorers who land here inadvertently, are chased back
into their ships, forced to take off. Tourists and the like. Nothing
suspicious about animals. And if the tourists don't leave, the animals
kill them."
"Shaw, now. Those animals can't kill."
"Think not, Mr. Marnagan? As long as we believed in them they could
have frightened us to death, forced us, maybe, to commit suicide. If
that isn't being dangerous—"
The Irishman whistled.
"But, we've got to
move
, Irish. We've got twenty minutes of oxygen.
In that time we've got to trace those monsters to their source,
Gunther's Base, fight our way in, and get fresh oxy-cannisters." Click
attached his camera to his mid-belt. "Gunther probably thinks we're
dead by now. Everyone else's been fooled by his playmates; they never
had a chance to disbelieve them."
"If it hadn't been for you taking them pictures, Click—"
"Coupled with your damned stubborn attitude about the accident—" Click
stopped and felt his insides turning to water. He shook his head and
felt a film slip down over his eyes. He spread his legs out to steady
himself, and swayed. "I—I don't think my oxygen is as full as yours.
This excitement had me double-breathing and I feel sick."
Marnagan's homely face grimaced in sympathy. "Hold tight, Click. The
guy that invented these fish-bowls didn't provide for a sick stomach."
"Hold tight, hell, let's move. We've got to find where those animals
came from! And the only way to do that is to get the animals to come
back!"
"Come back? How?"
"They're waiting, just outside the aura of our thoughts, and if we
believe in them again, they'll return."
Marnagan didn't like it. "Won't—won't they kill us—if they come—if
we believe in 'em?"
Hathaway shook a head that was tons heavy and weary. "Not if we believe
in them to a
certain point
. Psychologically they can both be seen and
felt. We only want to
see
them coming at us again."
"
Do
we, now?"
"With twenty minutes left, maybe less—"
"All right, Click, let's bring 'em back. How do we do it?"
Hathaway fought against the mist in his eyes. "Just think—I will see
the monsters again. I will see them again and I will not feel them.
Think it over and over."
Marnagan's hulk stirred uneasily. "And—what if I forget to remember
all that? What if I get excited...?"
Hathaway didn't answer. But his eyes told the story by just looking at
Irish.
Marnagan cursed. "All right, lad. Let's have at it!"
The monsters returned.
A soundless deluge of them, pouring over the rubbled horizon, swarming
in malevolent anticipation about the two men.
"This way, Irish. They come from this way! There's a focal point, a
sending station for these telepathic brutes. Come on!"
Hathaway sludged into the pressing tide of color, mouths, contorted
faces, silvery fat bodies misting as he plowed through them.
Marnagan was making good progress ahead of Hathaway. But he stopped and
raised his gun and made quick moves with it. "Click! This one here!
It's real!" He fell back and something struck him down. His immense
frame slammed against rock, noiselessly.
Hathaway darted forward, flung his body over Marnagan's, covered the
helmet glass with his hands, shouting:
"Marnagan! Get a grip, dammit! It's not real—don't let it force into
your mind! It's not real, I tell you!"
"Click—" Marnagan's face was a bitter, tortured movement behind glass.
"Click—" He was fighting hard. "I—I—sure now. Sure—" He smiled.
"It—it's only a shanty fake!"
"Keep saying it, Irish. Keep it up."
Marnagan's thick lips opened. "It's only a fake," he said. And then,
irritated, "Get the hell off me, Hathaway. Let me up to my feet!"
Hathaway got up, shakily. The air in his helmet smelled stale, and
little bubbles danced in his eyes. "Irish,
you
forget the monsters.
Let me handle them, I know how. They might fool you again, you might
forget."
Marnagan showed his teeth. "Gah! Let a flea have all the fun? And
besides, Click, I like to look at them. They're pretty."
The outpour of animals came from a low lying mound a mile farther on.
Evidently the telepathic source lay there. They approached it warily.
"We'll be taking our chances on guard," hissed Irish. "I'll go ahead,
draw their attention, maybe get captured. Then,
you
show up with
your
gun...."
"I haven't got one."
"We'll chance it, then. You stick here until I see what's ahead. They
probably got scanners out. Let them see me—"
And before Hathaway could object, Marnagan walked off. He walked about
five hundred yards, bent down, applied his fingers to something, heaved
up, and there was a door opening in the rock.
His voice came back across the distance, into Click's earphones. "A
door, an air-lock, Click. A tunnel leading down inside!"
Then, Marnagan dropped into the tunnel, disappearing. Click heard the
thud of his feet hitting the metal flooring.
Click sucked in his breath, hard and fast.
"All right, put 'em up!" a new harsh voice cried over a different
radio. One of Gunther's guards.
Three shots sizzled out, and Marnagan bellowed.
The strange harsh voice said, "That's better. Don't try and pick that
gun up now. Oh, so it's you. I thought Gunther had finished you off.
How'd you get past the animals?"
Click started running. He switched off his
sending
audio, kept his
receiving
on. Marnagan, weaponless.
One
guard. Click gasped. Things
were getting dark. Had to have air. Air. Air. He ran and kept running
and listening to Marnagan's lying voice:
"I tied them pink elephants of Gunther's in neat alphabetical bundles
and stacked them up to dry, ya louse!" Marnagan said. "But, damn you,
they killed my partner before he had a chance!"
The guard laughed.
The air-lock door was still wide open when Click reached it, his head
swimming darkly, his lungs crammed with pain-fire and hell-rockets. He
let himself down in, quiet and soft. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't
have a weapon. Oh, damn, damn!
A tunnel curved, ending in light, and two men silhouetted in that
yellow glare. Marnagan, backed against a wall, his helmet cracked,
air hissing slowly out of it, his face turning blue. And the guard, a
proton gun extended stiffly before him, also in a vac-suit. The guard
had his profile toward Hathaway, his lips twisting: "I think I'll let
you stand right there and die," he said quietly. "That what Gunther
wanted, anway. A nice sordid death."
Hathaway took three strides, his hands out in front of him.
"Don't move!" he snapped. "I've got a weapon stronger than yours. One
twitch and I'll blast you and the whole damned wall out from behind
you! Freeze!"
The guard whirled. He widened his sharp eyes, and reluctantly, dropped
his gun to the floor.
"Get his gun, Irish."
Marnagan made as if to move, crumpled clumsily forward.
Hathaway ran in, snatched up the gun, smirked at the guard. "Thanks for
posing," he said. "That shot will go down in film history for candid
acting."
"What!"
"Ah: ah! Keep your place. I've got a real gun now. Where's the door
leading into the Base?"
The guard moved his head sullenly over his left shoulder.
Click was afraid he would show his weak dizziness. He needed air.
"Okay. Drag Marnagan with you, open the door and we'll have air. Double
time! Double!"
Ten minutes later, Marnagan and Hathaway, fresh tanks of oxygen on
their backs, Marnagan in a fresh bulger and helmet, trussed the guard,
hid him in a huge trash receptacle. "Where he belongs," observed Irish
tersely.
They found themselves in a complete inner world; an asteroid nothing
more than a honey-comb fortress sliding through the void unchallenged.
Perfect front for a raider who had little equipment and was
short-handed of men. Gunther simply waited for specific cargo ships to
rocket by, pulled them or knocked them down and swarmed over them for
cargo. The animals served simply to insure against suspicion and the
swarms of tourists that filled the void these days. Small fry weren't
wanted. They were scared off.
The telepathic sending station for the animals was a great bank of
intricate, glittering machine, through which strips of colored film
with images slid into slots and machine mouths that translated them
into thought-emanations. A damned neat piece of genius.
"So here we are, still not much better off than we were," growled
Irish. "We haven't a ship or a space-radio, and more guards'll turn
up any moment. You think we could refocus this doohingey, project the
monsters inside the asteroid to fool the pirates themselves?"
"What good would that do?" Hathaway gnawed his lip. "They wouldn't fool
the engineers who created them, you nut."
Marnagan exhaled disgustedly. "Ah, if only the U.S. Cavalry would come
riding over the hill—"
"Irish!" Hathaway snapped that, his face lighting up. "Irish. The U.S.
Cavalry it is!" His eyes darted over the machines. "Here. Help me.
We'll stage everything on the most colossal raid of the century."
Marnagan winced. "You breathing oxygen or whiskey?"
"There's only one stipulation I make, Irish. I want a complete picture
of Marnagan capturing Raider's Base. I want a picture of Gunther's face
when you do it. Snap it, now, we've got rush work to do. How good an
actor are you?"
"That's a silly question."
"You only have to do three things. Walk with your gun out in front of
you, firing. That's number one. Number two is to clutch at your heart
and fall down dead. Number three is to clutch at your side, fall down
and twitch on the ground. Is that clear?"
"Clear as the Coal Sack Nebula...."
An hour later Hathaway trudged down a passageway that led out into a
sort of city street inside the asteroid. There were about six streets,
lined with cube houses in yellow metal, ending near Hathaway in a
wide, green-lawned Plaza.
Hathaway, weaponless, idly carrying his camera in one hand, walked
across the Plaza as if he owned it. He was heading for a building that
was pretentious enough to be Gunther's quarters.
He got halfway there when he felt a gun in his back.
He didn't resist. They took him straight ahead to his destination and
pushed him into a room where Gunther sat.
Hathaway looked at him. "So you're Gunther?" he said, calmly. The
pirate was incredibly old, his bulging forehead stood out over sunken,
questioningly dark eyes, and his scrawny body was lost in folds of
metal-link cloth. He glanced up from a paper-file, surprised. Before he
could speak, Hathaway said:
"Everything's over with, Mr. Gunther. The Patrol is in the city now and
we're capturing your Base. Don't try to fight. We've a thousand men
against your eighty-five."
Gunther sat there, blinking at Hathaway, not moving. His thin hands
twitched in his lap. "You are bluffing," he said, finally, with a firm
directness. "A ship hasn't landed here for an hour. Your ship was the
last. Two people were on it. The last I saw of them they were being
pursued to the death by the Beasts. One of you escaped, it seemed."
"Both. The other guy went after the Patrol."
"Impossible!"
"I can't respect your opinion, Mr. Gunther."
A shouting rose from the Plaza. About fifty of Gunther's men, lounging
on carved benches during their time-off, stirred to their feet and
started yelling. Gunther turned slowly to the huge window in one side
of his office. He stared, hard.
The Patrol was coming!
Across the Plaza, marching quietly and decisively, came the Patrol.
Five hundred Patrolmen in one long, incredible line, carrying paralysis
guns with them in their tight hands.
Gunther babbled like a child, his voice a shrill dagger in the air.
"Get out there, you men! Throw them back! We're outnumbered!"
Guns flared. But the Patrol came on. Gunther's men didn't run, Hathaway
had to credit them on that. They took it, standing.
Hathaway chuckled inside, deep. What a sweet, sweet shot this was.
His camera whirred, clicked and whirred again. Nobody stopped him
from filming it. Everything was too wild, hot and angry. Gunther was
throwing a fit, still seated at his desk, unable to move because of his
fragile, bony legs and their atrophied state.
Some of the Patrol were killed. Hathaway chuckled again as he saw three
of the Patrolmen clutch at their hearts, crumple, lie on the ground and
twitch. God, what photography!
Gunther raged, and swept a small pistol from his linked corselet. He
fired wildly until Hathaway hit him over the head with a paper-weight.
Then Hathaway took a picture of Gunther slumped at his desk, the chaos
taking place immediately outside his window.
The pirates broke and fled, those that were left. A mere handful. And
out of the chaos came Marnagan's voice, "Here!" | Click and Irish tricked him and his pirate guards. | He had a heart attack. | He surrendered. | The U.S. Cavalry swarmed his base. | 0 |
55933_N3ZLU76T_1 | Why did the Lane family move to Wisconsin? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | For Mr. Lane’s work | To be near family and friends | For Mrs. Lane’s singing career | For Peggy’s school | 0 |
55933_N3ZLU76T_2 | Why doesn’t Jean want to join Peggy in New York? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | She’s not interested in acting as a career. | She wants to be a singer. | She will take care of Socks. | She doesn’t want to leave her family. | 0 |
55933_N3ZLU76T_3 | Why did Mrs. Lane give up her dream of singing? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | She didn’t have time to study and practice. | She didn’t believe she could be good at it and gave up. | Her parents didn’t allow her to continue. | She got married and had a child. | 1 |
55933_N3ZLU76T_4 | Why did Mr. & Mrs. Lane agree so quickly to Peggy’s bargain? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | They didn’t want to argue about it anymore. | They didn’t want her to pursue a different career. | They understood that she was determined and realistic in her plans. | They remembered that she wanted to move to New York since she was young. | 2 |
55933_N3ZLU76T_5 | How did Mr. Lane know May Berriman? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | She was his former teacher. | She was an old friend of Mrs. Lane. | She was his childhood friend. | She was a friend from when he worked in New York. | 3 |
55933_N3ZLU76T_6 | What will Peggy mostly likely do tomorrow morning? | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
PEGGY FINDS THE THEATER
I
Dramatic Dialogue
“Of course, this is no surprise to us,” Thomas Lane
said to his daughter Peggy, who perched tensely on
the edge of a kitchen stool. “We could hardly have
helped knowing that you’ve wanted to be an actress
since you were out of your cradle. It’s just that decisions
like this can’t be made quickly.”
“But, Dad!” Peggy almost wailed. “You just finished
saying yourself that I’ve been thinking about
this and wanting it for years! You can’t follow that by
calling it a quick decision!” She turned to her mother,
her hazel eyes flashing under a mass of dark chestnut
curls. “Mother, you understand, don’t you?”
Mrs. Lane smiled gently and placed her soft white
hand on her daughter’s lean brown one. “Of course
I understand, Margaret, and so does your father. We
both want to do what’s best for you, not to stand in
your way. The only question is whether the time is
right, or if you should wait longer.”
2
“Wait! Mother—Dad—I’m years behind already!
The theater is full of beginners a year and even two
years younger than I am, and girls of my age have
lots of acting credits already. Besides, what is there to
wait for?”
Peggy’s father put down his coffee cup and leaned
back in the kitchen chair until it tilted on two legs
against the wall behind him. He took his time before
answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was
warm and slow.
“Peg, I don’t want to hold up your career. I don’t
have any objections to your wanting to act. I think—judging
from the plays I’ve seen you in at high
school and college—that you have a real talent. But
I thought that if you would go on with college for
three more years and get your degree, you would
gain so much worth-while knowledge that you’d use
and enjoy for the rest of your life—”
“But not acting knowledge!” Peggy cried.
“There’s more to life than that,” her father put in.
“There’s history and literature and foreign languages
and mathematics and sciences and music and art
and philosophy and a lot more—all of them fascinating
and all important.”
“None of them is as fascinating as acting to me,”
Peggy replied, “and none of them is nearly as important
to my life.”
3
Mrs. Lane nodded. “Of course, dear. I know just
how you feel about it,” she said. “I would have answered
just the same way when I was your age, except
that for me it was singing instead of acting. But—” and
here her pleasant face betrayed a trace of
sadness—“but I was never able to be a singer. I guess
I wasn’t quite good enough or else I didn’t really
want it hard enough—to go on with all the study and
practice it needed.”
She paused and looked thoughtfully at her daughter’s
intense expression, then took a deep breath before
going on.
“What you must realize, Margaret, is that you may
not quite make the grade. We think you’re wonderful,
but the theater is full of young girls whose parents
thought they were the most talented things
alive; girls who won all kinds of applause in high-school
and college plays; girls who have everything
except luck. You may be one of these girls, and if you
are, we want you to be prepared for it. We want you
to have something to fall back on, just in case
you ever need it.”
Mr. Lane, seeing Peggy’s hurt look, was quick to
step in with reassurance. “We don’t think you’re going
to fail, Peg. We have every confidence in you and
your talents. I don’t see how you could miss being the
biggest success ever—but I’m your father, not a
Broadway critic or a play producer, and I could be
wrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want you to be
hurt. All I ask is that you finish college and get a
teacher’s certificate so that you can always find
useful work if you have to. Then you can try your
luck in the theater. Doesn’t that make sense?”
4
Peggy stared at the faded linoleum on the floor for
a few moments before answering. Then, looking first
at her mother and then at her father, she replied
firmly, “No, it doesn’t! It might make sense if we
were talking about anything else but acting, but
we’re not. If I’m ever going to try, I’ll have a better
chance now than I will in three years. But I can see
your point of view, Dad, and I’ll tell you what—I’ll
make a bargain with you.”
“What sort of bargain, Peg?” her father asked curiously.
“If you let me go to New York now, and if I can get
into a good drama school there, I’ll study and try to
find acting jobs at the same time. That way I’ll still be
going to school and I’ll be giving myself a chance.
And if I’m not started in a career in one year, I’ll go
back to college and get my teacher’s certificate before
I try the theater again. How does that sound to
you?”
“It sounds fair enough,” Tom Lane admitted, “but
are you so confident that you’ll see results in one
year? After all, some of our top stars worked many
times that long before getting any recognition.”
“I don’t expect recognition in one year, Dad,”
Peggy said. “I’m not that conceited or that silly. All
I hope is that I’ll be able to get a part in that time,
and maybe be able to make a living out of acting.
And that’s probably asking too much. If I have to,
I’ll make a living at something else, maybe working
in an office or something, while I wait for parts. What
I want to prove in this year is that I can act. If I can’t,
I’ll come home.”
5
“It seems to me, Tom, that Margaret has a pretty
good idea of what she’s doing,” Mrs. Lane said. “She
sounds sensible and practical. If she were all starry-eyed
and expected to see her name in lights in a few
weeks, I’d vote against her going, but I’m beginning
to think that maybe she’s right about this being the
best time.”
“Oh, Mother!” Peggy shouted, jumping down from
the stool and throwing her arms about her mother’s
neck. “I knew you’d understand! And you understand
too, don’t you, Dad?” she appealed.
Her father replied in little puffs as he drew on his
pipe to get it started. “I ... never said ... I didn’t
... understand you ... did I?” His pipe satisfactorily
sending up thick clouds of fragrant smoke, he
took it out of his mouth before continuing more
evenly.
“Peg, your mother and I are cautious only because
we love you so much and want what’s going to make
you happy. At the same time, we want to spare you
any unnecessary unhappiness along the way. Remember,
I’m not a complete stranger to show business.
Before I came out here to Rockport to edit the
Eagle
,
I worked as a reporter on one of the best papers in
New York. I saw a lot ... I met a lot of actors and
actresses ... and I know how hard the city often
was for them. But I don’t want to protect you from
life. That’s no good either. Just let me think about it
a little longer and let me talk to your mother some
more.”
6
Mrs. Lane patted Peggy’s arm and said, “We won’t
keep you in suspense long, dear. Why don’t you go
out for a walk for a while and let us go over the situation
quietly? We’ll decide before bedtime.”
Peggy nodded silently and walked to the kitchen
door, where she paused to say, “I’m just going out to
the barn to see if Socks is all right for the night. Then
maybe I’ll go down to Jean’s for a while.”
As she stepped out into the soft summer dusk she
turned to look back just in time to see her mother
throw her a comically exaggerated wink of assurance.
Feeling much better, Peggy shut the screen door behind
her and started for the barn.
Ever since she had been a little girl, the barn had
been Peggy’s favorite place to go to be by herself and
think. Its musty but clean scent of straw and horses
and leather made her feel calm and alive. Breathing
in its odor gratefully, she walked into the half-dark to
Socks’s stall. As the little bay horse heard her coming,
she stamped one foot and softly whinnied a greeting.
Peggy stopped first at the bag that hung on the wall
among the bridles and halters and took out a lump of
sugar as a present. Then, after stroking Socks’s silky
nose, she held out her palm with the sugar cube.
Socks took it eagerly and pushed her nose against
Peggy’s hand in appreciation.
As Peggy mixed some oats and barley for her pet
and checked to see that there was enough straw in
the stall, she thought about her life in Rockport and
the new life that she might soon be going to.
7
Rockport, Wisconsin, was a fine place, as pretty a
small town as any girl could ask to grow up in. And
not too small, either, Peggy thought. Its 16,500 people
supported good schools, an excellent library, and two
good movie houses. What’s more, the Rockport Community
College attracted theater groups and concert
artists, so that life in the town had always been stimulating.
And of course, all of this was in addition to the
usual growing-up pleasures of swimming and sailing,
movie dates, and formal dances—everything that a
girl could want.
Peggy had lived all her life here, knew every tree-shaded
street, every country road, field, lake, and
stream. All of her friends were here, friends she had
known since her earliest baby days. It would be hard
to leave them, she knew, but there was no doubt in
her mind that she was going to do so. If not now, then
as soon as she possibly could.
It was not any dissatisfaction with her life, her
friends, or her home that made Peggy want to leave
Rockport. She was not running away from anything,
she reminded herself; she was running
to
something.
To what? To the bright lights, speeding taxis, glittering
towers of a make-believe movie-set New York?
Would it really be like that? Or would it be something
different, something like the dreary side-street
world of failure and defeat that she had also seen in
movies?
8
Seeing the image of herself hungry and tired, going
from office to office looking for a part in a play,
Peggy suddenly laughed aloud and brought herself
back to reality, to the warm barn smell and the big,
soft-eyed gaze of Socks. She threw her arm around
the smooth bay neck and laid her face next to the
horse’s cheek.
“Socks,” she murmured, “I need some of your horse
sense if I’m going to go out on my own! We’ll go
for a fast run in the morning and see if some fresh air
won’t clear my silly mind!”
With a final pat, she left the stall and the barn behind,
stepping out into the deepening dusk. It was
still too early to go back to the house to see if her parents
had reached a decision about her future. Fighting
down an impulse to rush right into the kitchen to
see how they were coming along, Peggy continued
down the driveway and turned left on the slate sidewalk
past the front porch of her family’s old farmhouse
and down the street toward Jean Wilson’s
house at the end of the block.
As she walked by her own home, she noticed with
a familiar tug at her heart how the lilac bushes on
the front lawn broke up the light from the windows
behind them into a pattern of leafy lace. For a moment,
or maybe a little more, she wondered why she
wanted to leave this. What for? What could ever be
better?
9
II
Dramatic Decision
Upstairs at the Wilsons’, Peggy found Jean swathed
in bath towels, washing her long, straight red hair,
which was now white with lather and piled up in a
high, soapy knot.
“You just washed it yesterday!” Peggy said. “Are
you doing it again—or still?”
Jean grinned, her eyes shut tight against the soapsuds.
“Again, I’m afraid,” she answered. “Maybe it’s
a nervous habit!”
“It’s a wonder you’re not bald, with all the rubbing
you give your hair,” Peggy said with a laugh.
“Well, if I do go bald, at least it will be with a
clean scalp!” Jean answered with a humorous crinkle
of her freckled nose. Taking a deep breath and puffing
out her cheeks comically, she plunged her head
into the basin and rinsed off the soap with a shampoo
hose. When she came up at last, dripping-wet
hair was tightly plastered to the back of her head.
“There!” she announced. “Don’t I look beautiful?”
10
After a brisk rubdown with one towel, Jean rolled
another dry towel around her head like an Indian
turban. Then, having wrapped herself in an ancient,
tattered, plaid bathrobe, she led Peggy out of the
steamy room and into her cozy, if somewhat cluttered,
bedroom. When they had made themselves
comfortable on the pillow-strewn daybeds, Jean came
straight to the point.
“So the grand debate is still going on, is it? When
do you think they’ll make up their minds?” she asked.
“How do you know they haven’t decided anything
yet?” Peggy said, in a puzzled tone.
“Oh, that didn’t take much deduction, my dear
Watson,” Jean laughed. “If they had decided against
the New York trip, your face would be as long as
Socks’s nose, and it’s not half that long. And if the answer
was yes, I wouldn’t have to wait to hear about it!
You would have been flying around the room and
talking a mile a minute. So I figured that nothing was
decided yet.”
“You know, if I were as smart as you,” Peggy said
thoughtfully, “I would have figured out a way to convince
Mother and Dad by now.”
“Oh, don’t feel bad about being dumb,” Jean said in
mock tones of comfort. “If I were as pretty and talented
as you are, I wouldn’t need brains, either!”
With a hoot of laughter, she rolled quickly aside on
the couch to avoid the pillow that Peggy threw at
her.
A short, breathless pillow fight followed, leaving
the girls limp with laughter and with Jean having to
retie her towel turban. From her new position, flat on
the floor, Peggy looked up at her friend with a rueful
smile.
11
“You know, I sometimes think that we haven’t
grown up at all!” she said. “I can hardly blame my
parents for thinking twice—and a lot more—before
treating me like an adult.”
“Nonsense!” Jean replied firmly. “Your parents
know a lot better than to confuse being stuffy with
being grown-up and responsible. And, besides, I
know that they’re not the least bit worried about your
being able to take care of yourself. I heard them talking
with my folks last night, and they haven’t got a
doubt in the world about you. But they know how
hard it can be to get a start as an actress, and they
want to be sure that you have a profession in case
you don’t get a break in show business.”
“I know,” Peggy answered. “We had a long talk
about it this evening after dinner.” Then she told her
friend about the conversation and her proposed “bargain”
with her parents.
“They both seemed to think it was fair,” she concluded,
“and when I went out, they were talking it
over. They promised me an answer by bedtime, and
I’m over here waiting until the jury comes in with its
decision. You know,” she said suddenly, sitting up
on the floor and crossing her legs under her, “I bet
they wouldn’t hesitate a minute if you would only
change your mind and decide to come with me and
try it too!”
12
After a moment’s thoughtful silence, Jean answered
slowly, “No, Peg. I’ve thought this all out before,
and I know it would be as wrong for me as it is
right for you. I know we had a lot of fun in the dramatic
groups, and I guess I was pretty good as a
comedienne in a couple of the plays, but I know I
haven’t got the real professional thing—and I know
that you have. In fact, the only professional talent I
think I do have for the theater is the ability to recognize
talent when I see it—and to recognize that it’s
not there when it isn’t!”
“But, Jean,” Peggy protested, “you can handle
comedy and character lines as well as anyone I
know!”
Jean nodded, accepting the compliment and seeming
at the same time to brush it off. “That doesn’t
matter. You know even better than I that there’s a lot
more to being an actress—a successful one—than
reading lines well. There’s the ability to make the
audience sit up and notice you the minute you walk
on, whether you have lines or not. And that’s something
you can’t learn; you either have it, or you
don’t. It’s like being double-jointed. I can make an
audience laugh when I have good lines, but you can
make them look at you and respond to you and be
with you all the way, even with bad lines. That’s
why you’re going to go to New York and be an actress.
And that’s why I’m not.”
“But, Jean—” Peggy began.
13
“No buts!” Jean cut in. “We’ve talked about this
enough before, and I’m not going to change my
mind. I’m as sure about what I want as you are about
what you want. I’m going to finish college and get my
certificate as an English teacher.”
“And what about acting? Can you get it out of
your mind as easily as all that?” Peggy asked.
“That’s the dark and devious part of my plan,”
Jean answered with a mysterious laugh that ended in
a comic witch’s cackle and an unconvincing witch-look
that was completely out of place on her round,
freckled face. “Once I get into a high school as an
English teacher, I’m going to try to teach a special
course in the literature of the theater and maybe another
one in stagecraft. I’m going to work with the
high-school drama group and put on plays. That way,
I’ll be in a spot where I can use my special talent of
recognizing talent. And that way,” she added, becoming
much more serious, “I have a chance really to
do something for the theater. If I can help and encourage
one or two people with real talent like yours,
then I’ll feel that I’ve really done something worth
while.”
Peggy nodded silently, not trusting herself to
speak for fear of saying something foolishly sentimental,
or even of crying. Her friend’s earnestness about
the importance of her work and her faith in Peggy’s
talent had touched her more than she could say.
14
The silence lasted what seemed a terribly long
time, until Jean broke it by suddenly jumping up and
flinging a last pillow which she had been hiding behind
her back. Running out of the bedroom, she
called, “Come on! I’ll race you down to the kitchen
for cocoa! By the time we’re finished, it’ll be about
time for your big Hour of Decision scene!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when Peggy finally felt
that her parents had had enough time to talk things
out. Leaving the Wilson house, she walked slowly
despite her eagerness, trying in all fairness to give her
mother and father every minute she could. Reaching
her home, she cut across the lawn behind the lilac
bushes, to the steps up to the broad porch that
fronted the house. As she climbed the steps, she
heard her father’s voice raised a little above its normal
soft, deep tone, but she could not make out the
words.
Crossing the porch, she caught sight of him
through the window. He was speaking on the telephone,
and now she caught his words.
“Fine. Yes.... Yes—I think we can. Very
well, day after tomorrow, then. That’s right—all
three of us. And, May—it’ll be good to see you again,
after all these years! Good-by.”
As Peggy entered the room, her father put down
the phone and turned to Mrs. Lane. “Well, Betty,”
he said, “it’s all set.”
“What’s all set, Dad?” Peggy said, breaking into a
run to her father’s side.
15
“Everything’s all set, Peg,” her father said with a
grin. “And it’s set just the way you wanted it! There’s
not a man in the world who can hold out against
two determined women.” He leaned back against the
fireplace mantel, waiting for the explosion he felt
sure was to follow his announcement. But Peggy just
stood, hardly moving a muscle. Then she walked
carefully, as if she were on the deck of a rolling ship,
to the big easy chair and slowly sat down.
“Well, for goodness’ sake!” her mother cried.
“Where’s the enthusiasm?”
Peggy swallowed hard before answering. When
her voice came, it sounded strange, about two tones
higher than usual. “I ... I’m trying to be sedate ... and
poised ... and very grown-up,” she said.
“But it’s not easy. All I want to do is to—” and she
jumped out of the chair—“to yell
whoopee
!” She
yelled at the top of her lungs.
After the kisses, the hugs, and the first excitement,
Peggy and her parents adjourned to the kitchen, the
favorite household conference room, for cookies and
milk and more talk.
“Now, tell me, Dad,” Peggy asked, her mouth full
of oatmeal cookies, no longer “sedate” or “poised,”
but her natural, bubbling self. “Who was that on the
phone, and where are the three of us going, and
what’s all set?”
16
“One thing at a time,” her father said. “To begin
with, we decided almost as soon as you left that we
were going to let you go to New York to try a year’s
experience in the theater. But then we had to decide
just where you would live, and where you should
study, and how much money you would need, and a
whole lot of other things. So I called New York to talk
to an old friend of mine who I felt would be able to
give us some help. Her name is May Berriman, and
she’s spent all her life in the theater. In fact, she was
a very successful actress. Now she’s been retired for
some years, but I thought she might give us some
good advice.”
“And did she?” Peggy asked.
“We were luckier than I would have thought possible,”
Mrs. Lane put in. “It seems that May bought a
big, old-fashioned town house and converted it into
a rooming house especially for young actresses. She
always wanted a house of her own with a garden in
back, but felt it was foolish for a woman living alone.
This way, she can afford to run a big place and at
the same time not be alone. And best of all, she says
she has a room that you can have!”
“Oh, Mother! It sounds wonderful!” Peggy exulted.
“I’ll be with other girls my own age who are actresses,
and living with an experienced actress! I’ll bet she
can teach me loads!”
“I’m sure she can,” her father said. “And so can
the New York Dramatic Academy.”
“Dad!” Peggy shouted, almost choking on a cooky.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to get me accepted
there! That’s the best dramatic school in the country!
How—?”
17
“Don’t get too excited, Peg,” Mr. Lane interrupted.
“You’re not accepted anywhere yet, but May
Berriman told me that the Academy is the best place
to study acting, and she said she would set up an
audition for you in two days. The term starts in a
couple of weeks, so there isn’t much time to lose.”
“Two days! Do you mean we’ll be going to New
York day after tomorrow, just like that?”
“Oh, no,” her mother answered calmly. “We’re going
to New York tomorrow on the first plane that we
can get seats on. Your father doesn’t believe in wasting
time, once his mind is made up.”
“Tomorrow?” Peggy repeated, almost unable to believe
what she had heard. “What are we sitting here
talking for, then? I’ve got a million things to do! I’ve
got to get packed ... I’ve got to think of what to
read for the audition! I can study on the plane, I
guess, but ... oh! I’ll be terrible in a reading unless
I can have more time! Oh, Mother, what parts
will I do? Where’s the Shakespeare? Where’s—”
“Whoa!” Mr. Lane said, catching Peggy’s arm to
prevent her from rushing out of the kitchen. “Not
now, young lady! We’ll pack in the morning, talk
about what you should read, and take an afternoon
plane to New York. But tonight, you’d better think
of nothing more than getting to bed. This is going to
be a busy time for all of us.”
Reluctantly, Peggy agreed, recognizing the sense
of what her father said. She finished her milk and
cookies, kissed her parents good night and went upstairs
to bed.
But it was one thing to go to bed and another to
go to sleep.
18
Peggy lay on her back, staring at the ceiling and
the patterns of light and shade cast by the street
lamp outside as it shone through the leaves of the big
maple tree. As she watched the shifting shadows,
she reviewed the roles she had played since her first
time in a high-school play. Which should she refresh
herself on? Which ones would she do best? And
which ones were most suited to her now? She recognized
that she had grown and developed past some
of the roles which had once seemed perfectly suited
to her talent and her appearance. But both had
changed. She was certainly not a mature actress
yet, from any point of view, but neither was she a
schoolgirl. Her trim figure was well formed; her face
had lost the undefined, simple cuteness of the early
teens, and had gained character. She didn’t think she
should read a young romantic part like Juliet. Not
that she couldn’t do it, but perhaps something
sharper was called for.
Perhaps Viola in
Twelfth Night
? Or perhaps not
Shakespeare at all. Maybe the people at the Academy
would think she was too arty or too pretentious?
Maybe she should do something dramatic and full of
stormy emotion, like Blanche in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
? Or, better for her development and age, a
light, brittle, comedy role...?
19
Nothing seemed quite right. Peggy’s thoughts
shifted with the shadows overhead. All the plays she
had ever seen or read or acted in melted together in
a blur, until the characters from one seemed to be
talking with the characters from another and moving
about in an enormous set made of pieces from two or
three different plays. More actors kept coming on in
a fantastic assortment of costumes until the stage was
full. Then the stage lights dimmed, the actors joined
hands across the stage to bow, the curtain slowly
descended, the lights went out—and Peggy was fast
asleep. | Rehearse for her audition. | Catch a plane to New York. | Take Socks out for a ride. | Pack her suitcase. | 3 |
61499_QH1RC44X_1 | Why did the first policeman smirk at Brian’s door? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | He recognized Brian as the boss of Venus Consolidated Research Organization. | He saw a woman in the bedroom. | He was sorry for getting Brian out of the bathtub. | He saw that Brian’s towel was open and not covering his body. | 1 |
61499_QH1RC44X_2 | Why was the woman in Brian’s apartment? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | She was drawing his bath and cleaning his apartment. | Pete set them up on a date. | She was hiding from the police. | She worked in his vitamin research lab. | 2 |
61499_QH1RC44X_3 | Why did Pete send the rebels to break Brian out of jail? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | Pete believed in the rebel cause. | Pete felt bad since it was his fault Brian was in jail. | Pete would do anything to help his boss. | Brian told Pete that he wanted to get out of jail. | 3 |
61499_QH1RC44X_4 | What would have happened if Brian didn’t escape with Crystal? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | Brian would have given Pete extra work to punish him for the prank. | Brian would have turned in Crystal and the rebels. | The police would have thought Brian was working with the rebels. | Brian would have continued his vitamin research. | 2 |
61499_QH1RC44X_5 | What advantage did the rebels have over the Venus Consolidated police? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | Fast atmospheric ships | Detailed knowledge of the area | Secret supporters on the inside | Stashes of weaponry in caves | 1 |
61499_QH1RC44X_6 | What is the meaning of “laconically” as used in this passage? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | Elaborately | Windy | Concisely | Deeply | 2 |
61499_QH1RC44X_7 | What caused the avalanche of rocks in the cavern? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | An atomite bomb. | A chemical reaction with the ships’ exhaust. | The vibrations of the advancing police. | Vibrations from the ships’ exhaust. | 3 |
61499_QH1RC44X_8 | What lesson did Brian learn from his experience? | MONOPOLY
By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts
Sheer efficiency and good management can
make a monopoly grow into being. And once
it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is
going to try to use it as a weapon if he can—
"That all, chief? Gonna quit now?"
Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant.
That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day.
"I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes
straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we
can get at that vitamin count early in the morning."
"Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day
off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax.
Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got
her radiophone number somewhere—just ask for Myrtle."
Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock.
"Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning.
Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was
still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard
the remarks that followed him.
"One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with
him."
"Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted.
Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants
could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing,
then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building.
He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the
compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here,
alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had
an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of
the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part
responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus
Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else
that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others,
pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the
monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's
regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to
suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors
of revolution among the disgruntled older families.
He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus
Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving
executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth.
He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not
directly influence his own department.
He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own
apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise
that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in
the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the
water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk
in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed
and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of
irradiated water.
He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful
blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly
awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The
battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up.
"What do you want?"
There was no answer; the hammering continued.
"All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub
and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and
grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite
meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of
ducks on parade.
Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open.
"What the devil—" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's
uniform.
"Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration
Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments."
"Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here."
The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly.
"Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you.
Have a good—Good night, sir," he saluted and left.
Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot
been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now.
Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the
open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as
it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant
mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his
regular routine.
"Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue
eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the
policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk.
"Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him.
Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd
soon fix that.
"All right, joke's over, you can beat it now."
"Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive
towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way
round."
Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs.
"Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted.
The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully
dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to
conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe
austerely around him.
"Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly.
"Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish
my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands
with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was
struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his
dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed
back into the bath.
The door opened a little.
"Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police
force."
"Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling
burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack
a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim
satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around
the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid
embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in
complete relaxation.
A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan.
"Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding
continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp
bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething
fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his
mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four
police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him
away from the door.
"Say! What the—"
"Where is she?" the sergeant demanded.
"Wherethehell's who?"
"Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here."
"Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you
say rebel?"
"Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?"
"She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was
going to have women running around in here, do you?"
"She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards
contributed. "But she ain't there now."
"You don't think that I—"
"Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along
and see the chief."
Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody.
Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me."
Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as
possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly
bewildered Pete Brent.
"What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble
already?"
"Me? For gosh sakes, chief—"
"Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me
arrested is your idea of a joke—"
"But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke.
That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter.
They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her
for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell
around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control
panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered
his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you
had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl
as good-looking as they say she is?"
"Now listen here, Brent. I don't know—"
"Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away."
"There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know
anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here—"
"Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can
pass the word along."
"Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant.
"Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly.
Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in
frustrated fury.
For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and
rattled the bars.
"Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't
hold me here indefinitely."
"Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if
you are—"
Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around
the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows
moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and
silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside
his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar.
"Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed.
He knew that voice!
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in
trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here
that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!"
"Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?"
"Sure I do. Guards! Guards!"
Someone came running.
"Guards are coming," a voice warned.
He could hear the girl struggling with the lock.
"Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure
cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they
find us trying to get you out of here."
Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was
right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away.
"Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it.
He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the
rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a
few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the
jail corridor.
The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage.
"This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of
this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle
of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping
bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best
jail.
They burst around a corner onto a startled guard.
"They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!"
"Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them
before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner.
"Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily
barred side door.
The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in
Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They
were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock
jammed immovably behind them.
Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into
brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and
Crystal James pushed past him.
"We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt.
Two guards barred the street ahead of them.
Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles
and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut
behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining
this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector
beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard
a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were
shooting to kill.
He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object
curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite
bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The
glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had
vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been.
"We've got to run!" the girl shouted.
He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the
corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a
roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in
the orderly rush of Venus City traffic.
The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration
Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond.
"What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get
away."
"That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out."
The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts
of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going
and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into
the garage's repair pit.
She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as
a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid
blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch
stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a
steep, steel stairway.
"Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely.
"Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of
the air shafts leading down to the old mines."
"Old mines? What old mines?"
"That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole
area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet.
These old tunnels run all under the city."
They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a
level tunnel.
"What do we do? Hide here?"
"I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police
will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City."
"Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague
keeps up to scare people with."
"That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my
father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right
off the planet."
"Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully.
"I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting
before he died," she said grimly.
Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice.
Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed
one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient
mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The
rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing
passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and
crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the
rebels had cleared away the debris of years.
Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a
twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel
to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction.
Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were
going.
The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every
direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and
rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons.
"These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed
to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness.
Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim
Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged
gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller
of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other.
"Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded.
"Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly.
"You're crazy, you can't get through there."
"Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them
and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off.
"We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!"
The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian
braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible
second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through
the opening it was stood vertically on edge.
Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside
the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back
into some semblance of order.
"That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak.
Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly
almost as soon as we can walk."
"Oh—I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did
see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus
Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station.
An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face
set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian
got up off the floor.
"You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't
trying to hit us."
"That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play
for peanuts."
"But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got
any authority to shoot anyone."
"Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped
bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you
think this revolution is about?"
"You must be mistak—" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the
ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close
astern.
"I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls.
Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back
to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned
her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers,
slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long
streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He
saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship
slipped frantically away and fell into a spin.
"That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others
doing?"
"Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick.
The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught
it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the
white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian
watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They
heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists
jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into
them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into
the mist-shrouded depths of the valley.
"The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of
outrage. "They didn't have a chance!"
"Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's
just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory
once in a while, you'd have heard of these things."
"But why—" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged
through the fuselage. "They're after us now!"
Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The
police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them.
"Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly.
She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they
hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed
down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower
valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading,
could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the
blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them,
talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the
ship out of its dive.
"
Phew!
" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder
can you do it?"
"Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We
may get as far as our headquarters—or we may not."
For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying
solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge
flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from
the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and
coughed and died.
"That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We
can glide in from here."
"Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was
the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the
valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed
it up and up—
"Look! Police ships. They've seen us!"
"Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land."
The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall!
"Are you crazy? Watch out—we'll crash!"
"You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped.
She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage
of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The
lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped
through the foliage—there was no crash. They burst through into a
huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men
came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship.
"Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside."
A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse,
rushed up to Crystal.
"What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands.
"They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot."
The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got
to get out of here."
"Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone,
running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern.
"Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded.
"That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And
this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern
thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the
opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be
spotted for sure, now."
The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the
crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of
an explosion.
"They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!"
"Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there
any other way of getting out of this place?"
"Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us."
"We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil
they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog."
"It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as
well as we do."
"How come?"
"The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague."
"Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's
leaving."
"We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us
any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow."
"We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships
around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern,"
Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily.
"You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway."
They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them
around and jockeyed them into position—not a moment too soon.
Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped
cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met
a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at
concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the
two ships.
Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as
they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame.
They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they
fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of
the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as
shrieking, living torches down the mountainside.
Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she
climbed blindly from her ship.
"Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered
her face with her hands.
Brian grabbed her and shook her.
"Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless
men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here."
"Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!"
"You don't have to. Wait here."
He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel
mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter,
verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the
maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture
adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust
seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In
a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a
subtle, intangible thunder of vibration.
Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the
entrance."
Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points
in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside
the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern
crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed
to the floor.
"It's time to check out," Brian shouted.
Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring
crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound
in the cavern behind them.
They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several
hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and
heaved beneath them.
"The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed.
"Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle
of jungle away from the slide.
Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them.
Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed
her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the
slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it
joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly
downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till
it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn
vegetation.
The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as
they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the
slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding
lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were
gone and the primeval silence settled back into place.
Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed
with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside.
"How did you do it?"
"It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right
vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've
made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?"
"Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started
scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside.
"Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along.
"The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we
can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our
side. They've helped us before." | That Serono Zeburzac was a rebel insider. | That Venus Consolidated served the best interests of the planet. | That the Venus Consolidated police weren’t honest. | That the rebels built mines as escape routes from the police. | 2 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_1 | Where was the Quest III coming home from? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | A dying star | Procyon | Capella | An expedition | 3 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_2 | How did the Quest III crew feel as they first approached the Sun? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | Satisfied that they had visited many wonderful planets. | Eager but anxious to be home after many disappointing false hopes. | Dizzy from the many colors displayed due to the Doppler Effect. | Disappointed that Earth was still there. | 1 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_3 | Who did the ship’s crew expect would meet them on arrival? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | The other Quest ships | Warships on attack | A parade | Maybe nobody | 3 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_4 | Why had the children never seen Earth? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | The ship didn’t have enough fuel to return to Earth. | Earth was destroyed before they were born. | They weren’t able to see through the portholes. | They were born while on Quest III. | 3 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_5 | What would have happened if the Centaurus Expedition hadn’t failed? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | People from Earth would have colonized the Procyon system. | Captain Llud would have become a hero. | The other two Quest ships would have been launched. | Humanity would have died out. | 0 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_6 | How did Gwar Den feel about his work? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | Bored and depressed since the work wasn’t meaningful. | Ashamed since they didn’t find a hospitable planet. | Ready to retire because he had been traveling for so long. | Proud that he was able to steer the ship home. | 3 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_7 | Why were three Quest ships built? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | To have a better chance of success if any failed. | So each could travel for 20,000 years. | To transport more people to the new planet. | In case the others break down. | 0 |
63899_A6K6U6SL_8 | What was Knof Junior’s plan to defeat the attackers? | THE GIANTS RETURN
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with
corrosive fire, determined to blast them
back to the stars. But they erred in thinking
the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes,
and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the
normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's
radial velocity changed relative to the
Quest III
, as for forty hours
the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering
backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the
Quest
III
drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of
light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless
luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown
sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of
nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the
Quest III's
crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they
came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed
the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born
in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low
voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might
lie at the long journey's end. For the
Quest III
was coming home; the
sun ahead was
the
Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.
Knof Llud, the
Quest III's
captain, came slowly down the narrow
stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main
recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber,
a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At
the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot
cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were
spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread
out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was
little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met
them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've
sighted Earth."
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on,
"It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has
identified it—no more."
But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round
the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could
pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung
each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears
were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about
to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at
his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do
you
feel,
Lesra?"
She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't
know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged
shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not
remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....
He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might
have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."
"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone
by—
there
—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world
we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."
The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't
worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had
hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear
within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge.
There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."
He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched
off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the
people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own
Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes
gleamed with unshed tears.
Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat
that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed
positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with
his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had
already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to
Earth.
Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted
before we get that far."
Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said
hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"
Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any
of the other
Quests
returned successful, or if they returned at
all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's
possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break
civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been
forgotten altogether."
He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private
office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to
notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he
sat idle, alone with his thoughts.
The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud
found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for
everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.
There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but
he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down
and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find
Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.
He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the
Quest III's
fuel stores
and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the
strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost
empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.
Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred
Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older
than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the
time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and
months had passed for the
Quest III
in interstellar flight while
years and decades had raced by on the home world.
Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with
built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about
three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great
expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to
the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a
report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were
still interested.
Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made
shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He
slid it onto the reproducer.
His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and
confident than he knew it was now.
"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time
since leaving Earth.
"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice
the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.
"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the
Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If
Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after
an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.
"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go
on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success
comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth;
friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the
Quest
ships
will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream,
humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."
Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned
back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed
remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still
have been ringing in his ears.
He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another,
later, one.
"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that
that system, too, is devoid of planets.
"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably
true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we
may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.
"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan....
This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to
one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship
and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and
energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and
exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless
and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids,
or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the
twentieth century.
"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are
the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and
therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be
limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is
life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was
in sight—so we launched the
Quests
. Perhaps our effort will prove as
futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to
reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport
very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into
its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward,
expanding limitlessly into the Universe....
"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"
Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That
was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first
disappointments.
He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four
years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange
longing....
"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on
the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing
through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.
"According to plan, the
Quest III
has reached its furthest point from
Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more
stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will
prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined
already.
"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have
only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the
Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead
along the Milky Way.
"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the
globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars
there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's
neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But
Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....
"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the
Quest III
could
achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility
of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough
fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after
more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and
perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.
"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other
Quests
, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according
to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the
other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable
phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from
overpopulation.
"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about
Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a
decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be
forgotten back there?
"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs
of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that
was once 'home' has probably been swept away....
"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."
Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then
he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.
The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake
him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them
once in translation from the ancient English....
... for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to
turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of
Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able
to alter that.
He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green
shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of
responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went
on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young
Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the
glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he
would want to do that, though.
Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed
to falter one moment in flight.
The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became
unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea
what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of
the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars
such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have
been done. The
Quest III's
collision armor was nonmaterial and for
practical purposes invulnerable.
Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the
intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled,
frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence,
maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.
He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook
the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded
cat.
"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain,
we're being attacked!"
"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically,
then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all
these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis.
There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three
short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the
interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said,
"Now—attacked by what?"
"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a
sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the
Quest III's
framework. The
navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not
fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to
show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them
long enough to tell much."
"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry
anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."
In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were
big; he had heard his father's words.
"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old
seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you,
huh, Dad?"
Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way."
He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.
There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts.
Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The
Quest III
shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions
of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty
engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.
To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge,
most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof
Llud.
"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"
Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and
they're all banging away at us."
The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen
where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice
from the same position.
Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently.
His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in
his father.
"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have
unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they
can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some
bigger stuff."
The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges,
would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting
the
Quest III's
shell was doing it at velocities where the
distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.
But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive
field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of
the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly
transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and
all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A
meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by
the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite
forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its
deflection was negligible.
The people in the
Quest III
would have felt nothing at all of
the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their
inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities,
was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to
provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.
One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in
wait for us. But why on Earth—"
"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on
Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."
The
Quest III
bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if
one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or
change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left
if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps
in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around
wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking,
always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The
interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the
vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling
the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn
apart.
Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was
paying attention to him. The men on the
Quest III's
bridge looked
questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed
into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have
caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored
too direct a hit."
He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been
got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the
Quest III
,
except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their
size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance
and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by
the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching
ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than
Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man.
Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.
"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine
as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human
origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy
they had explored, but one of the other
Quests
might have encountered
and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to
conquer.
It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a
constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into
space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That
argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind
it.
Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate
we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight
hours."
"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.
"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."
"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not
knowing why we're being attacked."
Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a
thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological
advantage, too!"
His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have
noticed it."
"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he
hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts
swinging wild and then you nail him."
Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've
got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in
a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I
was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At
least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."
And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an
audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies,
repeating on each the same brief recorded message:
"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition
Quest III
...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that
they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and
querying again, "Who are
you
?"
There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under
multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater
amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but
converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the
Quest III
too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own
nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of
his ship.
Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time,
Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."
Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But
they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and
those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up
inquiringly at Zost Relyul.
"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully.
"First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the
daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces
of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.
"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal
green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates
reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the
vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine
moss or even a coarse mold."
"Is that all?" demanded Llud.
"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried
photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing
and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is
opaque to it."
The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps
you can answer some of these riddles before—"
"
We know who you are
," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a
strange accent, "
and pleading will do you no good.
"
Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from
him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended
absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating
tape.
He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling
with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the
last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already
returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you
continue toward Earth."
Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming
from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it
had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not
as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned
to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the
Quest
III's
ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow
frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.
He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know
something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "
Are you
human?
"
The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are
not."
The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply.
Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned
hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully
into its field.
"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud
woodenly. He named a vision frequency.
"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its
language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the
changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize
your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the
Quest
I's
commander."
Knof Llud stiffened. The
Quest I
, launched toward Arcturus and the
star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the
Quest III
the
most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend
of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to
him?"
"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some
time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he
preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short
pause. "The vision connection is ready."
Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a
picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly,
but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed
the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the
Quest
III
, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head
seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.
He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"
"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question.
Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."
The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great
eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a
poisonous hatred.
"It is enough for you to know that you must die." | Talk to the attackers | Replenish with fresh crew to fight | Wait for the attackers to make a mistake in anger | Release the gravity impulses | 2 |
63919_EWN87TRA_1 | Where was David? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | Dead | On Earth | A weightless spaceship | A small room | 2 |
63919_EWN87TRA_2 | Why couldn’t David move after he first opened his eyes? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | He was in suspension. | He was in a tight space. | He had a wide seatbelt on. | He was weightless. | 2 |
63919_EWN87TRA_3 | Why did David press the button? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | He understood his name. | The experiment was successful. | He wanted to leave the spaceship. | He wanted to get more information from the voice. | 3 |
63919_EWN87TRA_4 | What did David determine the black box was for? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | Storage of canned food | A navigation device | A device to deliver medication | Testing equipment | 2 |
63919_EWN87TRA_5 | Why didn’t David awaken the woman first? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | He had amnesia and forgot. | She was important to the mission. | He stumbled and hurt himself. | He found her beautiful and didn’t want to harm her. | 3 |
63919_EWN87TRA_6 | How did suspension help the crew? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | They could survive without oxygen. | They could live on an inhospitable planet. | They could survive with lack of gravity. | They could travel through space for a long distance. | 3 |
63919_EWN87TRA_7 | Was the ship on target, within maximum deviation from schedule? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | Yes, they were within 5 degrees | No, they were over by 8 degrees | Yes, they were over by only 3 degrees. | No, they were under by 2 degrees | 1 |
63919_EWN87TRA_8 | What would happen if they didn’t change course? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | They would run out of oxygen before landing. | They would crash into the yellow-white star. | They would be thrown out of the sun’s orbit. | They would die before arriving back to Earth. | 1 |
63919_EWN87TRA_9 | What is the crew’s mission? | CAPTAIN CHAOS
By D. ALLEN MORRISSEY
Science equipped David Corbin with borrowed time;
sent him winging out in a state of suspension to future
centuries ... to a dark blue world whose only defense
was to seal tight the prying minds of foolish interlopers.
I heard the voice as I opened my eyes. I was lying down, still not
aware of where I was, waiting for the voice.
"Your name is David Corbin. Do you understand?"
I looked in the direction of the sound. Above my feet a bulkhead
loomed. There were round dials set in a row above a speaker. Over the
mesh-covered speaker, two knobs glowed red. I ran the words over in
my sluggish mind, thinking about an answer. The muscles in my throat
tightened up in reflex as I tried to bring some unity into the jumble
of thoughts and ideas that kept forming. One word formed out of the
rush of anxiety.
"No."
I shouted a protest against the strangeness of the room. I looked to
the right, my eyes following the curving ceiling that started at the
cot. The curve met another straight bulkhead on the left. I was in a
small room, gray in color, like dull metal. Overhead a bright light
burned into my vision. I wondered where in the universe I was.
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I stared at the speaker in the wall. The mesh-covered hole and the two
lights looked like a caricature of a face, set in a panel of dials. I
twisted my head to look for the button. I pushed away from the close
wall but I couldn't move. I reached down to the tightness that held my
body, found the wide strap that held me and fumbled with the buckle.
I threw it off and pushed myself up from the hard cot. I heard myself
yell in surprise as I floated up towards the light overhead.
I was weightless.
How do you describe being weightless when you are born into a world
bound by gravity. I twisted and shut my eyes in terror. There was no
sensation of place, no feeling of up or down, no direction. My back
bumped against the ceiling and I opened my eyes to stare at the cot and
floor. I was concentrating too hard on remembering to be frightened for
long. I pushed away from the warm metal and the floor moved up to meet
me.
"If you understand, press button A on your right."
What should I understand? That I was floating in a room that had a
curved wall ... that nothing was right in this hostile room?
When I reached the cot I held it and drew myself down. I glanced at the
planes of the room, trying to place it with other rooms I could see in
my mind. Gray walls with a crazy curved ceiling ... a door to my left
that appeared to be air tight.
I stared at my familiar hands. I rubbed them across my face, feeling
the solidity of flesh and bone, afraid to think too hard about myself.
"My name ... my name is...."
"Your name is David Corbin."
I stared at the speaker. How long did this go on? The name meant
nothing to me, but I thought about it, watching the relentless lights
that shone below the dials. I stood up slowly and looked at myself. I
was naked except for heavy shorts, and there was no clue to my name in
the pockets. The room was warm and the air I had been breathing was
good but it seemed wrong to be dressed like this. I didn't know why. I
thought about insanity, and the room seemed to fit my thoughts. When
the voice repeated the message again I had to act. Walking was like
treading water that couldn't be seen or felt.
I floated against the door, twisting the handle in fear that it
wouldn't turn. The handle clanged as I pushed it down and I stared at
the opposite wall of a narrow gray passageway. I pushed out into it and
grasped the metal rail that ran along the wall. I reasoned it was there
to propel yourself through the passageway in this weightless atmosphere.
It was effortless to move. I turned on my side like a swimmer and went
hand over hand, shooting down the corridor. I braced against forward
motion and stopped against a door at the end. Behind me I could see the
opened door I had left, and the thought of that questioning voice made
me want to move. I swung the door open, catching a glimpse of a room
crowded with equipment and....
I will always remember the scream of terror, the paralyzing fright of
what I saw through the portholes in the wall of the room. I saw the
blackest night, pierced by brilliance that blinded me. There was no
depth to the searing brightness of countless stars. They seemed to
press against the glass, blobs of fire against a black curtain burning
into my eyes and brain.
It was space.
I looked out at deep space, star systems in clusters. I shut my eyes.
When I looked again I knew where I was. Why the little room had been
shaped like quarter round. Why I drifted weightlessly. Why I was....
David Corbin.
I knew more of the puzzle. Something was wrong. After the first shock
of looking out, I accepted the fact that I was in a space ship, yet I
couldn't read the maps that were fastened to a table, nor understand
the function or design of the compact machinery.
WHY, Why, Why? The thought kept pounding at me. I was afraid to touch
anything in the room. I pressed against the clear window, wondering if
the stars were familiar. I had a brief vivid picture of a night sky on
Earth. This was not the same sky.
Back in the room where I had awakened, I touched the panel with the
glowing eyes. It had asked me if I understood. Now it must tell me why
I didn't. It had to help me, that flat metallic voice that repeated the
same words. It must tell me....
"Your name is David Corbin. If you understand, press button A on your
right."
I pressed the button by the cot. The red lights blinked out as I stood
in patient attention, trying to outguess the voice. I recalled a
phrase ... some words about precaution.
Precaution against forgetting.
It was crazy, but I trusted the panel. It was the only thing I saw that
could help me, guard me against another shock like seeing outside of
the clear portholes.
"It is assumed the experiment is a success," the voice said.
What experiment?
"You have been removed from suspension. Assume manual control of this
ship."
Control of a ship? Going where?
"Do not begin operations until the others are removed from suspension."
What others? Tell me what to do.
"Rely on instructions for factoring when you check the coordinates.
Your maximum deviation from schedule cannot exceed two degrees. Adopt
emergency procedures as you see fit. Good luck."
The voice snapped off and I laughed hysterically. None of it had made
sense, and I cursed whatever madness had put me here.
"Tell me what to do," I shouted wildly. I hammered the hard metal until
the pain in my hands made me stop.
"I can't remember what to do."
I held my bruised hands to my mouth, and I knew that was all the
message there was. In blind panic I pushed away from the panel.
Something tripped me and I fell back in a graceless arc. I pushed away
from the floor, barely feeling the pain in my leg, and went into the
hall.
Pain burned along my leg but I couldn't stop. In the first panic of
waking up in strangeness I had missed the other doors in the passage.
The first swung back to reveal a deep closet holding five bulky suits.
The second room was like my own. A dark haired, deep chested man lay on
the cot. His muscular body was secured by a wide belt. He was as still
as death, motionless without warmth or breath as I hovered over him.
I couldn't remember his face.
The next room held another man. He was young and wiry, like an athlete
cast in marble, dark haired and big jawed. A glassy eye stared up when
I rolled back his eyelid. The eyelid remained open until I closed it
and went on. Another room ... another man ... another stranger. This
man was tall and raw boned, light of skin and hair, as dead as the
others.
A flat, illogical voice had instructed me to revive these men. I
shivered in spite of the warmth of the room, studying the black box
that squatted on a shelf by his head. My hand shook when I touched
the metal. I dared not try to operate anything. Revive the others ...
instructions without knowledge were useless to me. I stopped looking
into the doors in the passageway and went back to the room with the
portholes. Everything lay in readiness, fastened down star charts,
instruments, glittering equipment. There was no feeling of disorder or
use in the room. It waited for human hands to make it operate.
Not mine. Not now.
I went past the room into another, where the curves were more sharp. I
could visualize the tapering hull leading to the nose of the ship. This
room was filled with equipment that formed a room out of the bordered
area I stood in. I sat in the deep chair facing the panel of dials and
instruments, in easy reach. I ran my hands over the dials, the rows of
smooth colored buttons, wondering.
The ports on the side were shielded and I stared out at static energy,
hung motionless in a world of searing light. There was no distortion,
no movement outside and I glanced back at the dials. What speeds were
they recording? What speeds and perhaps, what distance? It was useless
to translate the markings. They stood for anything I might guess, and
something kept pricking my mind, telling me I had no time to guess. I
thought of time again. I was supposed to act according to ... plan. Did
that mean ... in time ... in time. I went back down the passageway.
The fourth small room was the same. Except for the woman. She lay on a
cot, young and beautiful, even in the death-like immobility I had come
to accept. Her beauty was graceful lines of face and her figure—smooth
tapering legs, soft curves that were carved out of flesh colored stone.
Yet not stone. I held her small hand, then put it back on the cot. Her
attire was brief like the rest of us, shorts and a man's shirt. Golden
hair curled up around her lovely face. I wondered if she would ever
smile or move that graceful head. I rolled back her eyelid and looked
at a deep blue eye that stared back in glassy surprise. Four people in
all, depending on a blind helpless fool who didn't know their names or
the reason for that dependence. I sat beside her on the cot until I
could stand it no longer.
Searching the ship made me forget my fear. I hoped I would find some
answers. I went from the nose to the last bulkhead in a frenzy of
floating motion, looking behind each door until I went as far as I
could. There were two levels to the ship. They both ended in the lead
shield that was set where the swell of the curve was biggest. It meant
the engine or engines took up half the ship, cut off from the forward
half by the instrument studded shield. I retraced my steps and took a
rough estimate of size. The ship, as I called it, was at least four
hundred feet long, fifty feet in diameter on the inside.
The silence was a force in itself, pressing down from the metal walls,
driving me back to the comforting smallness of the room where I had
been reborn. I laughed bitterly, thinking about the aptness of that. I
had literally been reborn in this room, equipped with half ideas, and
no point to start from, no premise to seek. I sensed the place to start
from was back in the room. I searched it carefully.
Minutes later I realized the apparatus by the cot was different. It
was the same type of black box, but out from it was a metal arm, bent
in a funny angle. At the tip of the arm, a needle gleamed dully and I
rubbed the deep gash on my leg. I bent the arm back until the angle
looked right. It was then I realized the needle came to a spot where it
could have hit my neck when I lay down. My shout of excitement rang out
in the room, as I pictured the action of the extended arm. I lost my
sudden elation in the cabin where the girl lay. The box behind her head
was completely closed, and it didn't yield to the pressure I applied.
It had a cover, but no other opening where an arm could extend. I ran
my fingers over the unbroken surface, prying over the thin crack at
the base helplessly. If some sort of antidote was to be administered
manually I was lost. I had no knowledge of what to inject or where to
look for it. The chamber of the needle that had awakened me was empty.
That meant a measured amount.
In the laboratory on the lower level I went over the rows of cans and
tubes fastened to the shelves. There were earths and minerals, seeds
and chemicals, testing equipment in compact drawers, but nothing marked
for me. I wondered if I was an engineer or a pilot, or perhaps a doctor
sent along to safeguard the others. Complete amnesia would have been
terrible enough but this half knowledge, part awareness and association
with the ship was a frightening force that seemed ready to break out of
me.
I went back to the cabin where the powerful man lay. I had to risk
failure with one of them. I didn't want it to be the girl. I fought
down the thought that he might be the key man, remembering the voice
that had given the message. It was up to me, and soon. The metal in the
box would have withstood a bullet. It couldn't be pried apart, and I
searched again and again for a release mechanism.
I found it.
I swung the massive cover off and set it down. The equipment waited for
the touch of a button and it went into operation. I stepped back as the
tubes glowed to life and the arm swung down with the gleaming needle.
The needle went into the corded neck of the man. The fluid chamber
drained under pressure and the arm moved back.
I stood by the man for long minutes. Finally it came. He stirred
restlessly, closing his hands into fists. The deep chest rose and fell
unevenly as he breathed. Finally the eyes opened and he looked at me.
I watched him adjust to the room. It was in his eyes, wide at first,
moving about the confines of the room back to me.
"It looks like we made it," he said.
"Yes."
He unfastened the belt and sat up. I pushed him back as he floated up
finding little humor in the comic expression on his face.
"No gravity," he grunted and sat back.
"You get used to it fast," I answered. I thought of what to say as he
watched me. "How do you feel?"
He shrugged at the question. "Fine, I guess. Funny, I can't remember."
He saw it in my face, making him stop. "I can't remember dropping off
to sleep," he finished.
I held his hard arm. "What else? How much do you remember?"
"I'm all right," he answered. "There aren't supposed to be any effects
from this."
"Who is in charge of this ship?" I asked.
He tensed suddenly. "You are, sir. Why?"
I moved away from the cot. "Listen, I can't remember. I don't know your
name or anything about this ship."
"What do you mean? What can't you remember?" he asked. He stood up
slowly, edging around towards the door. I didn't want to fight him. I
wanted him to understand. "Look, I'm in trouble. Nothing fits, except
my name."
"You don't know me?"
"No."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes, yes. I don't know why but it's happened."
He let his breath out in a whistle. "For God's sake. Any bump on your
head?"
"I feel all right physically. I just can't place enough."
"The others. What about the others?" he blurted.
"I don't know. You're the first besides myself. I don't know how I
stumbled on the way to revive you."
He shook his head, watching me like I was a freak. "Let's check the
rest right away."
"Yes. I've got to know if they are like me. I'm afraid to think they
might be."
"Maybe it's temporary. We can figure something out."
II
The second man, the dark haired one, opened his eyes and recognized us.
He asked questions in rapid fire excitement. The third man, the tall
Viking, was all right until he moved. The weightless sensation made him
violently sick. We put him back on the cot, securing him again with
the belt, but the sight of us floating made him shake. He was retching
without results when we drifted out. I followed him to the girl's
quarters.
"What about her. Why is she here?" I asked my companion.
He lifted the cover from the apparatus. "She's the chemist in the crew."
"A girl?"
"Dr. Thiesen is an expert, trained for this," he said.
I looked at her. She looked anything but like a chemist.
"There must be men who could have been sent. I've been wondering why a
girl."
"I don't know why, Captain. You tried to stop her before. Age and
experience were all that mattered to the brass."
"It's a bad thing to do."
"I suppose. The mission stated one chemist."
"What is the mission of this ship?" I asked.
He held up his hand. "We'd better wait, sir. Everything was supposed to
be all right on this end. First you, then Carl, sick to his stomach."
"Okay. I'll hold the questions until we see about her."
We were out of luck with the girl. She woke up and she was frightened.
We questioned her and she was coherent but she couldn't remember. I
tried to smile as I sat on the cot, wondering what she was thinking.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
Her face was a mask of wide-eyed fear as she shook her head.
"Can you remember?"
"I don't know." Blue eyes stared at me in fear. Her voice was low.
"Do you know my name?"
The question frightened her. "Should I? I feel so strange. Give me a
minute to think."
I let her sit up slowly. "Do you know your name?"
She tightened up in my arms. "Yes. It's...." She looked at us for help,
frightened by the lack of clothing we wore, by the bleak room. Her eyes
circled the room. "I'm afraid," she cried. I held her and she shook
uncontrollably.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
The dark haired man came into the room, silent and watchful. My
companion motioned to him. "Get Carl and meet us in Control."
The man looked at me and I nodded. "We'll be there in a moment. I'm
afraid we've got trouble."
He nodded and pushed away from us. The girl screamed and covered her
face with her hands. I turned to the other man. "What's your name?"
"Croft. John Croft."
"John, what are your duties if any?"
"Automatic control. I helped to install it."
"Can you run this ship? How about the other two?"
He hit his hands together. "You fly it, sir. Can't you think?"
"I'm trying. I know the ship is familiar, but I've looked it over.
Maybe I'm trying too hard."
"You flew her from earth until we went into suspension," he said.
"I can't remember when," I said. I held the trembling girl against me,
shaking my head.
He glanced at the girl. "If the calculations are right it was more than
a hundred years ago."
We assembled in the control room for a council. We were all a little
better for being together. John Croft named the others for me. I
searched each face without recognition. The blond man was Carl Herrick,
a metallurgist. His lean face was white from his spell but he was
better. Paul Sample was a biologist, John said. He was lithe and
restless, with dark eyes that studied the rest of us. I looked at the
girl. She was staring out of the ports, her hands pressed against the
transparent break in the smooth wall. Karen Thiesen was a chemist, now
frightened and trying to remember.
I wasn't in much better condition. "Look, if it comes too fast for me,
for any of us, we'll stop. John, you can lead off."
"You ask the questions," he said.
I indicated the ship. "Where in creation are we going?"
"We set out from Earth for a single star in the direction of the center
of our Galaxy."
"From Earth? How could we?"
"Let's move slowly, sir," he said. "We're moving fast. I don't know if
you can picture it, but we're going about one hundred thousand miles an
hour."
"Through space?"
"Yes."
"What direction?"
Paul cut in. "It's a G type star, like our own sun in mass and
luminosity. We hope to find a planetary system capable of supporting
life."
"I can't grasp it. How can we go very far in a lifetime?"
"It can be done in two lifetimes," John said quietly.
"You said I had flown this ship. You meant before this suspension."
"Yes. That's why we can cross space to a near star."
"How long ago was it?"
"It was set at about a hundred years, sir. Doesn't that fit at all?"
"I can't believe it's possible."
Carl caught my eye. "Captain, we save this time without aging at all.
It puts us near a calculated destination."
"We've lost our lifetime." It was Karen. She had been crying silently
while we talked.
"Don't think about it," Paul said. "We can still pull this out all
right if you don't lose your nerve."
"What are we to do?" she asked.
John answered for me. "First we've got to find out where we are. I know
this ship but I can't fly it."
"Can I?" I asked.
We set up a temporary plan of action. Paul took Karen to the laboratory
in an effort to help her remember her job. Carl went back to divide the
rations.
I was to study the charts and manuals. It was better than doing
nothing, and I went into the navigation room and sat down. Earth was
an infinitesimal point somewhere behind us on the galactic plane, and
no one else was trained to navigate. The ship thundered to life as I
sat there. The blast roared once ... twice, then settled into a muted
crescendo of sound that hummed through the walls. I went into the
control room and watched John at the panel.
"I wish I knew what you were doing," I said savagely.
"Give it time."
"We can't spare any, can we?" I asked.
"I wish we knew. What about her—Dr. Thiesen?"
"She's in the lab. I don't think that will do much good. She's got to
be shocked out of a mental state like that."
"I guess you're right," he said slowly. "She's trained to administer
the suspension on the return trip."
I let my breath out slowly. "I didn't think about that."
"We couldn't even get part way back in a lifetime," he said.
"How old are you, John?"
"Twenty-eight."
"What about me?"
"Thirty." He stared at the panel in thought for a minutes. "What about
shock treatment? It sounds risky."
"I know. It's the only thing I could think of. Why didn't everyone
react the same?"
"That had me wondering for a while. I don't know. Anyway how could you
go about making her remember?"
"Throw a crisis, some situation at her, I guess."
He shrugged, letting his sure hands rest on the panel of dials. I
headed back towards the lab. If I could help her I might help myself.
I was past the rooms when the horn blasted through the corridor. I
turned automatically with the sound, pushing against the rail, towards
the control room. Deep in my mind I could see danger, and without
questioning why I knew I had to be at Control when the sound knifed
through the stillness. John was shouting as I thrust my way into the
room.
"Turn the ship. There's something dead ahead."
I had a glimpse of his contorted face as I dove at the control board.
My hands hit buttons, thumbed a switch and then a sudden force threw me
to the right. I slammed into the panel on the right, as the pressure
of the change dimmed my vision. Reflex made me look up at the radar
control screen.
It wasn't operating.
John let go of the padded chair, grinning weakly. I was busy for a few
seconds, feeding compensation into the gyros. Relief flooded through me
like warm liquid. I hung on the intercom for support, drawing air into
my heaving lungs.
"What—made you—think of that," I asked weakly.
"Shock treatment."
"I must have acted on instinct."
"You did. Even for a sick man that was pretty fast," he laughed.
"I can think again, John. I know who I am," I shouted. I threw my arms
around his massive shoulders. "You did it."
"You gave me the idea, Mister, talking about Dr. Thiesen."
"It worked. I'm okay," I said in giddy relief.
"I don't have to tell you I was scared as hell. I wish you could have
seen your face, the look in your eyes when I woke up."
"I wouldn't want to wake up like that again."
"You're all right now?" he asked. I grinned and nodded an answer. I saw
John as he was at the base, big and competent, sweating in the blazing
sun.
I thought about the rest of the crew too. "We're heading right for a
star...."
"It's been dead ahead for hours," he grunted. I leaned over and threw
the intercom to open. "This is control. Listen ... everyone. I'm over
it. Disregard the warning siren ... we were testing the ship."
The lab light blinked on as Paul cut in. "What was it ... hey, you said
you're all right."
"John did it. He hit the alarm figuring I would react. Listen, Paul. Is
any one hurt?"
"No. Carl is here too. His stomach flopped again but he's okay. What
about food. We're supposed to be checked before we eat."
"We'll have to go ahead without it. Any change?"
"No, I put her to bed. Shall I bring food?"
I glanced at John. He rubbed his stomach. "Yes," I answered. "Bring it
when you can. I've got to find out where we are."
We had to get off course before we ran into the yellow-white star that
had been picked for us. Food was set down by me, grew cold and was
carried away and I was still rechecking the figures. We were on a line
ten degrees above the galactic plane. The parallactic baseline from
Earth to the single star could be in error several degrees, or we could
be right on the calculated position of the star. The radar confirmed
my findings ... and my worst fears. When we set it for direction and
distance, the screen glowed to life and recorded the star dead ahead.
In all the distant star clusters, only this G type star was thought to
have a planetary system like our own. We were out on a gamble to find
a planet capable of supporting life. The idea had intrigued scientists
before I had first looked up at the night sky. When I was sure the
electronically recorded course was accurate for time, I checked
direction and speed from the readings and plotted our position. If I
was right we were much closer than we wanted to be. The bright pips on
the screen gave us the distance and size of the star while we fed the
figures into the calculator for our rate of approach.
Spectroscopic tests were run on the sun and checked against the figures
that had been calculated on Earth. We analyzed temperature, magnetic
fields, radial motion, density and luminosity, checking against the
standards the scientists had constructed. It was a G type star like our
own. It had more density and temperature and suitable planets or not,
we had to change course in a hurry. Carl analyzed the findings while we
came to a decision. Somewhere along an orbit that might be two hundred
miles across, our hypothetical planet circled this star. That distance
was selected when the planets in Earth's solar system had proved to be
barren. If the observations on this star were correct, we could expect
to find a planet in a state of fertility ... if it existed ... if it
were suitable for colonization ... if we could find it. | To conduct tests about life in space | To experiment with suspension and memory | To return to Earth as quickly as possible | To explore possible planets to support life | 3 |
52844_HC1ULH9J_1 | Why did Jimmy Tremaine visit his hometown? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | To catch a criminal. | To have a tour and visit the sites. | To locate a device. | To visit family and old friends. | 2 |
52844_HC1ULH9J_2 | What kind of area is Elsby? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | Rural and old-fashioned | Urban and busy | Flashy and rich | Run-down and dirty | 0 |
52844_HC1ULH9J_3 | What is the significance of May 19th, 1901? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | There was a thunderstorm in the area. | Bram bought a damaged farm from Mr. Spivey. | Bram’s house burned down. | The Pan-American Exposition was in Buffalo. | 1 |
52844_HC1ULH9J_4 | Who was in the black sedan that rushed off past Tremaine a block from the hotel? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | Jess | Mr. Bram | The men who stole the transmitter | Grammond’s men | 3 |
52844_HC1ULH9J_5 | Who is Soup Gaskin? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | Local librarian | Local politician | Local police officer | Local troublemaker | 3 |
52844_HC1ULH9J_6 | Why is Tremaine considered the best person to conduct this investigation? | THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
BY KEITH LAUMER
He was as ancient as time—and as strange as
his own frightful battle against incredible odds!
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage
and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom
cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder,
crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance
Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
"Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on." A thin hum sounded on the
wire as the scrambler went into operation.
"Okay, can you read me all right? I'm set up in Elsby. Grammond's boys
are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I'm not sitting in this
damned room crouched over a dial. I'll be out and around for the rest
of the afternoon."
"I want to see results," the thin voice came back over the filtered
hum of the jamming device. "You spent a week with Grammond—I can't
wait another. I don't mind telling you certain quarters are pressing
me."
"Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you've got
some answers to go with the questions?"
"I'm an appointive official," Fred said sharply. "But never mind
that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the
hyperwave program—he's been on my neck day and night. I can't say I
blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret
project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—"
"Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all.
Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let
me do it my way."
"I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator
could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home
area—"
"You don't have to justify yourself. Just don't hold out on me. I
sometimes wonder if I've seen the complete files on this—"
"You've seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I'm
warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!"
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street
and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY
MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a
heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind
an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the
opposite corner of his mouth.
"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of
authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while,
though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He
came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What
brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a
visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered
the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the
high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission
produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He
passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric
circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these
points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction
pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your
word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this
section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's
near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"
"That's a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the
news that Old Man Whatchamacallit's got an attic full of gear he says
is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven't even taken
to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord
intended."
"I didn't expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had
something ..."
"Course," said Jess, "there's always Mr. Bram ..."
"Mr. Bram," repeated Tremaine. "Is he still around? I remember him as a
hundred years old when I was kid."
"Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his
groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river."
"Well, what about him?"
"Nothing. But he's the town's mystery man. You know that. A little
touched in the head."
"There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember," Tremaine
said. "I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something
I've forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he'd teach me.
I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and
sometimes he gave us apples."
"I've never seen any harm in Bram," said Jess. "But you know how this
town is about foreigners, especially when they're a mite addled. Bram
has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he
talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an
ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He's foreign, all right.
But we never did know where he came from."
"How long's he lived here in Elsby?"
"Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about
ancestors and such as that? She couldn't remember about Mr. Bram. She
was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he'd lived in that same
old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died
five years ago ... in her seventies. He still walks in town every
Wednesday ... or he did up till yesterday anyway."
"Oh?" Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. "What happened
then?"
"You remember Soup Gaskin? He's got a boy, name of Hull. He's Soup all
over again."
"I remember Soup," Tremaine said. "He and his bunch used to come in
the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around
with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the
prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the
other drug store...."
"Soup's been in the pen since then. His boy Hull's the same kind. Him
and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram's place one night and set it
on fire."
"What was the idea of that?"
"Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was
passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here
for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke
routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of 'em but Hull are back
in the streets playin' with matches by now. I'm waiting for the day
they'll make jail age."
"Why Bram?" Tremaine persisted. "As far as I know, he never had any
dealings to speak of with anybody here in town."
"Oh hoh, you're a little young, Jimmy," Jess chuckled. "You never knew
about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll."
Tremaine shook his head.
"Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired
by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in
her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I
remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper.
Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to
think she was some kind of princess...."
"What about her and Bram? A romance?"
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling,
frowning. "This would ha' been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more'n
eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made
her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting
her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six
foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to
boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local
bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny
about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But
this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down
there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town,
practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy
shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off
her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was
ten years 'fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was
already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram
in front of her."
Tremaine got to his feet. "I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your ears
and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess.
Meantime, I'm just a tourist, seeing the sights."
"What about that gear of yours? Didn't you say you had some kind of
detector you were going to set up?"
"I've got an oversized suitcase," Tremaine said. "I'll be setting it up
in my room over at the hotel."
"When's this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?"
"After dark. I'm working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely
repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. You're over my head." Jess got to his feet. "Let me
know if you want anything. And by the way—" he winked broadly—"I
always did know who busted Soup Gaskin's nose and took out his front
teeth."
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town
Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow
autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the
steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor,
a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said
"MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD." Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at
Tremaine.
"We're closed," he said.
"I won't be a minute," Tremaine said. "Just want to check on when the
Bram property changed hands last."
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. "Bram?
He dead?"
"Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place."
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. "He ain't going to
sell, mister, if that's what you want to know."
"I want to know when he bought."
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. "Come back tomorrow," he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. "I was hoping
to save a trip." He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw.
A folded bill opened on the counter. The thin man's eyes darted toward
it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
"See what I can do," he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where
a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a
line written in faded ink:
"May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter
Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)"
"Translated, what does that mean?" said Tremaine.
"That's the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the
nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?"
"No, thanks," Tremaine said. "That's all I needed." He turned back to
the door.
"What's up, mister?" the clerk called after him. "Bram in some kind of
trouble?"
"No. No trouble."
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. "Nineteen-oh-one,"
he said. "I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be
dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age."
"I guess you're right."
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. "Lots of funny stories about
old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and
lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place."
"I've heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn't you say?"
"Maybe so." The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look.
"There's one story that's not superstition...."
Tremaine waited.
"You—uh—paying anything for information?"
"Now why would I do that?" Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. "Thought I'd ask. Anyway—I can swear to this.
Nobody in this town's ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup."
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco
facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a
paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
"You'll find back to nineteen-forty here," the librarian said. "The
older are there in the shelves."
"I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far."
The woman darted a suspicious look at Tremaine. "You have to handle
these old papers carefully."
"I'll be extremely careful." The woman sniffed, opened a drawer, leafed
through it, muttering.
"What date was it you wanted?"
"Nineteen-oh-one; the week of May nineteenth."
The librarian pulled out a folded paper, placed it on the table,
adjusted her glasses, squinted at the front page. "That's it," she
said. "These papers keep pretty well, provided they're stored in the
dark. But they're still flimsy, mind you."
"I'll remember." The woman stood by as Tremaine looked over the front
page. The lead article concerned the opening of the Pan-American
Exposition at Buffalo. Vice-President Roosevelt had made a speech.
Tremaine leafed over, reading slowly.
On page four, under a column headed
County Notes
he saw the name Bram:
Mr. Bram has purchased a quarter section of fine grazing land,
north of town, together with a sturdy house, from J. P. Spivey of
Elsby. Mr. Bram will occupy the home and will continue to graze a
few head of stock. Mr. Bram, who is a newcomer to the county, has
been a resident of Mrs. Stoate's Guest Home in Elsby for the past
months.
"May I see some earlier issues; from about the first of the year?"
The librarian produced the papers. Tremaine turned the pages, read the
heads, skimmed an article here and there. The librarian went back to
her desk. An hour later, in the issue for July 7, 1900, an item caught
his eye:
A Severe Thunderstorm. Citizens of Elsby and the country were much
alarmed by a violent cloudburst, accompanied by lightning and
thunder, during the night of the fifth. A fire set in the pine
woods north of Spivey's farm destroyed a considerable amount of
timber and threatened the house before burning itself out along
the river.
The librarian was at Tremaine's side. "I have to close the library now.
You'll have to come back tomorrow."
Outside, the sky was sallow in the west: lights were coming on in
windows along the side streets. Tremaine turned up his collar against a
cold wind that had risen, started along the street toward the hotel.
A block away a black late-model sedan rounded a corner with a faint
squeal of tires and gunned past him, a heavy antenna mounted forward
of the left rear tail fin whipping in the slipstream. Tremaine stopped
short, stared after the car.
"Damn!" he said aloud. An elderly man veered, eyeing him sharply.
Tremaine set off at a run, covered the two blocks to the hotel, yanked
open the door to his car, slid into the seat, made a U-turn, and headed
north after the police car.
Two miles into the dark hills north of the Elsby city limits, Tremaine
rounded a curve. The police car was parked on the shoulder beside the
highway just ahead. He pulled off the road ahead of it and walked back.
The door opened. A tall figure stepped out.
"What's your problem, mister?" a harsh voice drawled.
"What's the matter? Run out of signal?"
"What's it to you, mister?"
"Are you boys in touch with Grammond on the car set?"
"We could be."
"Mind if I have a word with him? My name's Tremaine."
"Oh," said the cop, "you're the big shot from Washington." He shifted
chewing tobacco to the other side of his jaw. "Sure, you can talk to
him." He turned and spoke to the other cop, who muttered into the mike
before handing it to Tremaine.
The heavy voice of the State Police chief crackled. "What's your beef,
Tremaine?"
"I thought you were going to keep your men away from Elsby until I gave
the word, Grammond."
"That was before I knew your Washington stuffed shirts were holding out
on me."
"It's nothing we can go to court with, Grammond. And the job you were
doing might have been influenced if I'd told you about the Elsby angle."
Grammond cursed. "I could have put my men in the town and taken it
apart brick by brick in the time—"
"That's just what I don't want. If our bird sees cops cruising, he'll
go underground."
"You've got it all figured, I see. I'm just the dumb hick you boys use
for the spade work, that it?"
"Pull your lip back in. You've given me the confirmation I needed."
"Confirmation, hell! All I know is that somebody somewhere is punching
out a signal. For all I know, it's forty midgets on bicycles, pedalling
all over the damned state. I've got fixes in every county—"
"The smallest hyperwave transmitter Uncle Sam knows how to build weighs
three tons," said Tremaine. "Bicycles are out."
Grammond snorted. "Okay, Tremaine," he said. "You're the boy with all
the answers. But if you get in trouble, don't call me; call Washington."
Back in his room, Tremaine put through a call.
"It looks like Grammond's not willing to be left out in the cold, Fred.
Tell him if he queers this—"
"I don't know but what he might have something," the voice came back
over the filtered hum. "Suppose he smokes them out—"
"Don't go dumb on me, Fred. We're not dealing with West Virginia
moonshiners."
"Don't tell me my job, Tremaine!" the voice snapped. "And don't try out
your famous temper on me. I'm still in charge of this investigation."
"Sure. Just don't get stuck in some senator's hip pocket." Tremaine
hung up the telephone, went to the dresser and poured two fingers of
Scotch into a water glass. He tossed it down, then pulled on his coat
and left the hotel.
He walked south two blocks, turned left down a twilit side street. He
walked slowly, looking at the weathered frame houses. Number 89 was a
once-stately three-storied mansion overgrown with untrimmed vines, its
windows squares of sad yellow light. He pushed through the gate in the
ancient picket fence, mounted the porch steps and pushed the button
beside the door, a dark panel of cracked varnish. It was a long minute
before the door opened. A tall woman with white hair and a fine-boned
face looked at him coolly.
"Miss Carroll," Tremaine said. "You won't remember me, but I—"
"There is nothing whatever wrong with my faculties, James," Miss
Carroll said calmly. Her voice was still resonant, a deep contralto.
Only a faint quaver reflected her age—close to eighty, Tremaine
thought, startled.
"I'm flattered you remember me, Miss Carroll," he said.
"Come in." She led the way to a pleasant parlor set out with the
furnishings of another era. She motioned Tremaine to a seat and took a
straight chair across the room from him.
"You look very well, James," she said, nodding. "I'm pleased to see
that you've amounted to something."
"Just another bureaucrat, I'm afraid."
"You were wise to leave Elsby. There is no future here for a young man."
"I often wondered why you didn't leave, Miss Carroll. I thought, even
as a boy, that you were a woman of great ability."
"Why did you come today, James?" asked Miss Carroll.
"I...." Tremaine started. He looked at the old lady. "I want some
information. This is an important matter. May I rely on your
discretion?"
"Of course."
"How long has Mr. Bram lived in Elsby?"
Miss Carroll looked at him for a long moment. "Will what I tell you be
used against him?"
"There'll be nothing done against him, Miss Carroll ... unless it needs
to be in the national interest."
"I'm not at all sure I know what the term 'national interest' means,
James. I distrust these glib phrases."
"I always liked Mr. Bram," said Tremaine. "I'm not out to hurt him."
"Mr. Bram came here when I was a young woman. I'm not certain of the
year."
"What does he do for a living?"
"I have no idea."
"Why did a healthy young fellow like Bram settle out in that isolated
piece of country? What's his story?"
"I'm ... not sure that anyone truly knows Bram's story."
"You called him 'Bram', Miss Carroll. Is that his first name ... or his
last?"
"That is his only name. Just ... Bram."
"You knew him well once, Miss Carroll. Is there anything—"
A tear rolled down Miss Carroll's faded cheek. She wiped it away
impatiently.
"I'm an unfulfilled old maid, James," she said. "You must forgive me."
Tremaine stood up. "I'm sorry. Really sorry. I didn't mean to grill
you. Miss Carroll. You've been very kind. I had no right...."
Miss Carroll shook her head. "I knew you as a boy, James. I have
complete confidence in you. If anything I can tell you about Bram will
be helpful to you, it is my duty to oblige you; and it may help him."
She paused. Tremaine waited.
"Many years ago I was courted by Bram. One day he asked me to go with
him to his house. On the way he told me a terrible and pathetic tale.
He said that each night he fought a battle with evil beings, alone, in
a cave beneath his house."
Miss Carroll drew a deep breath and went on. "I was torn between pity
and horror. I begged him to take me back. He refused." Miss Carroll
twisted her fingers together, her eyes fixed on the long past. "When
we reached the house, he ran to the kitchen. He lit a lamp and threw
open a concealed panel. There were stairs. He went down ... and left me
there alone.
"I waited all that night in the carriage. At dawn he emerged. He tried
to speak to me but I would not listen.
"He took a locket from his neck and put it into my hand. He told me to
keep it and, if ever I should need him, to press it between my fingers
in a secret way ... and he would come. I told him that until he would
consent to see a doctor, I did not wish him to call. He drove me home.
He never called again."
"This locket," said Tremaine, "do you still have it?"
Miss Carroll hesitated, then put her hand to her throat, lifted a
silver disc on a fine golden chain. "You see what a foolish old woman I
am, James."
"May I see it?"
She handed the locket to him. It was heavy, smooth. "I'd like to
examine this more closely," he said. "May I take it with me?"
Miss Carroll nodded.
"There is one other thing," she said, "perhaps quite meaningless...."
"I'd be grateful for any lead."
"Bram fears the thunder."
III
As Tremaine walked slowly toward the lighted main street of Elsby a car
pulled to a stop beside him. Jess leaned out, peered at Tremaine and
asked:
"Any luck, Jimmy?"
Tremaine shook his head. "I'm getting nowhere fast. The Bram idea's a
dud, I'm afraid."
"Funny thing about Bram. You know, he hasn't showed up yet. I'm getting
a little worried. Want to run out there with me and take a look around?"
"Sure. Just so I'm back by full dark."
As they pulled away from the curb Jess said, "Jimmy, what's this about
State Police nosing around here? I thought you were playing a lone hand
from what you were saying to me."
"I thought so too, Jess. But it looks like Grammond's a jump ahead of
me. He smells headlines in this; he doesn't want to be left out."
"Well, the State cops could be mighty handy to have around. I'm
wondering why you don't want 'em in. If there's some kind of spy ring
working—"
"We're up against an unknown quantity. I don't know what's behind this
and neither does anybody else. Maybe it's a ring of Bolsheviks ...
and maybe it's something bigger. I have the feeling we've made enough
mistakes in the last few years; I don't want to see this botched."
The last pink light of sunset was fading from the clouds to the west as
Jess swung the car through the open gate, pulled up under the old trees
before the square-built house. The windows were dark. The two men got
out, circled the house once, then mounted the steps and rapped on the
door. There was a black patch of charred flooring under the window, and
the paint on the wall above it was bubbled. Somewhere a cricket set up
a strident chirrup, suddenly cut off. Jess leaned down, picked up an
empty shotgun shell. He looked at Tremaine. "This don't look good," he
said. "You suppose those fool boys...?"
He tried the door. It opened. A broken hasp dangled. He turned to
Tremaine. "Maybe this is more than kid stuff," he said. "You carry a
gun?"
"In the car."
"Better get it."
Tremaine went to the car, dropped the pistol in his coat pocket,
rejoined Jess inside the house. It was silent, deserted. In the kitchen
Jess flicked the beam of his flashlight around the room. An empty plate
lay on the oilcloth-covered table.
"This place is empty," he said. "Anybody'd think he'd been gone a week."
"Not a very cozy—" Tremaine broke off. A thin yelp sounded in the
distance.
"I'm getting jumpy," said Jess. "Dern hounddog, I guess."
A low growl seemed to rumble distantly. "What the devil's that?"
Tremaine said.
Jess shone the light on the floor. "Look here," he said. The ring of
light showed a spatter of dark droplets all across the plank floor.
"That's blood, Jess...." Tremaine scanned the floor. It was of broad
slabs, closely laid, scrubbed clean but for the dark stains.
"Maybe he cleaned a chicken. This is the kitchen."
"It's a trail." Tremaine followed the line of drops across the floor.
It ended suddenly near the wall.
"What do you make of it. Jimmy?"
A wail sounded, a thin forlorn cry, trailing off into silence. Jess
stared at Tremaine. "I'm too damned old to start believing in spooks,"
he said. "You suppose those damn-fool boys are hiding here, playing
tricks?"
"I think." Tremaine said, "that we'd better go ask Hull Gaskin a few
questions."
At the station Jess led Tremaine to a cell where a lanky teen-age boy
lounged on a steel-framed cot, blinking up at the visitor under a mop
of greased hair.
"Hull, this is Mr. Tremaine," said Jess. He took out a heavy key, swung
the cell door open. "He wants to talk to you."
"I ain't done nothin," Hull said sullenly. "There ain't nothin wrong
with burnin out a Commie, is there?"
"Bram's a Commie, is he?" Tremaine said softly. "How'd you find that
out, Hull?"
"He's a foreigner, ain't he?" the youth shot back. "Besides, we
heard...."
"What did you hear?"
"They're lookin for the spies."
"Who's looking for spies?"
"Cops."
"Who says so?"
The boy looked directly at Tremaine for an instant, flicked his eyes to
the corner of the cell. "Cops was talkin about 'em," he said.
"Spill it, Hull," the policeman said. "Mr. Tremaine hasn't got all
night."
"They parked out east of town, on 302, back of the woodlot. They called
me over and asked me a bunch of questions. Said I could help 'em get
them spies. Wanted to know all about any funny-actin people around
hers."
"And you mentioned Bram?"
The boy darted another look at Tremaine. "They said they figured the
spies was out north of town. Well, Bram's a foreigner, and he's out
that way, ain't he?"
"Anything else?"
The boy looked at his feet. | He knows the people and the area. | He has special training. | He has extra time. | He has money to pay people bribes. | 0 |
61405_DPAPHI73_1 | Where did Mia grow up? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | Earth | a space ship | Tintera | The Third Level | 1 |
61405_DPAPHI73_2 | What is the Trial? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | your chance to find a suitable partner | your first flight away from Earth | proving your ability to survive on your own | defending your right to have children | 2 |
61405_DPAPHI73_3 | What happened to Earth? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | People divided into small, vicious colonies | Overpopulation caused a war | People discovered more planets and chose to move | Everyone chose to live in space | 1 |
61405_DPAPHI73_4 | What is the name of the first person to talk to Mia on Tintera? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | Jimmy | Ninc | Horst | Losel | 2 |
61405_DPAPHI73_5 | What is NOT a reason that Mia pulled out her pistol the first time? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | She felt threatened by the group of men | They made her feel uncomfortable | She couldn't see all of the men at the same time | Someone was about to pull a gun on her | 2 |
61405_DPAPHI73_6 | What did Mia have for siblings? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | a brother and a sister | no siblings | two sisters | one brother | 1 |
61405_DPAPHI73_7 | Why did Mia begin to feel defeated and tired? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | She was out of food | She'd been riding for over a week | She missed her family | She didn't understand the planet she was dropped in | 3 |
61405_DPAPHI73_8 | What DIDN'T Mia learn at the campsite she located? | DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN
BY ALEXEI PANSHIN
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim
in the miasma of a planet without
spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!
I
The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.
The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen
small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship
that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the
ramp.
There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places
in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that
nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling
lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to
me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An
intelligent runt like me.
He said what I expected. "Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get
together when we get down?"
I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked
him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack
he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, "Not likely. I want to
come back alive." It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went
back to his place without saying anything.
My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be
telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that
scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the
meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.
After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.
We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and
then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to
leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.
Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's
the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go
partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that
crack about being a snob.
The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact
the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was
almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council
debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was
all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us
kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going
to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much
if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.
I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody
else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when
I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that
wasn't in public.
It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,
because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me
unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.
Planets make me feel wretched.
The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and
calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on
a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere
and little grubby things just looking for
you
to crawl on. If you
can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty
imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've
been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but
not for me.
We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a
thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up
a level or down a level and be back in civilization.
When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the
sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested
hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They
don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his
gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still
smarting from the slap I'd given him.
In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see
Jimmy—if he would get back alive.
It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the
nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound
like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.
Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow
for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They
do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time
you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to
the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship
is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that
something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population
from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to
keep the population steady.
I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be
found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.
Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start
getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next
landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't
have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the
bad moment any longer.
The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,
and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the
color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.
II
The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the
lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in
the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach
if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in
thirty gone.
I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three
things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.
The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot
I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to
camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,
though not with that meatball Jimmy D.
No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take
nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from
nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.
I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to
Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was
spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got
back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to
look forward to.
In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking
animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty
good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the
best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I
wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and
they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good
that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.
On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the
hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching
it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a
hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks
of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't
identify.
One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when
they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the
actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on
Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were
established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have
draft animals.
The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,
as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything
else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies
were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that
could
have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have
had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll
bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.
We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the
road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.
I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined
bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There
were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures
alive.
They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and
knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for
faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were
almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They
made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded
along.
I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the
men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as
cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line
and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That
one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.
He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he
had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we
reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow
me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the
face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man
looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That
was why I kept riding.
He said, "What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?
There be escaped Losels in these woods."
I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it
was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.
Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say
anything. It seemed smart.
"Where be you from?" he asked.
I pointed to the road behind us.
"And where be you going?"
I pointed ahead. No other way to go.
He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and
Daddy, who should know better.
We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, "Maybe you'd
better ride on from here with us. For protection."
He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a
mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether
everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International
English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit
with him.
One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been
watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.
"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at
all. We mought as well throw him back again."
The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he
expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.
The hard man said to the others, "This boy will be riding along with us
to Forton for protection."
I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving
along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.
I felt uncomfortable.
I said, "I don't think so."
What the man did then surprised me. He said, "I do think so," and
reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.
I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over
with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he
didn't want to be fried.
I said, "Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground."
They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.
When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, "All right, let's go."
They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I
could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with
narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling
tones said, "Look here, kid...."
"Shut up," I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It
surprised me. I didn't think I sounded
that
mean. I decided he just
didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.
After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the
creatures, I said, "If you want your rifles, you can go back and get
them now." I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next
bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and
the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.
I put this episode in the "file and hold for analysis" section in my
mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes
I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.
III
When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and
four
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have
been
eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt
really
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.
I wished for the same for myself.
The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids
off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the
camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I
couldn't see far into the dark.
A voice there said, "I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this
one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're
not."
Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the
campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the
fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets
and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now
what they used the high-walled pen for.
I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the
night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take
leave.
I never got the chance.
I was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my
shoulder and I was swung around.
"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here," he called. It was the one
who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He
was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.
I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he
went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him
and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from
behind and pinned my arms to my side.
I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly
hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a
lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he
didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet
and dragged me off.
When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped
dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and
I'll hurt you."
That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd
threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things
to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight
for that. "I ought to club you anyway," he said.
The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting
the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.
"No," he said. "Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what
we can use."
The other one didn't move. "Get going, Jack," Horst said in a menacing
tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally
backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me
being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his
bunch.
But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under
my jacket.
Horst turned back to me and I said, "You can't do this and get away
with it."
He said, "Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of
trouble. So don't give me a hard time."
He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I
didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.
"The courts won't let you get away with this," I said. I'd passed
a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL
JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or
something stuffy like that.
He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I
knew I'd goofed.
"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be
taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to
court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving
you your freedom."
"Why would they be doing that?" I asked. I slipped my hand under my
jacket.
"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the
Ships," Horst said. "That be enough. They already have one of you brats
in jail in Forton."
I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with
all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.
He said, "The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what
this be for." He held out my pickup signal.
Horst looked at it, then handed it back. "Throw it away," he said.
I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, "Hand
that over to me."
Horst made a disgusted sound.
"Don't make any noise," I said, "or you'll fry. Now hand it over."
I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the
saddle. "What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton."
"I can't remember," he said. "But it be coming to me. Hold on."
I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind
and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, "Good
enough," to the others who'd come up behind me.
I felt like a fool.
Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and
said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was
natural and mine wasn't, "The piece be yours." Then he tromped on it
until it cracked and fell apart.
Then he said, "Pull a gun on me twice. Twice." He slapped me so hard
that my ears rang. "You dirty little punk."
I said calmly, "You big louse."
It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can
remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my
face and then nothing.
Brains are no good if you don't use them. | Why the ship flew over her head | People grow old and gray on this planet | The Trial kids weren't welcome on Tintera | Horst keeps his animals in the pen | 0 |
63640_WKJ9NHVR_1 | What wouldn't Casey say to describe himself? | JUPITER'S JOKE
By A. L. HALEY
Casey Ritter, the guy who never turned
down a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods
of idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward
the great red spot of terrible Jupiter.
Those methane and ammonia planets, take it from me, they're the
dead-end of creation, and why the Old Man ever thought them up I'll
never know. I never thought I'd mess around any of them, but things
can sure happen. A man can get himself backed into a corner in this
little old solar system. It just ain't big enough for a gent of scope
and talent; and the day the Solar System Customs caught me red-handed
smuggling Kooleen crystals in from Mars, I knew I was in that corner,
and sewed up tight.
Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,
in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't
going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was
likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with
them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not
to rat on him before taking the job.
Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he
doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten
members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel
fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of
circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they
didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.
I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all
set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even
hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was
saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.
Then I croaked, "Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?
Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?" Being civil to the
court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,
a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.
The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and
then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of
dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny
throat, and told me what for.
"You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter,"
he said. "Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who
manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit
the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial
anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—"
I snorted. "Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy
tales! How could any—"
The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our
little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.
"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated
photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them
and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,
the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a
substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we
say, eminently suited to the task."
He beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!
Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen
caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't
been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....
At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd
thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full
pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not
when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not
unless it was a straight suicide mission!
I feebly massaged my throat. "Pictures?" I whispered. "Show me 'em."
Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.
I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those
inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,
a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating
among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to
gangrene around the edges.
The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties
had taken my voice again. "How big?" I whispered.
He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. "About the size of a man, I
believe."
I raised my shrinking head. "Take me to jail!" I said firmly, and
collapsed onto my chair.
A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. "So this is
the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!" he sneered.
"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!"
I shuddered. "You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw
the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!"
They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude
at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself
into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of
it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard
won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back
turned. How stupid could they get?
When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked
around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls
chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars
now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.
made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and
turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in
the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly
refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling
safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.
At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my
cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and
his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a
right to be; and after awhile I braced him.
I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an
asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the
tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week
when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip.
"Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me," he says. "I just
made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed."
"Oh, no!" I moaned. "What were you trying to do, start a feud between
us and Mars?"
He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with
real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or
a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. "Buddy," he said reverently,
"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!
Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's
eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!"
His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a
fresh scent.
I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the
super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of
Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort
of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're
mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be
nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's
champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to
him.
"How'd you make the getaway?" I asked, taking him at his word.
He looked loftily past me. "Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise
where I cached 'em."
"Cached what?"
"The rocks, stupe."
I hardly heard the cut. "You mean you really did get away with them?"
My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing
along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I
somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was
impossible. I'd investigated once myself.
He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard
coming.
That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much
jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning
with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself
put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on
me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a
week later.
By that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling
with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,
he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, "When I
chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe
and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl
won't give me fer 'em—" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.
"Jupiter!" I goggled at him. "Akroida! Who's she?"
He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he
was sure I'd been born. "Don't you know nothin', butterhead?"
From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke
again. The memory still makes me fry.
"Akroida," he explained in his own sweet time, "is the queen-scorp
of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the
Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,
remember?" He winked broadly. "It come from Mars in the first place,
you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,
if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—" He went off into a dream
about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.
"You mean those scorpions have really got brains?"
"Brains!" he snorted. "Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than
people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you
just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.
Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's
fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite
you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,
so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that
almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!"
He sighed regretfully. "But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda
persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here
cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer
them emeralds."
I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my
nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and
along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had
already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out
alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it
was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so
that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.
But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group
of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked
up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard
Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.
So did I.
For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,
while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would
make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a
letter to the S.S.C.
The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,
friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter
that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the
caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made
and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to
shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with
those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.
"I put on a yeller slicker," he confessed sadly. "That there ammonia
mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this
here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to
an audience with the old rip." He shook his head slowly. "The kid
that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.
I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain
drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the
chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal
hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it
a-purpose to upset her."
Then he winked at me. "But then I got off in a corner and cooked up
some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with
ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,
though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they
cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper."
He ruminated a few minutes. "Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out
with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'
put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll
do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But
remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful."
II
Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was
set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy
methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that
tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.
I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had
slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut
Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space
again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically
slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got
me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and
to remind me that this was public service, strictly.
"These—" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer
miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—"These jewels are as nothing,
Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with
them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—"
He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—"IF you succeed, your
reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added
to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man."
That twitch of the nose riled me no little. "I ain't failed yet!" I
snarled at him. "Just you wait till I do, feller!" I slipped the string
of emeralds back into its little safe. "Instead of sniping at me, why
don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?"
With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on
Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's
ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe
looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I
patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and
passionate purple.
I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and
anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air
and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in
their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I
was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little
bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and
spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a
mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.
That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the
whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first
there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all
dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise!
The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating
around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed
that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the
outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I
forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I
couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red
floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor,
I eased along.
But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that
red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green
hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with
a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even
though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he
didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally.
There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that
anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now
that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out
there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly
doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one
thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty.
Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of
my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the
lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,
though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted
dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and
lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.
I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My
fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell
I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me
into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even
intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm
expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided
to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the
poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its
expression.
I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone
else. "I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming
lady," I informed him. "However, I have something very special in the
way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might
be interested."
He reared back at that, and reaching up, plucked his right eye out of
the socket and reeled it out to the end of a two-foot tentacle, and
then he examined me with it just like an old-time earl with one of
those things they called monocles. Pard hadn't warned me about those
removable eyes, for reasons best known to himself. I still wake up
screaming....
Anyway, when that thing pulled out its eye and held it toward me, I
backed up against the side of the ship like I'd been half-electrocuted.
Then I gagged. But I could still remember that I had to live in that
suit for awhile, so I held on. Then that monstrosity reeled in the eye,
and I gagged again.
My actions didn't bother him a bit. "Jewels, did you say?" he tapped
out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to
tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....
A shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,
and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition
that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but
I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.
Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, "How's about
taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,
old pal?" Or words to that effect.
He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. "Anything!
Just anything you desire, my dearest friend."
I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. "I'm Casey
Ritter. What's your label, chum?"
"Attaboy," he ticked coyly.
"Attaboy?" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain
nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. "Who named
you that?"
He simpered. "My dear friend, Pard Hoskins."
I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for
Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. "How come you aren't
mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?"
He hung his silly head. "I fear I am colorblind," he confessed sadly.
Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide
I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.
"Lead off, old pal," I sang out, and then had to tap it. "I'll follow
in my boat."
Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only
alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to
a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard
Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?
Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like
one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of
the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and
mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.
Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.
Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking
over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after
him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a
natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the
throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now
beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions,
all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt.
Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free
and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to
death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest
that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth.
It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that
something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and
the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into
a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly.
It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only
have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant.
In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the
cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in
diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through
which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in
and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my
eyeballs felt paralyzed.
Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.
persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than
any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.
Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a
window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was
fumbling, too. "Zero hour, chump!" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking
up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the
airlock.
III
That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's
on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no
building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it
was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of
space.
In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was
put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that
there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just
right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air
as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but
what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?
Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the
airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on
my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully
endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the
little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.
We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight
of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly
dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he
just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city
block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it
glowed like the inside of a red light.
No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all
that red!
A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up
a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring
grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who
else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one!
Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a
green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled
space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that
twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as
a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping
here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of
somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I
could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit.
Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding,
shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and
making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire.
Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and
shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went
across to her alone with the arsenic.
Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped
bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and
scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched
over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box
over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and
sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I
could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.
"Who from?" asked Akroida.
That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of
those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code
at all.
"Who from?" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.
"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly
remarkable jewels," he confessed coyly.
Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. "His
name?" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in
his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my
direction. "Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?"
Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. "I—uh—the
stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention
to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman." He
ducked his head and fearfully waited.
A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even
higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. "An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?"
Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.
The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a
maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with
that dragon's tail of hers. | He'd never give up a client | He's a master smuggler | He's traveled all over the solar system | He'd do anything for money | 3 |