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61097_S3UO0IYW

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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What is significant about the “secret” Retief unveils about the Soetti?

61097_S3UO0IYW_6

61097_S3UO0IYW

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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Why are the Soetti allowed to board the ship?

61097_S3UO0IYW_7

61097_S3UO0IYW

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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What was Skaw's importance?

61097_S3UO0IYW_8

61097_S3UO0IYW

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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Why did the captain try to change course away from Jorgenon's Worlds?

61097_S3UO0IYW_9

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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Why is Acoustix so valuable?

63442_D519INBY_1

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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What is true about the Red Spot Fever?

63442_D519INBY_2

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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Why does Grannie fool Billy as well when she rides away with Park?

63442_D519INBY_3

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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What gives away the location of the lens?

63442_D519INBY_4

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/4/4/63442//63442-h//63442-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Why does the party run into duplicates of themselves?

63442_D519INBY_5

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/3/4/4/63442//63442-h//63442-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

What is so unique about the cockatoos on this planet?

63442_D519INBY_6

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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How did Grannie Annie save the workers?

63442_D519INBY_7

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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What does the viviscreen do?

63442_D519INBY_8

63442_D519INBY

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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What main motivation did Antler Park have to leave the lens in the barracks?

63442_D519INBY_9

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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What initially alerted people to the fault line and the onset of problems?

50893_71BYF8M1_1

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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What reason did the newspaper have to focus on the possible active volcano theory and not the opinion of the geographer?

50893_71BYF8M1_2

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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What happens that completely confirms Schwartzberg's theory?

50893_71BYF8M1_3

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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What is most significant about the earthquake that happens?

50893_71BYF8M1_4

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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About how long does the tragedy take place?

50893_71BYF8M1_5

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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What major change happened to the country's landscape as the tragedy continued?

50893_71BYF8M1_6

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

How has the new Nebraska Sea changed the climate in America?

50893_71BYF8M1_7

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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What's the most unexpected result of the disaster?

50893_71BYF8M1_8

50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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How has America transformed as a country after the events?

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50893_71BYF8M1

Gutenberg

The Great Nebraska Sea

1956.0

Danzig, Allan

Science fiction; PS; Short stories; United States -- Fiction

THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA By ALLAN DANZIG Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It has happened a hundred times in the long history of Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again! Everyone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the general public. It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the Pecos as far south as Texas. Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa. By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line. It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the connection. The population of the states affected was in places as low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming. It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area. The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report. The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service had other worries at the moment, and filed the report. But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as this. Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area, tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically, a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could be. Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark. It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York Times ). The idea was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it. To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled, never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more plausible theory. Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting for their university and government department to approve budgets. They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct. They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate. Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs. East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking, into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression. There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular. Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault. "Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership privately wondered if there would be any pieces. The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going, there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning. By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared. Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety. All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home to wait. There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps. As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down, down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble. Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared. Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the President declared a national emergency. By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south. Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all death toll had risen above 1,000. Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous. Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska. The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking. On the actual scene of the disaster (or the scenes ; it is impossible to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam. The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet, just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm," declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a day? The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward. Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now streaming east. Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take. 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion. Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd eastward. All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to be done in an orderly way. And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its inexorable descent. On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The second phase of the national disaster was beginning. The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block south of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the astounding rate of about six feet per hour. At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land wanted to be somewhere else." Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered, seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center from the U. S. marched on the land. From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. "We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before." Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour before the town disappeared forever. One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map. The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine, Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed. South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma. By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge. Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain, deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County. Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to North Dakota. Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one great swirl. Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most terrible sound they had ever heard. "We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour, because of the spray." Salt spray. The ocean had come to New Mexico. The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport, Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way. The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota. The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the new sea. Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went down with his State. Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on radio and television. Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre, South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the younger children and what provisions they could find—"Mostly a ham and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster. "We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts behind, in the rush!" But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring, into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what had been dusty farmland, cities and towns. Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives. No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished from the heart of the North American continent forever. It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea came to America. Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean, it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of Dakota. What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming contribute no small part to the nation's economy. Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea? The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri, our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana, is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent. Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks with the glistening white beaches? Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges. Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was. And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi. And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation. The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri, but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political scene. But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade and the ferment of world culture. It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri, and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have developed on the new harbors of the inland sea. Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made its laborious and dusty way west!

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This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

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50893_71BYF8M1_10

61090_FGU9ZSOF

Gutenberg

Call Him Nemesis

1970.0

Westlake, Donald E.

PS; Science fiction; Crime -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Vigilantes -- Fiction

CALL HIM NEMESIS By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and, for that matter, so do the cops! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup." There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with money. It was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on." That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey!" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. "Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." "It was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires ." "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. "Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chevvy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chevvy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" On the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The car was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do that ?" Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned. "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully.... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS! Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. II The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, "Go away! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands!" They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, "The Scorpion." You don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most—"You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys"—and to be a complete realist—"You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation—" started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News : Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS. Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. III Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "Listen, lady," said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to go to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there!" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie!" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard. The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is, Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'" Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. "You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.'" "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson." "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/0/9/61090//61090-h//61090-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Why did the bank robbers end up crashing?

61090_FGU9ZSOF_1

61090_FGU9ZSOF

Gutenberg

Call Him Nemesis

1970.0

Westlake, Donald E.

PS; Science fiction; Crime -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Vigilantes -- Fiction

CALL HIM NEMESIS By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and, for that matter, so do the cops! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup." There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with money. It was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on." That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey!" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. "Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." "It was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires ." "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. "Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chevvy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chevvy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" On the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The car was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do that ?" Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned. "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully.... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS! Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. II The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, "Go away! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands!" They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, "The Scorpion." You don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most—"You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys"—and to be a complete realist—"You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation—" started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News : Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS. Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. III Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "Listen, lady," said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to go to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there!" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie!" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard. The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is, Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'" Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. "You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.'" "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson." "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.

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Why does The Scorpion go mostly unnoticed, despite reaching out to the newspaper?

61090_FGU9ZSOF_2

61090_FGU9ZSOF

Gutenberg

Call Him Nemesis

1970.0

Westlake, Donald E.

PS; Science fiction; Crime -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Vigilantes -- Fiction

CALL HIM NEMESIS By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and, for that matter, so do the cops! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup." There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with money. It was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on." That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey!" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. "Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." "It was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires ." "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. "Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chevvy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chevvy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" On the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The car was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do that ?" Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned. "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully.... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS! Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. II The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, "Go away! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands!" They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, "The Scorpion." You don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most—"You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys"—and to be a complete realist—"You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation—" started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News : Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS. Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. III Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "Listen, lady," said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to go to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there!" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie!" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard. The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is, Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'" Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. "You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.'" "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson." "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.

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Why does Stevenson begin to suspect a connection between the crimes?

61090_FGU9ZSOF_3

61090_FGU9ZSOF

Gutenberg

Call Him Nemesis

1970.0

Westlake, Donald E.

PS; Science fiction; Crime -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Vigilantes -- Fiction

CALL HIM NEMESIS By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and, for that matter, so do the cops! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup." There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with money. It was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on." That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey!" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. "Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." "It was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires ." "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. "Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chevvy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chevvy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" On the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The car was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do that ?" Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned. "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully.... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS! Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. II The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, "Go away! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands!" They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, "The Scorpion." You don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most—"You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys"—and to be a complete realist—"You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation—" started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News : Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS. Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. III Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "Listen, lady," said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to go to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there!" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie!" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard. The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is, Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'" Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. "You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.'" "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson." "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.

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Why do the gangs pick Halloween night to fight?

61090_FGU9ZSOF_4

61090_FGU9ZSOF

Gutenberg

Call Him Nemesis

1970.0

Westlake, Donald E.

PS; Science fiction; Crime -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Vigilantes -- Fiction

CALL HIM NEMESIS By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and, for that matter, so do the cops! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup." There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with money. It was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on." That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey!" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. "Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." "It was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires ." "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. "Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chevvy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chevvy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" On the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The car was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do that ?" Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned. "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully.... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS! Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. II The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, "Go away! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands!" They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, "The Scorpion." You don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most—"You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys"—and to be a complete realist—"You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation—" started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News : Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS. Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. III Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "Listen, lady," said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to go to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there!" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie!" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard. The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is, Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'" Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. "You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.'" "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson." "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.

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Why does the Scorpion leave their signature at each crime?

61090_FGU9ZSOF_5

61090_FGU9ZSOF

Gutenberg

Call Him Nemesis

1970.0

Westlake, Donald E.

PS; Science fiction; Crime -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Vigilantes -- Fiction

CALL HIM NEMESIS By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and, for that matter, so do the cops! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup." There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with money. It was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on." That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey!" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. "Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." "It was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires ." "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. "Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chevvy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chevvy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" On the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The car was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do that ?" Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned. "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully.... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS! Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. II The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, "Go away! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands!" They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, "The Scorpion." You don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most—"You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys"—and to be a complete realist—"You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation—" started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News : Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS. Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. III Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "Listen, lady," said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to go to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there!" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie!" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard. The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is, Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'" Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. "You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.'" "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson." "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.

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What do all 3 crimes have in common?

61090_FGU9ZSOF_6

61090_FGU9ZSOF

Gutenberg

Call Him Nemesis

1970.0

Westlake, Donald E.

PS; Science fiction; Crime -- Fiction; Parapsychology -- Fiction; Vigilantes -- Fiction

CALL HIM NEMESIS By DONALD E. WESTLAKE Criminals, beware; the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and, for that matter, so do the cops! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The man with the handkerchief mask said, "All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup." There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers. The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous. The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, "Think about retirement, my friend." The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with money. It was just like the movies. The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel. The man by the door said, "Hurry up." The man with the satchel said, "One more drawer." The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, "Keep your shirt on." That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door. The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, "Hey!" The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk. The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, "Help! Help! Robbery!" The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine. Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch. Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies. There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them. Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car. "Hey," said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. "Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?" "Come along home," said his mother, grabbing his hand. "We don't want to be involved." "It was the nuttiest thing," said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. "An operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?" Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. "They always slip up," he said. "Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up." "Yes, but their tires ." "Well," said Pauling, "it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest." "What I can't figure out," said Stevenson, "is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't that hot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down." Pauling shrugged again. "We got them. That's the important thing." "Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are." Stevenson shook his head. "I can't figure it." "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth," suggested Pauling. "They picked the wrong car to steal." "And that doesn't make sense, either," said Stevenson. "Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?" "Why? What was it, a foreign make?" "No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a block away." "Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car," said Pauling. "For a well-planned operation like this one," said Stevenson, "they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense." "What do they have to say about it?" Pauling demanded. "Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all." The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. "The owner of that Chevvy's here," he said. "Right," said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk. The owner of the Chevvy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. "John Hastings," he said. "They say you have my car here." "I believe so, yes," said Stevenson. "I'm afraid it's in pretty bad shape." "So I was told over the phone," said Hastings grimly. "I've contacted my insurance company." "Good. The car's in the police garage, around the corner. If you'd come with me?" On the way around, Stevenson said, "I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened." "That's right," said Hastings. "I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone." "You left the keys in it?" "Well, why not?" demanded Hastings belligerently. "If I'm making just a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?" "The car was stolen," Stevenson reminded him. Hastings grumbled and glared. "It's always been perfectly safe up till now." "Yes, sir. In here." Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. "It's ruined!" he cried. "What did you do to the tires?" "Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup." Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. "Look at that! There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?" Stevenson shook his head. "No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman." "Hmph." Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, "What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car." "It wasn't a bunch of kids," Stevenson told him. "It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup." "Then why did they do that ?" Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, "The Scorpion" burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. "I really don't know," he said. "It wasn't there before the car was stolen?" "Of course not!" Stevenson frowned. "Now, why in the world did they do that?" "I suggest," said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, "you ask them that." Stevenson shook his head. "It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us." He looked at the trunk lid again. "It's the nuttiest thing," he said thoughtfully.... That was on Wednesday. The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address. The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point: Dear Mr. Editor: The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS! Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn't rate a line in the paper. II The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk. It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins. Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand. As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom. Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and "stop acting like a child." Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, "Go away! Can't you let a man sleep?" At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder. Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, "Murder! Murder!" At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in "news-tips" rewards. By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens. In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved. The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house. The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat. The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again. The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically. Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn. Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police. They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: "My hands! My hands!" They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder. Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends. On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all. He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, "The Scorpion." You don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most—"You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys"—and to be a complete realist—"You gotta have both feet on the ground." If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks. The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore. "Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?" he demanded. "I'm not sure," admitted Stevenson. "But we've got these two things. First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'." "He says he put that on there himself," said the captain. Stevenson shook his head. "His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense." "He put it on there himself, Stevenson," said the captain with weary patience. "What are you trying to prove?" "I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?" "They were defective," said Hanks promptly. "All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?" "How do I know?" demanded the captain. "Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?" "They say they didn't do it," said Stevenson. "And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been there." The captain shook his head. "I don't get it," he admitted. "What are you trying to prove?" "I guess," said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, "I guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind." "What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?" "All I know," insisted Stevenson, "is what I see." "And all I know," the captain told him, "is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so." "And what made it so hot?" "Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?" "All of a sudden?" "He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him." "How come the same name showed up each time, then?" Stevenson asked desperately. "How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?" "But there's no explanation—" started Stevenson. "What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?" "I remember," said Stevenson. "Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson," the captain advised him. "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.... The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News : Dear Mr. Editor, You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS. Sincerely yours, THE SCORPION Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten. III Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a JD. The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war. The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances. The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through. Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street. Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited. At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started. At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks on. They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, "Hey, you kids. Take off." One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. "Who, us?" "Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way." "The subway's this way," objected the kid in the red mask. "Who cares? You go around the other way." "Listen, lady," said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, "we got a long way to go to get home." "Yeah," said another kid, in a black mask, "and we're late as it is." "I couldn't care less," Judy told them callously. "You can't go down that street." "Why not?" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. "Why can't we go down there?" this apparition demanded. "Because I said so," Judy told him. "Now, you kids get away from here. Take off." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. "Hey, they're fighting down there!" "It's a rumble," said Judy proudly. "You twerps don't want to be involved." "Hey!" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street. "Hey, Eddie!" shouted one of the other kids. "Eddie, come back!" Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn't know what to do. A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. "Cheez," said one of the kids. "The cops!" "Fuzz!" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, "Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!" But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard. The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over. Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street. And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault. Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. "All right, Stevenson," he said. "Make it fast, I've got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing of yours again." "I'm afraid it is, Captain," said Stevenson. "Did you see the morning paper?" "So what?" "Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?" Captain Hanks sighed. "Stevenson," he said wearily, "are you going to try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?" "Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'" Stevenson told him. "One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers." "So they changed their name," said Hanks. "Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?" "Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over." "It was a territorial war," Stevenson reminded him. "They've admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight." "A bunch of juvenile delinquents," said Hanks in disgust. "You take their word?" "Captain, did you read the article in the paper?" "I glanced through it." "All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded 'The Scorpion.'" "Now, let me tell you something," said Hanks severely. "They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That's what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson." "Yes, sir," said Stevenson.

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What seems to be the Scorpion's motivation?

61090_FGU9ZSOF_7

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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Why are Quezy and Bob investigating the asteroid?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_1

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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Why are Quezy and Bob pressed for time?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_2

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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Why does Starre lay claim to the asteroid?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_3

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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Why is Starre hesitant to accept Bob's feelings?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_4

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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How does the shape of Starre's ship benefit them?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_5

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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What happens at the second confrontation with the Saylor brothers?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_6

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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Why do Starre, Bob, and Quezy work together, despite having goals that are at odds with one another?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_7

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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Why do Bob and Quezy haul asteroids in the first place?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_8

63527_XKZ0ITIT

Gutenberg

Cosmic Yo-Yo

1950.0

Rocklynne, Ross

PS; Asteroids -- Fiction; Short stories; Science fiction; Weddings -- Fiction

COSMIC YO-YO By ROSS ROCKLYNNE "Want an asteroid in your backyard? We supply cheap. Trouble also handled without charge." Interplanetary Hauling Company. (ADVT.) [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bob Parker, looking through the photo-amplifiers at the wedge-shaped asteroid, was plainly flabbergasted. Not in his wildest imaginings had he thought they would actually find what they were looking for. "Cut the drive!" he yelled at Queazy. "I've got it, right on the nose. Queazy, my boy, can you imagine it? We're in the dough. Not only that, we're rich! Come here!" Queazy discharged their tremendous inertia into the motive-tubes in such a manner that the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. "She checks down to the last dimension," Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. "Now all we have to do is find out if she's made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn't be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!" He jerked a badly crumpled ethergram from his pocket, smoothed it out, and thumbed his nose at the signature. "Whee! Mr. Andrew S. Burnside, you owe us five hundred and fifty thousand dollars!" Queazy straightened. A slow, likeable smile wreathed his tanned face. "Better take it easy," he advised, "until I land the ship and we use the atomic whirl spectroscope to determine the composition of the asteroid." "Have it your way," Bob Parker sang, happily. He threw the ethergram to the winds and it fell gently to the deck-plates. While Queazy—so called because his full name was Quentin Zuyler—dropped the ship straight down to the smooth surface of the asteroid, and clamped it tight with magnetic grapples, Bob flung open the lazarette, brought out two space-suits. Moments later, they were outside the ship, with star-powdered infinity spread to all sides. In the ship, the ethergram from Andrew S. Burnside, of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the world, still lay on the deck-plates. It was addressed to: Mr. Robert Parker, President Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., 777 Main Street, Satterfield City, Fontanaland, Mars. The ethergram read: Received your advertising literature a week ago. Would like to state that yes I would like an asteroid in my back yard. Must meet following specifications: 506 feet length, long enough for wedding procession; 98 feet at base, tapering to 10 feet at apex; 9-12 feet thick; topside smooth-plane, underside rough-plane; composed of iron ore, tungsten, quartz crystals, and cinnabar. Must be in my back yard before 11:30 A.M. my time, for important wedding June 2, else order is void. Will pay $5.00 per ton. Bob Parker had received that ethergram three weeks ago. And if The Interplanetary Hauling & Moving Co., hadn't been about to go on the rocks (chiefly due to the activities of Saylor & Saylor, a rival firm) neither Bob nor Queazy would have thought of sending an answering ethergram to Burnside stating that they would fill the order. It was, plainly, a hair-brained request. And yet, if by some chance there was such a rigidly specified asteroid, their financial worries would be over. That they had actually discovered the asteroid, using their mass-detectors in a weight-elimination process, seemed like an incredible stroke of luck. For there are literally millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt, and they had been out in space only three weeks. The "asteroid in your back yard" idea had been Bob Parker's originally. Now it was a fad that was sweeping Earth, and Burnside wasn't the first rich man who had decided to hold a wedding on top of an asteroid. Unfortunately, other interplanetary moving companies had cashed in on that brainstorm, chiefly the firm of the Saylor brothers—which persons Bob Parker intended to punch in the nose some day. And would have before this if he hadn't been lanky and tall while they were giants. Now that he and Queazy had found the asteroid, they were desperate to get it to its destination, for fear that the Saylor brothers might get wind of what was going on, and try to beat them out of their profits. Which was not so far-fetched, because the firm of Saylor & Saylor made no pretense of being scrupulous. Now they scuffed along the smooth-plane topside of the asteroid, the magnets in their shoes keeping them from stepping off into space. They came to the broad base of the asteroid-wedge, walked over the edge and "down" the twelve-foot thickness. Here they squatted, and Bob Parker happily clamped the atomic-whirl spectroscope to the rough surface. By the naked eye, they could see iron ore, quartz crystals, cinnabar, but he had the spectroscope and there was no reason why he shouldn't use it. He satisfied himself as to the exterior of the asteroid, and then sent the twin beams deep into its heart. The beams crossed, tore atoms from molecules, revolved them like an infinitely fine powder. The radiations from the sundered molecules traveled back up the beams to the atomic-whirl spectroscope. Bob watched a pointer which moved slowly up and up—past tungsten, past iridium, past gold— Bob Parker said, in astonishment, "Hell! There's something screwy about this business. Look at that point—" Neither he nor Queazy had the opportunity to observe the pointer any further. A cold, completely disagreeable feminine voice said, "May I ask what you interlopers are doing on my asteroid?" Bob started so badly that the spectroscope's settings were jarred and the lights in its interior died. Bob twisted his head around as far as he could inside the "aquarium"—the glass helmet, and found himself looking at a space-suited girl who was standing on the edge of the asteroid "below." "Ma'am," said Bob, blinking, "did you say something?" Queazy made a gulping sound and slowly straightened. He automatically reached up as if he would take off his hat and twist it in his hands. "I said," remarked the girl, "that you should scram off of my asteroid. And quit poking around at it with that spectroscope. I've already taken a reading. Cinnabar, iron ore, quartz crystals, tungsten. Goodbye." Bob's nose twitched as he adjusted his glasses, which he wore even inside his suit. He couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. He knew that he was slowly working up a blush. Mildly speaking, the girl was beautiful, and though only her carefully made-up face was visible—cool blue eyes, masterfully coiffed, upswept, glinting brown hair, wilful lips and chin—Bob suspected the rest of her compared nicely. Her expression darkened as she saw the completely instinctive way he was looking at her and her radioed-voice rapped out, "Now you two boys go and play somewhere else! Else I'll let the Interplanetary Commission know you've infringed the law. G'bye!" She turned and disappeared. Bob awoke from his trance, shouted desperately, "Hey! Wait! You! " He and Queazy caught up with her on the side of the asteroid they hadn't yet examined. It was a rough plane, completing the rigid qualifications Burnside had set down. "Wait a minute," Bob Parker begged nervously. "I want to make some conversation, lady. I'm sure you don't understand the conditions—" The girl turned and drew a gun from a holster. It was a spasticizer, and it was three times as big as her gloved hand. "I understand conditions better than you do," she said. "You want to move this asteroid from its orbit and haul it back to Earth. Unfortunately, this is my home, by common law. Come back in a month. I don't expect to be here then." "A month!" Parker burst the word out. He started to sweat, then his face became grim. He took two slow steps toward the girl. She blinked and lost her composure and unconsciously backed up two steps. About twenty steps away was her small dumbbell-shaped ship, so shiny and unscarred that it reflected starlight in highlights from its curved surface. A rich girl's ship, Bob Parker thought angrily. A month would be too late! He said grimly, "Don't worry. I don't intend to pull any rough stuff. I just want you to listen to reason. You've taken a whim to stay on an asteroid that doesn't mean anything to you one way or another. But to us—to me and Queazy here—it means our business. We got an order for this asteroid. Some screwball millionaire wants it for a backyard wedding see? We get five hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it! If we don't take this asteroid to Earth before June 2, we go back to Satterfield City and work the rest of our lives in the glass factories. Don't we, Queazy?" Queazy said simply, "That's right, miss. We're in a spot. I assure you we didn't expect to find someone living here." The girl holstered her spasticizer, but her completely inhospitable expression did not change. She put her hands on the bulging hips of her space-suit. "Okay," she said. "Now I understand the conditions. Now we both understand each other. G'bye again. I'm staying here and—" she smiled sweetly "—it may interest you to know that if I let you have the asteroid you'll save your business, but I'll meet a fate worse than death! So that's that." Bob recognized finality when he saw it. "Come on, Queazy," he said fuming. "Let this brat have her way. But if I ever run across her without a space-suit on I'm going to give her the licking of her life, right where it'll do the most good!" He turned angrily, but Queazy grabbed his arm, his mouth falling open. He pointed off into space, beyond the girl. "What's that?" he whispered. "What's wha— Oh! " Bob Parker's stomach caved in. A few hundred feet away, floating gently toward the asteroid, came another ship—a ship a trifle bigger than their own. The girl turned, too. They heard her gasp. In another second, Bob was standing next to her. He turned the audio-switch to his headset off, and spoke to the girl by putting his helmet against hers. "Listen to me, miss," he snapped earnestly, when she tried to draw away. "Don't talk by radio. That ship belongs to the Saylor brothers! Oh, Lord, that this should happen! Somewhere along the line, we've been double-crossed. Those boys are after this asteroid too, and they won't hesitate to pull any rough stuff. We're in this together, understand? We got to back each other up." The girl nodded dumbly. Suddenly she seemed to be frightened. "It's—it's very important that this—this asteroid stay right where it is," she said huskily. "What—what will they do?" Bob Parker didn't answer. The big ship had landed, and little blue sparks crackled between the hull and the asteroid as the magnetic clamps took hold. A few seconds later, the airlocks swung down, and five men let themselves down to the asteroid's surface and stood surveying the three who faced them. The two men in the lead stood with their hands on their hips; their darkish, twin faces were grinning broadly. "A pleasure," drawled Wally Saylor, looking at the girl. "What do you think of this situation Billy?" "It's obvious," drawled Billy Saylor, rocking back and forth on his heels, "that Bob Parker and company have double-crossed us. We'll have to take steps." The three men behind the Saylor twins broke into rough, chuckling laughter. Bob Parker's gorge rose. "Scram," he said coldly. "We've got an ethergram direct from Andrew S. Burnside ordering this asteroid." "So have we," Wally Saylor smiled—and his smile remained fixed, dangerous. He started moving forward, and the three men in back came abreast, forming a semi-circle which slowly closed in. Bob Parker gave back a step, as he saw their intentions. "We got here first," he snapped harshly. "Try any funny stuff and we'll report you to the Interplanetary Commission!" It was Bob Parker's misfortune that he didn't carry a weapon. Each of these men carried one or more, plainly visible. But he was thinking of the girl's spasticizer—a paralyzing weapon. He took a hair-brained chance, jerked the spasticizer from the girl's holster and yelled at Queazy. Queazy got the idea, urged his immense body into motion. He hurled straight at Billy Saylor, lifted him straight off the asteroid and threw him away, into space. He yelled with triumph. At the same time, the spasticizer Bob held was shot cleanly out of his hand by Wally Saylor. Bob roared, started toward Wally Saylor, knocked the smoking gun from his hand with a sweeping arm. Then something crushing seemed to hit him in the stomach, grabbing at his solar plexus. He doubled up, gurgling with agony. He fell over on his back, and his boots were wrenched loose from their magnetic grip. Vaguely, before the flickering points of light in his brain subsided to complete darkness, he heard the girl's scream of rage—then a scream of pain. What had happened to Queazy he didn't know. He felt so horribly sick, he didn't care. Then—lights out. Bob Parker came to, the emptiness of remote starlight in his face. He opened his eyes. He was slowly revolving on an axis. Sometimes the Sun swept across his line of vision. A cold hammering began at the base of his skull, a sensation similar to that of being buried alive. There was no asteroid, no girl, no Queazy. He was alone in the vastness of space. Alone in a space-suit. "Queazy!" he whispered. "Queazy! I'm running out of air!" There was no answer from Queazy. With sick eyes, Bob studied the oxygen indicator. There was only five pounds pressure. Five pounds! That meant he had been floating around out here—how long? Days at least—maybe weeks! It was evident that somebody had given him a dose of spastic rays, enough to screw up every muscle in his body to the snapping point, putting him in such a condition of suspended animation that his oxygen needs were small. He closed his eyes, trying to fight against panic. He was glad he couldn't see any part of his body. He was probably scrawny. And he was hungry! "I'll starve," he thought. "Or suffocate to death first!" He couldn't keep himself from taking in great gulps of air. Minutes, then hours passed. He was breathing abnormally, and there wasn't enough air in the first place. He pleaded continually for Queazy, hoping that somehow Queazy could help, when probably Queazy was in the same condition. He ripped out wild curses directed at the Saylor brothers. Murderers, both of them! Up until this time, he had merely thought of them as business rivals. If he ever got out of this— He groaned. He never would get out of it! After another hour, he was gasping weakly, and yellow spots danced in his eyes. He called Queazy's name once more, knowing that was the last time he would have strength to call it. And this time the headset spoke back! Bob Parker made a gurgling sound. A voice came again, washed with static, far away, burbling, but excited. Bob made a rattling sound in his throat. Then his eyes started to close, but he imagined that he saw a ship, shiny and small, driving toward him, growing in size against the backdrop of the Milky Way. He relapsed, a terrific buzzing in his ears. He did not lose consciousness. He heard voices, Queazy's and the girl's, whoever she was. Somebody grabbed hold of his foot. His "aquarium" was unbuckled and good air washed over his streaming face. The sudden rush of oxygen to his brain dizzied him. Then he was lying on a bunk, and gradually the world beyond his sick body focussed in his clearing eyes and he knew he was alive—and going to stay that way, for awhile anyway. "Thanks, Queazy," he said huskily. Queazy was bending over him, his anxiety clearing away from his suddenly brightening face. "Don't thank me," he whispered. "We'd have both been goners if it hadn't been for her. The Saylor brothers left her paralyzed like us, and when she woke up she was on a slow orbit around her ship. She unstrapped her holster and threw it away from her and it gave her enough reaction to reach the ship. She got inside and used the direction-finder on the telaudio and located me first. The Saylors scattered us far and wide." Queazy's broad, normally good-humored face twisted blackly. "The so and so's didn't care if we lived or died." Bob saw the girl now, standing a little behind Queazy, looking down at him curiously, but unhappily. Her space-suit was off. She was wearing lightly striped blue slacks and blue silk blouse and she had a paper flower in her hair. Something in Bob's stomach caved in as his eyes widened on her. The girl said glumly, "I guess you men won't much care for me when you find out who I am and what I've done. I'm Starre Lowenthal—Andrew S. Burnside's granddaughter!" Bob came slowly to his feet, and matched Queazy's slowly growing anger. "Say that again?" he snapped. "This is some kind of dirty trick you and your grandfather cooked up?" "No!" she exclaimed. "No. My grandfather didn't even know there was an asteroid like this. But I did, long before he ordered it from you—or from the Saylor brothers. You see—well, my granddad's about the stubbornest old hoot-owl in this universe! He's always had his way, and when people stand in his way, that's just a challenge to him. He's been badgering me for years to marry Mac, and so has Mac—" "Who's Mac?" Queazy demanded. "My fiancé, I guess," she said helplessly. "He's one of my granddad's protégés. Granddad's always financing some likely young man and giving him a start in life. Mac has become pretty famous for his Mercurian water-colors—he's an artist. Well, I couldn't hold out any longer. If you knew my grandfather, you'd know how absolutely impossible it is to go against him when he's got his mind set! I was just a mass of nerves. So I decided to trick him and I came out to the asteroid belt and picked out an asteroid that was shaped so a wedding could take place on it. I took the measurements and the composition, then I told my grandfather I'd marry Mac if the wedding was in the back yard on top of an asteroid with those measurements and made of iron ore, tungsten, and so forth. He agreed so fast he scared me, and just to make sure that if somebody did find the asteroid in time they wouldn't be able to get it back to Earth, I came out here and decided to live here. Asteroids up to a certain size belong to whoever happens to be on them, by common law.... So I had everything figured out—except," she added bitterly, "the Saylor brothers! I guess Granddad wanted to make sure the asteroid was delivered, so he gave the order to several companies." Bob swore under his breath. He went reeling across to a port, and was gratified to see his and Queazy's big interplanetary hauler floating only a few hundred feet away. He swung around, looked at Queazy. "How long were we floating around out there?" "Three weeks, according to the chronometer. The Saylor boys gave us a stiff shot." " Ouch! " Bob groaned. Then he looked at Starre Lowenthal with determination. "Miss, pardon me if I say that this deal you and your granddad cooked up is plain screwy! With us on the butt end. But I'm going to put this to you plainly. We can catch up with the Saylor brothers even if they are three weeks ahead of us. The Saylor ship and ours both travel on the HH drive—inertia-less. But the asteroid has plenty of inertia, and so they'll have to haul it down to Earth by a long, spiraling orbit. We can go direct and probably catch up with them a few hundred thousand miles this side of Earth. And we can have a fling at getting the asteroid back!" Her eyes sparkled. "You mean—" she cried. Then her attractive face fell. "Oh," she said. " Oh! And when you get it back, you'll land it." "That's right," Bob said grimly. "We're in business. For us, it's a matter of survival. If the by-product of delivering the asteroid is your marriage—sorry! But until we do get the asteroid back, we three can work as a team if you're willing. We'll fight the other problem out later. Okay?" She smiled tremulously. "Okay, I guess." Queazy looked from one to another of them. He waved his hand scornfully at Bob. "You're plain nuts," he complained. "How do you propose to go about convincing the Saylor brothers they ought to let us have the asteroid back? Remember, commercial ships aren't allowed to carry long-range weapons. And we couldn't ram the Saylor brothers' ship—not without damaging our own ship just as much. Go ahead and answer that." Bob looked at Queazy dismally. "The old balance-wheel," he groaned at Starre. "He's always pulling me up short when I go off half-cocked. All I know is, that maybe we'll get a good idea as we go along. In the meantime, Starre—ahem—none of us has eaten in three weeks...?" Starre got the idea. She smiled dazzlingly and vanished toward the galley. Bob Parker was in love with Starre Lowenthal. He knew that after five days out, as the ship hurled itself at breakneck speed toward Earth; probably that distracting emotion was the real reason he couldn't attach any significance to Starre's dumbbell-shaped ship, which trailed astern, attached by a long cable. Starre apparently knew he was in love with her, too, for on the fifth day Bob was teaching her the mechanics of operating the hauler, and she gently lifted his hand from a finger-switch. "Even I know that isn't the control to the Holloway vacuum-feeder, Bob. That switch is for the—ah—the anathern tube, you told me. Right?" "Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first—motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at—Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something—" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's—there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid—" "You have to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling—and I can't put the thought into concrete words—that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? How? " Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A yo-yo !" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. " Queazy, I've got it! " It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!" They weren't where Bob and Queazy had calculated, as they had discovered the next day. They had expected to pick up the asteroid on their mass-detectors a few hundred thousand miles outside of the Moon's orbit. But now they saw the giant ship attached like a leech to the still bigger asteroid—inside the Moon's orbit! A mere two hundred thousand miles from Earth! "We have to work fast," Bob stammered, sweating. He got within naked-eye distance of the Saylor brothers' ship. Below, Earth was spread out, a huge crescent shape, part of the Eastern hemisphere vaguely visible through impeding clouds and atmosphere. The enemy ship was two miles distant, a black shadow occulting part of the brilliant sky. It was moving along a down-spiraling path toward Earth. Queazy's big hand gripped his shoulder. "Go to it, Bob!" Bob nodded grimly. He backed the hauler up about thirty miles, then sent it forward again, directly toward the Saylor brothers' ship at ten miles per second. And resting on the blunt nose of the ship was the "yo-yo." There was little doubt the Saylors' saw their approach. But, scornfully, they made no attempt to evade. There was no possible harm the oncoming ship could wreak. Or at least that was what they thought, for Bob brought the hauler's speed down to zero—and Starre Lowenthal's little ship, possessing its own inertia, kept on moving! It spun away from the hauler's blunt nose, paying out two rigid lengths of cable behind it as it unwound, hurled itself forward like a fantastic spinning cannon ball. "It's going to hit!" The excited cry came from Starre. But Bob swore. The dumbbell ship reached the end of its cables, falling a bare twenty feet short of completing its mission. It didn't stop spinning, but came winding back up the cable, at the same terrific speed with which it had left. Bob sweated, having only fractions of seconds in which to maneuver for the "yo-yo" could strike a fatal blow at the hauler too. It was ticklish work completely to nullify the "yo-yo's" speed. Bob used exactly the same method of catching the "yo-yo" on the blunt nose of the ship as a baseball player uses to catch a hard-driven ball in his glove—namely, by matching the ball's speed and direction almost exactly at the moment of impact. And now Bob's hours of practice paid dividends, for the "yo-yo" came to rest snugly, ready to be released again. All this had happened in such a short space of time that the Saylor brothers must have had only a bare realization of what was going on. But by the time the "yo-yo" was flung at them again, this time with better calculations, they managed to put the firmly held asteroid between them and the deadly missile. But it was clumsy evasion, for the asteroid was several times as massive as the ship which was towing it, and its inertia was great. And as soon as the little ship came spinning back to rest, Bob flung the hauler to a new vantage point and again the "yo-yo" snapped out. And this time—collision! Bob yelled as he saw the stern section of the Saylor brothers' ship crumple like tissue paper crushed between the hand. The dumbbell-shaped ship, smaller, and therefore stauncher due to the principle of the arch, wound up again, wobbling a little. It had received a mere dent in its starboard half. Starre was chortling with glee. Queazy whispered, "Attaboy, Bob! This time we'll knock 'em out of the sky!" The "yo-yo" came to rest and at the same moment a gong rang excitedly. Bob knew what that meant. The Saylor brothers were trying to establish communication. Queazy was across the room in two running strides. He threw in the telaudio and almost immediately, Wally Saylor's big body built up in the plate. Wally Saylor's face was quivering with wrath. "What do you damned fools think you're trying to do?" he roared. "You've crushed in our stern section. You've sliced away half of our stern jets. Air is rushing out! You'll kill us!" "Now," Bob drawled, "you're getting the idea." "I'll inform the Interplanetary Commission!" screamed Saylor. " If you're alive," Bob snarled wrathfully. "And you won't be unless you release the asteroid." "I'll see you in Hades first!" "Hades," remarked Bob coldly, "here you come!" He snapped the hauler into its mile-a-second speed again, stopped it at zero. And the "yo-yo" went on its lone, destructive sortie. For a fraction of a second Wally Saylor exhibited the countenance of a doomed man. In the telaudio plate, he whirled, and diminished in size with a strangled yell. The "yo-yo" struck again, but Bob Parker maneuvered its speed in such a manner that it struck in the same place as before, but not as heavily, then rebounded and came spinning back with perfect, sparkling precision. And even before it snugged itself into its berth, it was apparent that the Saylor brothers had given up. Like a wounded terrier, their ship shook itself free of the asteroid, hung in black space for a second, then vanished with a flaming puff of released gravitons from its still-intact jets. The battle was won!

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What is likely the next step in the story?

63527_XKZ0ITIT_9

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

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Why was Peter Karson initially relieved when he first heard the news of the invasion?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_1

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

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What seems to be the invader's reason for visiting Earth?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_2

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

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What is significant about the events being broadcasted?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_3

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

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How does it seem that the aliens communicate?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_4

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

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Why is Peter's status so important when he wakes up?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_5

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

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What is Peter's mission aboard The Avenger?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_6

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/6/1/62619//62619-h//62619-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Why does Peter insist that Lorelei not come along for the mission?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_7

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/6/1/62619//62619-h//62619-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Before his departure, Peter recalls a line from a film. Why does it come to mind for him?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_8

62619_Q3L6B2WU

Gutenberg

The Avenger

1956.0

Knight, Damon

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; PS; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Short stories

THE AVENGER By STUART FLEMING Karson was creating a superman to fight the weird super-monsters who had invaded Earth. But he was forgetting one tiny thing—like calls to like. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been. There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again. I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter. It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking. It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it. But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly. A tear was trickling down my cheek. Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing. Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain. Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry. A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back. There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body. For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone. "Lord!" he said. He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal. One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable. Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on. There were flaring red headlines. Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion. INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON. 200 DEAD Then lines of type, and farther down: 50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM PARIS MATERNITY CENTER He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them. MOON SHIP DESTROYED IN TRANSIT NO COMMUNICATION FROM ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING The item below the last one said: Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: "The reason for this ... order must be apparent to all civilized peoples. For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them. "The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way . "Since the Invaders first appeared in Wood River, Oregon, 24 hours ago, they have not once acknowledged our attempts to communicate, or in any way taken notice of our existence as reasoning beings. They have treated us precisely as we, in less enlightened days, might have treated a newly-discovered race of lower animals. They have not attacked our centers of government, nor immobilized our communications, nor laid siege to our defenses. But in instance after instance, they have done as they would with us. They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion. "I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!" Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time. " Will we?" he asked himself softly. It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. Peter took it in fifteen seconds, running, and stumbled to a halt in front of the door marked "Radiation." She had set her door mechanism to "Etaoin Shrdlu," principally because he hated double-talk. He mouthed the syllables, had to repeat them because he put an accent in the wrong place, and squeezed through the door as soon as it opened far enough to admit him. Lorelei, beautiful in spite of dark-circled eyes and a smear of grease on her chin, looked up from a huge ledger at the end of the room. One blonde eyebrow arched in the quizzical expression he knew so well. "What makes, Peter my love?" she asked, and bent back to the ledger. Then she did a double-take, looked at his face intently, and said, "Darling, what's wrong?" He said, "Have you seen the news recently?" She frowned. "Why, no—Harry and I have been working for thirty-six hours straight. Haven't seen anybody, haven't heard anything. Why?" "You wouldn't believe me. Where's your newsbox?" She came around the desk and put her hands on his shoulders. "Pete, you know I haven't one—it bores me or upsets me, depending on whether there's trouble or not. What—" "I'm sorry, I forgot," he said. "But you have a scanner?" "Yes, of course. But really, Pete—" "You'll understand in a minute. Turn it on, Lorelei." She gazed at him levelly for a moment, kissed him impulsively, and then walked over to the video panel on the wall and swept a mountain of papers away from in front of it. She turned the selector dial to "News" and pressed the stud. A faint wash of color appeared on the panel, strengthened slowly, and suddenly leapt into full brilliance. Lorelei caught her breath. It was a street scene in the Science City of Manhattan, flooded by the warm spring sunshine. Down on the lowest level, visible past the transport and passenger tubes, the parks and moving ways should have been dotted with colorful, holiday crowds. The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone. There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. The thin moaning that went up from them was more horrible than any cry of agony. "The Invaders are here, citizens," the commentator was saying in a strangled voice. "Stay off the streets. Hide yourselves. Stay off the streets...." His voice droned on, but neither of them heard it. Lorelei buried her head on his chest, clutching at him desperately. "Peter!" she said faintly. "Why do they broadcast such things?" "They have to," he told her grimly. "There will be panics and suicides, and they know it; but they have to do it. This isn't like a war, where the noncombatants' morale has to be kept up. There aren't going to be any noncombatants, this time. Everybody in the world has to know about them, so that he can fight them—and then it may not be enough." The viewpoint of the teleo sender changed as the two red beings soared away from their victims and angled slowly up the street. Peter reached out to switch off the scanner, and froze. The girl felt his muscles tense abruptly, looked back at the scene. The Invaders were floating up the sloping side of a tall, pure white structure that dominated the rest. "That's the Atlas building," she said unbelievingly. "Us!" "Yes." Silently, they counted stories as the two beings rose. Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ... forty-eight. Inevitably, they halted. Then they faded slowly. It was impossible to say whether they had gone through the solid wall, or simply melted away. The man and woman clung together, waiting. There was a thick, oppressive silence, full of small rustlings and other faint sounds that were no longer normal. Then, very near, a man screamed in a high, inhuman voice. The screamed dwindled into a throaty gurgle and died, leaving silence again. Peter's lips were cold with sweat. Tiny nerves in his face and arms were jumping convulsively. His stomach crawled. He thrust the girl away from him and started toward the inner room. "Wait here," he mouthed. She was after him, clinging to his arms. "No, Peter! Don't go in there! Peter! " But he pushed her away again, woodenly, and stalked forward. There was a space in the middle of the room where machinery had been cleared away to make room for an incompleted setup. Peter walked down the narrow aisle, past bakelite-sheathed mechanisms and rows of animal cages, and paused just short of it. The two red beings were there, formless bodies hazy in midair, the distorted, hairless skulls in profile, staring at something outside his range of vision. Peter forced himself forward another step. Little Harry Kanin, Lorelei's assistant, was crumpled in a corner, half supported by the broad base of an X-ray chamber. His face was flaccid and bloated. His glazed eyes, impassive yet somehow pleading, stared at nothingness straight ahead of him. The Invaders ignored Peter, staring expressionlessly down at Kanin. In a moment Peter realized what they were doing to him. He stood, paralyzed with horror, and watched it happen. The little man's body was sagging, ever so slowly, as if he were relaxing tiredly. His torso was telescoping, bit by bit; his spread legs grew wider and more shapeless, his cheeks caved in and his skull grew gradually flatter. When it was over, the thing that had been Kanin was a limp, boneless puddle of flesh. Peter could not look at it. There was a scream in his throat that would not come out. He was beyond fear, beyond agony. He turned to the still-hovering monsters and said in a terrible voice, "Why? Why?" The nearest being turned slowly to regard him. Its lips did not move, but there was a tiny sound in Peter's brain, a thin, dry whispering. The scream was welling up. He fought it down and listened. " Wurnkomellilonasendiktolsasangkanmiamiamimami.... " The face was staring directly into his, the bulging eyes hypnotic. The ears were small, no more than excresences of skin. The narrow lips seemed sealed together; a thin, slimy ichor drooled from them. There were lines in the face, but they were lines of age, not emotion. Only the eyes were alive. " ... raswilopreatadvuonistuwurncchtusanlgkelglawwalinom.... " "I can't understand," he cried wildly. "What do you want?" " ... morofelcovisyanmamiwurlectaunntous. " He heard a faint sound behind him, and whirled. It was the first time he had realized that Lorelei had followed him. She stood there, swaying, very pale, looking at the red Invaders. Her eyes swiveled slowly.... " Opreniktoulestritifenrelngetnaktwiltoctpre. " His voice was hoarse. "Don't look! Don't—Go back!" The horrible, mindless noise in his throat was almost beyond his power to repress. His insides writhed to thrust it out. She didn't see him. Her eyes glazed, and she dropped limply to the floor. The scream came out then. Before he knew, even, that he could hold it back no longer, his mouth was wide open, his muscles tensed, his fingernails slicing his palms. It echoed with unbelievable volume in the room. It was a scream to split eardrums; a scream to wake the dead. Somebody said, "Doctor!" He wanted to say, "Yes, get a doctor. Lorelei—" but his mouth only twitched feebly. He couldn't seem to get it to work properly. He tried again. "Doctor." "Yes?" A gentle, masculine voice. He opened his eyes with an effort. There was a blurred face before him; in a moment it grew clearer. The strong, clean-shaven chin contrasted oddly with the haggard circles under the eyes. There was a clean, starched odor. "Where am I?" he said. He tried to turn his head, but a firm hand pressed him back into the sheets. "You're in a hospital. Just lie quietly, please." He tried to get up again. "Where's Lorelei?" "She's well, and you'll see her soon. Now lie quietly. You've been a very sick man." Peter sank back in the bed. The room was coming into focus. He looked around him slowly. He felt very weak, but perfectly lucid. "Yes...." he said. "How long have I been here, Doctor?" The man hesitated, looked at him intently. "Three months," he said. He turned and gave low-voiced instructions to a nurse, and then went away. Peter's head began spinning just a little. Glass clinked from a metal stand near his head; the nurse bent over him with a glass half full of milky fluid. It tasted awful, but she made him drink it all. In a moment he began to relax, and the room got fuzzy again. Just before he drifted off, he said sleepily, "You can't—fool me. It's been more —than three—months." He was right. All the nurses, and even Dr. Arnold, were evasive, but he kept asking them why he couldn't see Lorelei, and finally he wormed it out of them. It had been nine and a half months, not three, and he'd been in a coma all that time. Lorelei, it seemed, had recovered much sooner. "She was only suffering from ordinary shock," Arnold explained. "Seeing that assistant of hers—it was enough to knock anybody out, especially a woman. But you stood actual mental contact with them for approximately five minutes. Yes, we know—you talked a lot. It's a miracle you're alive, and rational." "But where is she?" Peter complained. "You still haven't explained why I haven't been able to see her." Arnold frowned. "All right," he said. "I guess you're strong enough to take it. She's underground, with the rest of the women and children, and a good two-thirds of the male population. That's where you'll go, as soon as you're well enough to be moved. We started digging in six months ago." "But why?" Peter whispered. Arnold's strong jaw knotted. "We're hiding," he said. "Everything else has failed." Peter couldn't think of anything to say. Dr. Arnold's voice went on after a moment, musingly. "We're burrowing into the earth, like worms. It didn't take us long to find out we couldn't kill them. They didn't even take any notice of our attempts to do so, except once. That was when a squadron of the Police caught about fifty of them together at one time, and attacked with flame guns and a new secret weapon. It didn't hurt them, but it annoyed them. It was the first time they'd been annoyed, I think. They blew up half a state, and it's still smoldering." "And since then?" Peter asked huskily. "Since then, we've been burrowing. All the big cities.... It would be an impossible task if we tried to include all the thinly-populated areas, of course, but it doesn't matter. By the time we excavate enough to take care of a quarter of the earth's population, the other three-quarters will be dead, or worse." "I wonder," Peter said shakily, "if I am strong enough to take it." Arnold laughed harshly. "You are. You've got to be. You're part of our last hope, you see." "Our last hope?" "Yes. You're a scientist." "I see," said Peter. And for the first time, he thought of the Citadel . No plan leaped full-born into his mind, but, maybe , he thought, there's a chance .... It wasn't very big, the thing that had been his shining dream. It lay there in its rough cradle, a globe of raw dura-steel not more than five hundred meters in diameter, where the Citadel was to have been a thousand. It wouldn't house a hundred scientists, eagerly delving into the hinterland of research. The huge compartments weren't filled with the latest equipment for chemical and physical experiment; instead, there was compressed oxygen there, and concentrated food, enough to last a lifetime. It was a new world, all by itself; or else it was a tomb. And there was one other change, one that you couldn't see from the outside. The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone. A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock— The Avenger . He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting. Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—" "Darling," he began wearily. "Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way." "There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. "Darling, listen to me. We've tried everything. We've gone underground, but that's only delaying the end. They still come down here, only not as many. The mortality rate is up, the suicide rate is up, the birth rate is down, in spite of anything we can do. You've seen the figures: we're riding a curve that ends in extinction fifty years from now. "They'll live, and we'll die, because they're a superior race. We're a million years too far back even to understand what they are or where they came from. Besides them, we're apes. There's only one answer." She was crying now, silently, with great racking sobs that shook her slender body. But he went remorselessly on. "Out there, in space, the cosmics change unshielded life. They make tentacles out of arms; or scales out of hair; or twelve toes, or a dozen ears—or a better brain. Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them , but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?" She choked, "But why can't you take me along?" He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. You'd be their murderer." Her sobs gradually died away. She straightened slowly until he no longer had to support her, but all the vitality and resilience was gone out of her body. "All right," she said in a lifeless voice. "You'll come back, Peter." He turned away suddenly, not trusting himself to kiss her goodbye. A line from an old film kept echoing through his head. " They'll come back—but not as boys !" We'll come back, but not as men. We'll come back, but not as elephants. We'll come back, but not as octopi. He was trembling violently. He ran the last few steps, stumbled into the airlock, and pressed the stud that would seal the door behind him. We'll come back.... He heard the massive disk sink home, closing him off. Then he sank down on the floor of the airlock and put his head in shaking hands. After a while he roused himself, closed the inner door of the lock behind him, and walked down the long corridor into the control chamber. The shining banks of keys were there, waiting for his touch; he slumped down before them and listlessly closed the contact of the visiplate. He swung its field slowly, scanning for the last time the bare walls of the underground chamber, making sure that all the spectators had retired out of the way of the blast. Then his clawed fingers poised over the keys, hovered a moment, and thrust down. Acceleration pressed him deep into his chair. In the visiplate, the heavy doors that closed the tunnel above him flashed back, one by one. The energy-charged screen flickered off to let him pass, and closed smoothly behind him. The last doors, cleverly camouflaged, slipped back into place and then dwindled in the distance. It was done. He flashed on out, past the moon, past Mars, over the asteroid belt. The days merged into weeks, then months, and finally, far out, The Avenger curved into an orbit and held it. The great motors died, and the silence pressed in about him. Already he could feel the invisible rays burning resistlessly through his flesh as if it were water, shifting the cells of his body, working its slow, monstrous alchemy upon him. Peter waited until the changes were unmistakably evident in his skin and hair, and then he smashed all the mirrors in the ship. The embryos were pulsing with unnatural life, even in the suspended animation of their crystal cells. One by one he allowed them to mature, and after weeks or years destroyed the monstrosities that came from the incubators. Time went by, meaninglessly. He ate when he was hungry, slept when his driving purpose let him, and worked unceasingly, searching for the million-to-one chance. He stared sometimes through changed eyes at the tiny blue star that was Earth, wondering if the race he had left behind still burrowed in its worm-tunnels, digging deeper and deeper away from the sunlight. But after a time he ceased even to wonder. And one changeling-child he did not destroy. He fed knowledge to its eager brain, and watched it through the swift years, with a dawning hope.... Peter closed the diary. "The rest you know, Robert," he said. "Yes," I told him. "I was that child. I am the millionth mutation you were searching for." His eyes glowed suddenly in their misshapen sockets. "You are. Your brain is as superior to mine as mine is to an anthropoid's. You solve instinctively problems that would take our mechanical computers hours of work. You are a superman." "I am without your imperfections," I said, flexing my arms. He rose and strode nervously over to the window. I watched him as he stood there, outlined against the blazing galaxies. He had changed but little in the years that I had known him. His lank gray hair straggled over his sunken eyes; his cheeks were blobbed with excresences of flesh; one corner of his mouth was drawn up in a perpetual grin. He had a tiny sixth finger on his left hand. He turned again, and I saw the old scar on his cheek where I had once accidentally drawn one of my talons across his face. "And now," he said softly, "we will go home. I've waited so long—keeping the control chamber and the engine room locked away from you, not telling you, even, about Earth until now—because I had to be sure. But now, the waiting is over. "They're still there, I'm sure of it—the people, and the Invaders. You can kill the Invaders, Robert." He looked at me, a little oddly, almost as if he had some instinctive knowledge of what was to come. But he went on swiftly, "On Earth we had a saying: 'Fight fire with fire.' That is the way it will be with you. You are completely, coldly logical, just as they are. You can understand them, and so you can conquer them." I said, "That is the reason why we will not go back to Earth." He stared at me, his jaw slack, his hands trembling. "What—what did you say?" I repeated it patiently. "But why?" he cried, sinking down into the chair before me. In an instant all the joy had gone out of him. I could not understand his suffering, but I could recognize it. "You yourself have said it," I told him. "I am a being of logic, just as the beings who have invaded your planet are. I do not comprehend the things which you call hate, fear, joy and love, as they do not. If I went to Earth, I would use your people to further my knowledge, just as the invaders do. I would have no reason to kill the invaders. They are more nearly kin to me than your people." Peter's eyes were dull, his limbs slumped. For a moment I thought that the shock had deranged his mind. His voice trembled when he said, "But if I ask you to kill them, and not my people?" "To do so would be illogical." He waved his hands helplessly. "Gratitude?" he muttered. "No, you don't understand that, either." Then he cried suddenly, "But I am your friend, Robert!" "I do not understand 'friend,'" I said. I did understand "gratitude," a little. It was a reciprocal arrangement: I did what Peter wished, so long as I did not actively want to do otherwise, because he had done things for me. Very well, then we must not go back. It was very simple, but I knew that he could not comprehend it. I tried to explain it to him, however. But he only stared at me, with an expression on his face that I had never seen there before, and that, somehow, I did not like to see. It was disquieting, and so I hastened to the end that I knew was inevitable.

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By the end of the passage. what can we understand about the opening scene?

62619_Q3L6B2WU_9

61228_GH2KIWTI

Gutenberg

The Big Headache

1972.0

Harmon, Jim

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Short stories; Experiments -- Fiction; PS

THE BIG HEADACHE BY JIM HARMON What's the principal cause of headaches? Why, having a head, of course! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I "Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment?" Ferris asked eagerly. "How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that repatriated fullback." Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down." "I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research." "When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches." Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider—?" "No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself." " Our discovery," Mitchell said politely. "That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine." "You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields," Mitchell said. "But now Macklin—" Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets. For the past seven years Macklin—who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin . The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health. Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus. Ferris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly. "Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?" Ferris demanded, pausing in mid-stride. "I imagine he will," Mitchell said. "Macklin's always seemed a decent enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees meetings." "He's always treated me like dirt," Ferris said heatedly. "Everyone on this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in their smug faces." Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of scientific detachment. There came a discreet knock on the door. "Please come in," Mitchell said. Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell suspected that that was his intention. He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. "Good of you to ask me over, Steven." Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. "How have you been, Harold?" Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. "Fine, thank you, doctor." Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. "Now what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know." Mitchell moved around the desk casually. "Actually, Doctor, we haven't the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an element of risk." The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. "Now you have me intrigued. What is it all about?" "Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "That's right, Steven. Migraine." "That must be terrible," Ferris said. "All your fine reputation and lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing agony begins, can it?" "No, Harold, it isn't," Macklin admitted. "What does your project have to do with my headaches?" "Doctor," Mitchell said, "what would you say the most common complaint of man is?" "I would have said the common cold," Macklin replied, "but I suppose from what you have said you mean headaches." "Headaches," Mitchell agreed. "Everybody has them at some time in his life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by their headaches." "Yes," Macklin said. "But think," Ferris interjected, "what a boon it would be if everyone could be cured of headaches forever by one simple injection." "I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it would please about everybody else." "Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular pains," Mitchell said. "I see. Are you two saying you have such a shot? Can you cure headaches?" "We think we can," Ferris said. "How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?" Macklin asked. "I know that much about the subject." "There are a number of different causes for headaches—nervous strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors, over-indulgence—but there is one effect of all of this, the one real cause of headaches," Mitchell announced. "We have definitely established this for this first time," Ferris added. "That's fine," Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. "And this effect that produces headaches is?" "The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain," Mitchell said eagerly. "That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a virus that feeds on pituitrin." "That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean the end of the race as well," Macklin said. "In certain areas it is valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels." "The virus," Ferris explained, "can easily be localized and stabilized. A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain." The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. "If this really works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?" He reinserted the pipe. "I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate," Ferris said. "Our discovery will work." "Will work," Macklin said thoughtfully. "The operative word. It hasn't worked then?" "Certainly it has," Ferris said. "On rats, on chimps...." "But not on humans?" Macklin asked. "Not yet," Mitchell admitted. "Well," Macklin said. "Well." He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm. "Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors from the Army." "We want you," Ferris told him. Macklin coughed. "I don't want to overestimate my value but the government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this project. My wife would like it even less." Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him mouthing the word yellow . "Doctor," Mitchell said quickly, "I know it's a tremendous favor to ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem. Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our studies we can get no more financial backing. We should run a large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that. We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our resources." "I'm tempted," Macklin said hesitantly, "but the answer is go. I mean ' no '. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to others to take the rest—the risk, I mean." Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. "I really would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh." Ferris smiled. "Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've heard some say they preferred the migraine." Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to tend it in a worn leather case. "Tell me," he said, "what is the worst that could happen to me?" "Low blood pressure," Ferris said. "That's not so bad," Macklin said. "How low can it get?" "When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point," Mitchell said. A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. "Is there much risk of that?" "Practically none," Mitchell said. "We have to give you the worst possibilities. All our test animals survived and seem perfectly happy and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong." Macklin held his head in both hands. "Why did you two select me ?" "You're an important man, doctor," Ferris said. "Nobody would care if Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic migraine. You do." "Yes, I do," Macklin said. "Very well. Go ahead. Give me your injection." Mitchell cleared his throat. "Are you positive, doctor?" he asked uncertainly. "Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over." "No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now." "There's a simple release," Ferris said smoothly. Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen. II "Ferris!" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him. "Right here," the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work table, penciling notes. "I've been expecting you." "Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the newspapers," Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the folded paper. "On the contrary, I should and I did," Ferris answered. "We wanted something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is." "Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!" "Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy, with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces." "It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum." "But—" The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections. Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient. "It's Macklin's wife," Ferris said. "Do you want to talk to her? I'm no good with hysterical women." "Hysterical?" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone. "Hello?" Mitchell said reluctantly. "Mrs. Macklin?" "You are the other one," the clear feminine voice said. "Your name is Mitchell." She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell thought. "That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's associate." "Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?" "What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said sharply. "I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband heroin." "That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?" "The—trance he's in now." "Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off by this time." "Most known narcotics," she admitted, "but evidently you have discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?" "Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are calmer." Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. "What could be wrong with Macklin?" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone. Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. "Let's have a look at the test animals." Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus, was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire, worrying the lock on the cage. "Jerry is a great deal more active than Dean," Mitchell said. "Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either." They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats, Bud and Lou, much the same. "I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood," Mitchell ventured. "Iron deficiency anemia?" "Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin." "There's nothing wrong with him," Ferris snapped. "He's probably just trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!" Macklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in aqua-tinted aluminum. Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed dum-de-de-dum-dum-dum . As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious. The door unlatched and swung back. "Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said quickly, "I'm sure we can help if there is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr. Mitchell." "You had certainly better help him, gentlemen." She stood out of the doorway for them to pass. Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline. The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them. "You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized injection," he said. It wasn't a question. "I don't like that 'unauthorized'," Ferris snapped. The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted a heavy eyebrow. "No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to treat illnesses?" "We weren't treating an illness," Mitchell said. "We were discovering a method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?" The colonel smiled thinly. "Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him." Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man. "Can we see him?" Mitchell asked. "Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be just as well. We have laws to cover that." The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room. Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to his home surroundings. On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect carpet. The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the scrupulously clean rug. "What's wrong with him, Sidney?" the other officer asked the doctor. "Not a thing," Sidney said. "He's the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson." "But—" Colonel Carson protested. "Oh, he's changed all right," the Army doctor answered. "He's not the same man as he used to be." "How is he different?" Mitchell demanded. The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. "He used to be a mathematical genius." "And now?" Mitchell said impatiently. "Now he is a moron," the medic said. III Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor mumbled he had a report to make. Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each other. "What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?" Mitchell asked. "Not an idiot," Colonel Carson corrected primly. "Dr. Macklin is a moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid." "I'm not so dumb," Macklin said defensively. "I beg your pardon, sir," Carson said. "I didn't intend any offense. But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you, your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron." "That's just on book learning," Macklin said. "There's a lot you learn in life that you don't get out of books, son." "I'm confident that's true, sir," Colonel Carson said. He turned to the two biologists. "Perhaps we had better speak outside." "But—" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. "Very well. Let's step into the hall." Ferris followed them docilely. "What have you done to him?" the colonel asked straightforwardly. "We merely cured him of his headaches," Mitchell said. "How?" Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus. "You mean," the Army officer said levelly "you have infected him with some kind of a disease to rot his brain?" "No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make him understand." "All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if he had been kicked in the head by a mule," Colonel Carson said. "I think I can explain," Ferris interrupted. "You can?" Mitchell said. Ferris nodded. "We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain cells to function properly." "Why won't they function?" Carson roared. "They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin," Ferris explained. "The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying." The colonel yelled. Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct. The colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides. "I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly once in a human race." "Just a moment," Mitchell interrupted, "we can cure Macklin." "You can ?" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees. "Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary." "Good!" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the knees. "Just you wait a second now, boys," Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning in the doorway, holding his pipe. "I've been listening to what you've been saying and I don't like it." "What do you mean you don't like it?" Carson demanded. He added, "Sir?" "I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be." "Yes, doctor," Mitchell said eagerly, "just as you used to be." " With my headaches, like before?" Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to frame an answer. "Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is a dismal failure." "I wouldn't go that far," Ferris remarked cheerfully. Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw Macklin slowly shaking his head. "No, sir!" the mathematician said. "I shall not go back to my original state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying, worrying." "You mean wondering," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing. How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say, what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?" Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it. "That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him," Mitchell said. "It's not his decision to make," the colonel said. "He's an idiot now." "No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't think you can." "No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state." The colonel looked momentarily glum that it wasn't. Mitchell looked back at Macklin. "Where did his wife get to, Colonel? I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions for himself. Perhaps she could influence him." "Maybe," the colonel said. "Let's find her." They found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached. "Mrs. Macklin," the colonel began, "these gentlemen believe they can cure your husband of his present condition." "Really?" she said. "Did you speak to Elliot about that?" "Y-yes," Colonel Carson said, "but he's not himself. He refused the treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence." She nodded. "If those are his wishes, I can't go against them." "But Mrs. Macklin!" Mitchell protested. "You will have to get a court order overruling your husband's wishes." She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. "That was my original thought. But I've redecided." "Redecided!" Carson burst out almost hysterically. "Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again, where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy now. Like a child, but happy." "Mrs. Macklin," the Army man said levelly, "if you don't help us restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order declaring him incompetent." "But he is not! Legally, I mean," the woman stormed. "Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin to sanity." "I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner," she said. The colonel looked smug. "Why not?" "Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is involved." "There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—" "It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority." "I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment there is no chance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell interjected. Her mouth grew petulant. "I don't care. I would rather have a live husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him comfortable...." Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led him back into the hall. "I'm no psychiatrist," Mitchell said, "but I think she wants Macklin stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life, and now she can dominate him completely." "What is she? A monster?" the Army officer muttered. "No," Mitchell said. "She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous of her husband's genius." "Maybe," Carson said. "I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk." "I'll go with you," Ferris said. Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist. Carson squinted. "Any particular reason, doctor?" "To celebrate," Ferris said. The colonel shrugged. "That's as good a reason as any." On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in bewilderment. IV Macklin was playing jacks. He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed "M" so it was all the same. Mitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty. He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger. After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer. "Hello?" Elliot Macklin said. Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the phone instead of his wife. "Can you speak freely, doctor?" Mitchell asked. "Of course," the mathematician said. "I can talk fine." "I mean, are you alone?" "Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give me anything, though." "Good boy," the biologist said. "Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son. I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me, don't you?" There was a slight hesitation. "Sure," Macklin said, "if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?" "But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if I could have some reason for not telling you the truth." "I suppose so," Macklin said humbly. "You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to have time to think about." "If you say so." "Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those worries just as you got rid of the others?" Mitchell asked. "I guess I'd like that," the mathematician replied. "Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't you?" "No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me back where I was instead of helping me more?" "I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!" "If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is watching me pretty close." "That's alright," Mitchell said quickly. "You can bring along Colonel Carson." "But he won't like you fixing me up more." "But he can't stop me! Not if you want me to do it. Now listen to me—I want you to come right on over here, El." "If you say so," Macklin said uncertainly.

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Why do they want Macklin specifically to be the test subject?

61228_GH2KIWTI_1

61228_GH2KIWTI

Gutenberg

The Big Headache

1972.0

Harmon, Jim

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Short stories; Experiments -- Fiction; PS

THE BIG HEADACHE BY JIM HARMON What's the principal cause of headaches? Why, having a head, of course! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I "Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment?" Ferris asked eagerly. "How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that repatriated fullback." Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down." "I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research." "When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches." Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider—?" "No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself." " Our discovery," Mitchell said politely. "That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine." "You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields," Mitchell said. "But now Macklin—" Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets. For the past seven years Macklin—who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin . The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health. Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus. Ferris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly. "Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?" Ferris demanded, pausing in mid-stride. "I imagine he will," Mitchell said. "Macklin's always seemed a decent enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees meetings." "He's always treated me like dirt," Ferris said heatedly. "Everyone on this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in their smug faces." Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of scientific detachment. There came a discreet knock on the door. "Please come in," Mitchell said. Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell suspected that that was his intention. He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. "Good of you to ask me over, Steven." Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. "How have you been, Harold?" Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. "Fine, thank you, doctor." Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. "Now what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know." Mitchell moved around the desk casually. "Actually, Doctor, we haven't the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an element of risk." The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. "Now you have me intrigued. What is it all about?" "Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "That's right, Steven. Migraine." "That must be terrible," Ferris said. "All your fine reputation and lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing agony begins, can it?" "No, Harold, it isn't," Macklin admitted. "What does your project have to do with my headaches?" "Doctor," Mitchell said, "what would you say the most common complaint of man is?" "I would have said the common cold," Macklin replied, "but I suppose from what you have said you mean headaches." "Headaches," Mitchell agreed. "Everybody has them at some time in his life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by their headaches." "Yes," Macklin said. "But think," Ferris interjected, "what a boon it would be if everyone could be cured of headaches forever by one simple injection." "I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it would please about everybody else." "Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular pains," Mitchell said. "I see. Are you two saying you have such a shot? Can you cure headaches?" "We think we can," Ferris said. "How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?" Macklin asked. "I know that much about the subject." "There are a number of different causes for headaches—nervous strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors, over-indulgence—but there is one effect of all of this, the one real cause of headaches," Mitchell announced. "We have definitely established this for this first time," Ferris added. "That's fine," Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. "And this effect that produces headaches is?" "The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain," Mitchell said eagerly. "That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a virus that feeds on pituitrin." "That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean the end of the race as well," Macklin said. "In certain areas it is valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels." "The virus," Ferris explained, "can easily be localized and stabilized. A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain." The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. "If this really works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?" He reinserted the pipe. "I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate," Ferris said. "Our discovery will work." "Will work," Macklin said thoughtfully. "The operative word. It hasn't worked then?" "Certainly it has," Ferris said. "On rats, on chimps...." "But not on humans?" Macklin asked. "Not yet," Mitchell admitted. "Well," Macklin said. "Well." He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm. "Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors from the Army." "We want you," Ferris told him. Macklin coughed. "I don't want to overestimate my value but the government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this project. My wife would like it even less." Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him mouthing the word yellow . "Doctor," Mitchell said quickly, "I know it's a tremendous favor to ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem. Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our studies we can get no more financial backing. We should run a large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that. We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our resources." "I'm tempted," Macklin said hesitantly, "but the answer is go. I mean ' no '. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to others to take the rest—the risk, I mean." Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. "I really would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh." Ferris smiled. "Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've heard some say they preferred the migraine." Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to tend it in a worn leather case. "Tell me," he said, "what is the worst that could happen to me?" "Low blood pressure," Ferris said. "That's not so bad," Macklin said. "How low can it get?" "When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point," Mitchell said. A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. "Is there much risk of that?" "Practically none," Mitchell said. "We have to give you the worst possibilities. All our test animals survived and seem perfectly happy and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong." Macklin held his head in both hands. "Why did you two select me ?" "You're an important man, doctor," Ferris said. "Nobody would care if Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic migraine. You do." "Yes, I do," Macklin said. "Very well. Go ahead. Give me your injection." Mitchell cleared his throat. "Are you positive, doctor?" he asked uncertainly. "Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over." "No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now." "There's a simple release," Ferris said smoothly. Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen. II "Ferris!" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him. "Right here," the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work table, penciling notes. "I've been expecting you." "Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the newspapers," Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the folded paper. "On the contrary, I should and I did," Ferris answered. "We wanted something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is." "Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!" "Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy, with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces." "It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum." "But—" The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections. Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient. "It's Macklin's wife," Ferris said. "Do you want to talk to her? I'm no good with hysterical women." "Hysterical?" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone. "Hello?" Mitchell said reluctantly. "Mrs. Macklin?" "You are the other one," the clear feminine voice said. "Your name is Mitchell." She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell thought. "That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's associate." "Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?" "What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said sharply. "I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband heroin." "That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?" "The—trance he's in now." "Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off by this time." "Most known narcotics," she admitted, "but evidently you have discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?" "Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are calmer." Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. "What could be wrong with Macklin?" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone. Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. "Let's have a look at the test animals." Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus, was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire, worrying the lock on the cage. "Jerry is a great deal more active than Dean," Mitchell said. "Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either." They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats, Bud and Lou, much the same. "I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood," Mitchell ventured. "Iron deficiency anemia?" "Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin." "There's nothing wrong with him," Ferris snapped. "He's probably just trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!" Macklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in aqua-tinted aluminum. Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed dum-de-de-dum-dum-dum . As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious. The door unlatched and swung back. "Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said quickly, "I'm sure we can help if there is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr. Mitchell." "You had certainly better help him, gentlemen." She stood out of the doorway for them to pass. Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline. The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them. "You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized injection," he said. It wasn't a question. "I don't like that 'unauthorized'," Ferris snapped. The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted a heavy eyebrow. "No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to treat illnesses?" "We weren't treating an illness," Mitchell said. "We were discovering a method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?" The colonel smiled thinly. "Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him." Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man. "Can we see him?" Mitchell asked. "Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be just as well. We have laws to cover that." The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room. Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to his home surroundings. On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect carpet. The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the scrupulously clean rug. "What's wrong with him, Sidney?" the other officer asked the doctor. "Not a thing," Sidney said. "He's the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson." "But—" Colonel Carson protested. "Oh, he's changed all right," the Army doctor answered. "He's not the same man as he used to be." "How is he different?" Mitchell demanded. The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. "He used to be a mathematical genius." "And now?" Mitchell said impatiently. "Now he is a moron," the medic said. III Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor mumbled he had a report to make. Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each other. "What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?" Mitchell asked. "Not an idiot," Colonel Carson corrected primly. "Dr. Macklin is a moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid." "I'm not so dumb," Macklin said defensively. "I beg your pardon, sir," Carson said. "I didn't intend any offense. But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you, your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron." "That's just on book learning," Macklin said. "There's a lot you learn in life that you don't get out of books, son." "I'm confident that's true, sir," Colonel Carson said. He turned to the two biologists. "Perhaps we had better speak outside." "But—" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. "Very well. Let's step into the hall." Ferris followed them docilely. "What have you done to him?" the colonel asked straightforwardly. "We merely cured him of his headaches," Mitchell said. "How?" Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus. "You mean," the Army officer said levelly "you have infected him with some kind of a disease to rot his brain?" "No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make him understand." "All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if he had been kicked in the head by a mule," Colonel Carson said. "I think I can explain," Ferris interrupted. "You can?" Mitchell said. Ferris nodded. "We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain cells to function properly." "Why won't they function?" Carson roared. "They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin," Ferris explained. "The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying." The colonel yelled. Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct. The colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides. "I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly once in a human race." "Just a moment," Mitchell interrupted, "we can cure Macklin." "You can ?" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees. "Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary." "Good!" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the knees. "Just you wait a second now, boys," Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning in the doorway, holding his pipe. "I've been listening to what you've been saying and I don't like it." "What do you mean you don't like it?" Carson demanded. He added, "Sir?" "I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be." "Yes, doctor," Mitchell said eagerly, "just as you used to be." " With my headaches, like before?" Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to frame an answer. "Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is a dismal failure." "I wouldn't go that far," Ferris remarked cheerfully. Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw Macklin slowly shaking his head. "No, sir!" the mathematician said. "I shall not go back to my original state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying, worrying." "You mean wondering," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing. How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say, what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?" Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it. "That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him," Mitchell said. "It's not his decision to make," the colonel said. "He's an idiot now." "No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't think you can." "No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state." The colonel looked momentarily glum that it wasn't. Mitchell looked back at Macklin. "Where did his wife get to, Colonel? I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions for himself. Perhaps she could influence him." "Maybe," the colonel said. "Let's find her." They found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached. "Mrs. Macklin," the colonel began, "these gentlemen believe they can cure your husband of his present condition." "Really?" she said. "Did you speak to Elliot about that?" "Y-yes," Colonel Carson said, "but he's not himself. He refused the treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence." She nodded. "If those are his wishes, I can't go against them." "But Mrs. Macklin!" Mitchell protested. "You will have to get a court order overruling your husband's wishes." She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. "That was my original thought. But I've redecided." "Redecided!" Carson burst out almost hysterically. "Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again, where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy now. Like a child, but happy." "Mrs. Macklin," the Army man said levelly, "if you don't help us restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order declaring him incompetent." "But he is not! Legally, I mean," the woman stormed. "Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin to sanity." "I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner," she said. The colonel looked smug. "Why not?" "Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is involved." "There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—" "It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority." "I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment there is no chance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell interjected. Her mouth grew petulant. "I don't care. I would rather have a live husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him comfortable...." Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led him back into the hall. "I'm no psychiatrist," Mitchell said, "but I think she wants Macklin stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life, and now she can dominate him completely." "What is she? A monster?" the Army officer muttered. "No," Mitchell said. "She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous of her husband's genius." "Maybe," Carson said. "I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk." "I'll go with you," Ferris said. Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist. Carson squinted. "Any particular reason, doctor?" "To celebrate," Ferris said. The colonel shrugged. "That's as good a reason as any." On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in bewilderment. IV Macklin was playing jacks. He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed "M" so it was all the same. Mitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty. He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger. After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer. "Hello?" Elliot Macklin said. Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the phone instead of his wife. "Can you speak freely, doctor?" Mitchell asked. "Of course," the mathematician said. "I can talk fine." "I mean, are you alone?" "Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give me anything, though." "Good boy," the biologist said. "Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son. I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me, don't you?" There was a slight hesitation. "Sure," Macklin said, "if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?" "But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if I could have some reason for not telling you the truth." "I suppose so," Macklin said humbly. "You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to have time to think about." "If you say so." "Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those worries just as you got rid of the others?" Mitchell asked. "I guess I'd like that," the mathematician replied. "Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't you?" "No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me back where I was instead of helping me more?" "I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!" "If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is watching me pretty close." "That's alright," Mitchell said quickly. "You can bring along Colonel Carson." "But he won't like you fixing me up more." "But he can't stop me! Not if you want me to do it. Now listen to me—I want you to come right on over here, El." "If you say so," Macklin said uncertainly.

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How would the shot theoretically cure headaches?

61228_GH2KIWTI_2

61228_GH2KIWTI

Gutenberg

The Big Headache

1972.0

Harmon, Jim

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Short stories; Experiments -- Fiction; PS

THE BIG HEADACHE BY JIM HARMON What's the principal cause of headaches? Why, having a head, of course! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I "Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment?" Ferris asked eagerly. "How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that repatriated fullback." Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down." "I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research." "When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches." Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider—?" "No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself." " Our discovery," Mitchell said politely. "That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine." "You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields," Mitchell said. "But now Macklin—" Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets. For the past seven years Macklin—who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin . The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health. Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus. Ferris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly. "Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?" Ferris demanded, pausing in mid-stride. "I imagine he will," Mitchell said. "Macklin's always seemed a decent enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees meetings." "He's always treated me like dirt," Ferris said heatedly. "Everyone on this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in their smug faces." Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of scientific detachment. There came a discreet knock on the door. "Please come in," Mitchell said. Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell suspected that that was his intention. He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. "Good of you to ask me over, Steven." Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. "How have you been, Harold?" Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. "Fine, thank you, doctor." Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. "Now what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know." Mitchell moved around the desk casually. "Actually, Doctor, we haven't the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an element of risk." The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. "Now you have me intrigued. What is it all about?" "Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "That's right, Steven. Migraine." "That must be terrible," Ferris said. "All your fine reputation and lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing agony begins, can it?" "No, Harold, it isn't," Macklin admitted. "What does your project have to do with my headaches?" "Doctor," Mitchell said, "what would you say the most common complaint of man is?" "I would have said the common cold," Macklin replied, "but I suppose from what you have said you mean headaches." "Headaches," Mitchell agreed. "Everybody has them at some time in his life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by their headaches." "Yes," Macklin said. "But think," Ferris interjected, "what a boon it would be if everyone could be cured of headaches forever by one simple injection." "I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it would please about everybody else." "Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular pains," Mitchell said. "I see. Are you two saying you have such a shot? Can you cure headaches?" "We think we can," Ferris said. "How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?" Macklin asked. "I know that much about the subject." "There are a number of different causes for headaches—nervous strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors, over-indulgence—but there is one effect of all of this, the one real cause of headaches," Mitchell announced. "We have definitely established this for this first time," Ferris added. "That's fine," Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. "And this effect that produces headaches is?" "The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain," Mitchell said eagerly. "That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a virus that feeds on pituitrin." "That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean the end of the race as well," Macklin said. "In certain areas it is valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels." "The virus," Ferris explained, "can easily be localized and stabilized. A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain." The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. "If this really works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?" He reinserted the pipe. "I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate," Ferris said. "Our discovery will work." "Will work," Macklin said thoughtfully. "The operative word. It hasn't worked then?" "Certainly it has," Ferris said. "On rats, on chimps...." "But not on humans?" Macklin asked. "Not yet," Mitchell admitted. "Well," Macklin said. "Well." He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm. "Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors from the Army." "We want you," Ferris told him. Macklin coughed. "I don't want to overestimate my value but the government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this project. My wife would like it even less." Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him mouthing the word yellow . "Doctor," Mitchell said quickly, "I know it's a tremendous favor to ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem. Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our studies we can get no more financial backing. We should run a large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that. We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our resources." "I'm tempted," Macklin said hesitantly, "but the answer is go. I mean ' no '. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to others to take the rest—the risk, I mean." Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. "I really would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh." Ferris smiled. "Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've heard some say they preferred the migraine." Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to tend it in a worn leather case. "Tell me," he said, "what is the worst that could happen to me?" "Low blood pressure," Ferris said. "That's not so bad," Macklin said. "How low can it get?" "When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point," Mitchell said. A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. "Is there much risk of that?" "Practically none," Mitchell said. "We have to give you the worst possibilities. All our test animals survived and seem perfectly happy and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong." Macklin held his head in both hands. "Why did you two select me ?" "You're an important man, doctor," Ferris said. "Nobody would care if Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic migraine. You do." "Yes, I do," Macklin said. "Very well. Go ahead. Give me your injection." Mitchell cleared his throat. "Are you positive, doctor?" he asked uncertainly. "Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over." "No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now." "There's a simple release," Ferris said smoothly. Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen. II "Ferris!" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him. "Right here," the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work table, penciling notes. "I've been expecting you." "Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the newspapers," Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the folded paper. "On the contrary, I should and I did," Ferris answered. "We wanted something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is." "Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!" "Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy, with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces." "It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum." "But—" The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections. Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient. "It's Macklin's wife," Ferris said. "Do you want to talk to her? I'm no good with hysterical women." "Hysterical?" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone. "Hello?" Mitchell said reluctantly. "Mrs. Macklin?" "You are the other one," the clear feminine voice said. "Your name is Mitchell." She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell thought. "That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's associate." "Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?" "What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said sharply. "I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband heroin." "That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?" "The—trance he's in now." "Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off by this time." "Most known narcotics," she admitted, "but evidently you have discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?" "Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are calmer." Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. "What could be wrong with Macklin?" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone. Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. "Let's have a look at the test animals." Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus, was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire, worrying the lock on the cage. "Jerry is a great deal more active than Dean," Mitchell said. "Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either." They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats, Bud and Lou, much the same. "I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood," Mitchell ventured. "Iron deficiency anemia?" "Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin." "There's nothing wrong with him," Ferris snapped. "He's probably just trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!" Macklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in aqua-tinted aluminum. Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed dum-de-de-dum-dum-dum . As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious. The door unlatched and swung back. "Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said quickly, "I'm sure we can help if there is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr. Mitchell." "You had certainly better help him, gentlemen." She stood out of the doorway for them to pass. Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline. The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them. "You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized injection," he said. It wasn't a question. "I don't like that 'unauthorized'," Ferris snapped. The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted a heavy eyebrow. "No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to treat illnesses?" "We weren't treating an illness," Mitchell said. "We were discovering a method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?" The colonel smiled thinly. "Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him." Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man. "Can we see him?" Mitchell asked. "Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be just as well. We have laws to cover that." The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room. Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to his home surroundings. On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect carpet. The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the scrupulously clean rug. "What's wrong with him, Sidney?" the other officer asked the doctor. "Not a thing," Sidney said. "He's the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson." "But—" Colonel Carson protested. "Oh, he's changed all right," the Army doctor answered. "He's not the same man as he used to be." "How is he different?" Mitchell demanded. The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. "He used to be a mathematical genius." "And now?" Mitchell said impatiently. "Now he is a moron," the medic said. III Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor mumbled he had a report to make. Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each other. "What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?" Mitchell asked. "Not an idiot," Colonel Carson corrected primly. "Dr. Macklin is a moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid." "I'm not so dumb," Macklin said defensively. "I beg your pardon, sir," Carson said. "I didn't intend any offense. But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you, your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron." "That's just on book learning," Macklin said. "There's a lot you learn in life that you don't get out of books, son." "I'm confident that's true, sir," Colonel Carson said. He turned to the two biologists. "Perhaps we had better speak outside." "But—" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. "Very well. Let's step into the hall." Ferris followed them docilely. "What have you done to him?" the colonel asked straightforwardly. "We merely cured him of his headaches," Mitchell said. "How?" Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus. "You mean," the Army officer said levelly "you have infected him with some kind of a disease to rot his brain?" "No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make him understand." "All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if he had been kicked in the head by a mule," Colonel Carson said. "I think I can explain," Ferris interrupted. "You can?" Mitchell said. Ferris nodded. "We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain cells to function properly." "Why won't they function?" Carson roared. "They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin," Ferris explained. "The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying." The colonel yelled. Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct. The colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides. "I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly once in a human race." "Just a moment," Mitchell interrupted, "we can cure Macklin." "You can ?" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees. "Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary." "Good!" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the knees. "Just you wait a second now, boys," Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning in the doorway, holding his pipe. "I've been listening to what you've been saying and I don't like it." "What do you mean you don't like it?" Carson demanded. He added, "Sir?" "I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be." "Yes, doctor," Mitchell said eagerly, "just as you used to be." " With my headaches, like before?" Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to frame an answer. "Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is a dismal failure." "I wouldn't go that far," Ferris remarked cheerfully. Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw Macklin slowly shaking his head. "No, sir!" the mathematician said. "I shall not go back to my original state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying, worrying." "You mean wondering," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing. How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say, what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?" Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it. "That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him," Mitchell said. "It's not his decision to make," the colonel said. "He's an idiot now." "No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't think you can." "No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state." The colonel looked momentarily glum that it wasn't. Mitchell looked back at Macklin. "Where did his wife get to, Colonel? I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions for himself. Perhaps she could influence him." "Maybe," the colonel said. "Let's find her." They found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached. "Mrs. Macklin," the colonel began, "these gentlemen believe they can cure your husband of his present condition." "Really?" she said. "Did you speak to Elliot about that?" "Y-yes," Colonel Carson said, "but he's not himself. He refused the treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence." She nodded. "If those are his wishes, I can't go against them." "But Mrs. Macklin!" Mitchell protested. "You will have to get a court order overruling your husband's wishes." She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. "That was my original thought. But I've redecided." "Redecided!" Carson burst out almost hysterically. "Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again, where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy now. Like a child, but happy." "Mrs. Macklin," the Army man said levelly, "if you don't help us restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order declaring him incompetent." "But he is not! Legally, I mean," the woman stormed. "Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin to sanity." "I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner," she said. The colonel looked smug. "Why not?" "Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is involved." "There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—" "It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority." "I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment there is no chance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell interjected. Her mouth grew petulant. "I don't care. I would rather have a live husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him comfortable...." Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led him back into the hall. "I'm no psychiatrist," Mitchell said, "but I think she wants Macklin stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life, and now she can dominate him completely." "What is she? A monster?" the Army officer muttered. "No," Mitchell said. "She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous of her husband's genius." "Maybe," Carson said. "I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk." "I'll go with you," Ferris said. Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist. Carson squinted. "Any particular reason, doctor?" "To celebrate," Ferris said. The colonel shrugged. "That's as good a reason as any." On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in bewilderment. IV Macklin was playing jacks. He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed "M" so it was all the same. Mitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty. He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger. After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer. "Hello?" Elliot Macklin said. Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the phone instead of his wife. "Can you speak freely, doctor?" Mitchell asked. "Of course," the mathematician said. "I can talk fine." "I mean, are you alone?" "Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give me anything, though." "Good boy," the biologist said. "Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son. I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me, don't you?" There was a slight hesitation. "Sure," Macklin said, "if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?" "But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if I could have some reason for not telling you the truth." "I suppose so," Macklin said humbly. "You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to have time to think about." "If you say so." "Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those worries just as you got rid of the others?" Mitchell asked. "I guess I'd like that," the mathematician replied. "Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't you?" "No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me back where I was instead of helping me more?" "I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!" "If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is watching me pretty close." "That's alright," Mitchell said quickly. "You can bring along Colonel Carson." "But he won't like you fixing me up more." "But he can't stop me! Not if you want me to do it. Now listen to me—I want you to come right on over here, El." "If you say so," Macklin said uncertainly.

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Why is Macklin's reaction to the shot alarming?

61228_GH2KIWTI_3

61228_GH2KIWTI

Gutenberg

The Big Headache

1972.0

Harmon, Jim

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Short stories; Experiments -- Fiction; PS

THE BIG HEADACHE BY JIM HARMON What's the principal cause of headaches? Why, having a head, of course! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I "Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment?" Ferris asked eagerly. "How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that repatriated fullback." Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down." "I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research." "When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches." Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider—?" "No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself." " Our discovery," Mitchell said politely. "That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine." "You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields," Mitchell said. "But now Macklin—" Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets. For the past seven years Macklin—who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin . The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health. Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus. Ferris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly. "Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?" Ferris demanded, pausing in mid-stride. "I imagine he will," Mitchell said. "Macklin's always seemed a decent enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees meetings." "He's always treated me like dirt," Ferris said heatedly. "Everyone on this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in their smug faces." Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of scientific detachment. There came a discreet knock on the door. "Please come in," Mitchell said. Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell suspected that that was his intention. He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. "Good of you to ask me over, Steven." Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. "How have you been, Harold?" Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. "Fine, thank you, doctor." Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. "Now what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know." Mitchell moved around the desk casually. "Actually, Doctor, we haven't the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an element of risk." The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. "Now you have me intrigued. What is it all about?" "Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "That's right, Steven. Migraine." "That must be terrible," Ferris said. "All your fine reputation and lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing agony begins, can it?" "No, Harold, it isn't," Macklin admitted. "What does your project have to do with my headaches?" "Doctor," Mitchell said, "what would you say the most common complaint of man is?" "I would have said the common cold," Macklin replied, "but I suppose from what you have said you mean headaches." "Headaches," Mitchell agreed. "Everybody has them at some time in his life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by their headaches." "Yes," Macklin said. "But think," Ferris interjected, "what a boon it would be if everyone could be cured of headaches forever by one simple injection." "I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it would please about everybody else." "Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular pains," Mitchell said. "I see. Are you two saying you have such a shot? Can you cure headaches?" "We think we can," Ferris said. "How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?" Macklin asked. "I know that much about the subject." "There are a number of different causes for headaches—nervous strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors, over-indulgence—but there is one effect of all of this, the one real cause of headaches," Mitchell announced. "We have definitely established this for this first time," Ferris added. "That's fine," Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. "And this effect that produces headaches is?" "The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain," Mitchell said eagerly. "That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a virus that feeds on pituitrin." "That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean the end of the race as well," Macklin said. "In certain areas it is valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels." "The virus," Ferris explained, "can easily be localized and stabilized. A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain." The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. "If this really works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?" He reinserted the pipe. "I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate," Ferris said. "Our discovery will work." "Will work," Macklin said thoughtfully. "The operative word. It hasn't worked then?" "Certainly it has," Ferris said. "On rats, on chimps...." "But not on humans?" Macklin asked. "Not yet," Mitchell admitted. "Well," Macklin said. "Well." He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm. "Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors from the Army." "We want you," Ferris told him. Macklin coughed. "I don't want to overestimate my value but the government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this project. My wife would like it even less." Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him mouthing the word yellow . "Doctor," Mitchell said quickly, "I know it's a tremendous favor to ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem. Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our studies we can get no more financial backing. We should run a large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that. We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our resources." "I'm tempted," Macklin said hesitantly, "but the answer is go. I mean ' no '. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to others to take the rest—the risk, I mean." Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. "I really would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh." Ferris smiled. "Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've heard some say they preferred the migraine." Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to tend it in a worn leather case. "Tell me," he said, "what is the worst that could happen to me?" "Low blood pressure," Ferris said. "That's not so bad," Macklin said. "How low can it get?" "When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point," Mitchell said. A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. "Is there much risk of that?" "Practically none," Mitchell said. "We have to give you the worst possibilities. All our test animals survived and seem perfectly happy and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong." Macklin held his head in both hands. "Why did you two select me ?" "You're an important man, doctor," Ferris said. "Nobody would care if Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic migraine. You do." "Yes, I do," Macklin said. "Very well. Go ahead. Give me your injection." Mitchell cleared his throat. "Are you positive, doctor?" he asked uncertainly. "Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over." "No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now." "There's a simple release," Ferris said smoothly. Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen. II "Ferris!" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him. "Right here," the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work table, penciling notes. "I've been expecting you." "Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the newspapers," Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the folded paper. "On the contrary, I should and I did," Ferris answered. "We wanted something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is." "Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!" "Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy, with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces." "It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum." "But—" The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections. Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient. "It's Macklin's wife," Ferris said. "Do you want to talk to her? I'm no good with hysterical women." "Hysterical?" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone. "Hello?" Mitchell said reluctantly. "Mrs. Macklin?" "You are the other one," the clear feminine voice said. "Your name is Mitchell." She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell thought. "That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's associate." "Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?" "What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said sharply. "I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband heroin." "That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?" "The—trance he's in now." "Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off by this time." "Most known narcotics," she admitted, "but evidently you have discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?" "Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are calmer." Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. "What could be wrong with Macklin?" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone. Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. "Let's have a look at the test animals." Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus, was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire, worrying the lock on the cage. "Jerry is a great deal more active than Dean," Mitchell said. "Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either." They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats, Bud and Lou, much the same. "I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood," Mitchell ventured. "Iron deficiency anemia?" "Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin." "There's nothing wrong with him," Ferris snapped. "He's probably just trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!" Macklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in aqua-tinted aluminum. Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed dum-de-de-dum-dum-dum . As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious. The door unlatched and swung back. "Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said quickly, "I'm sure we can help if there is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr. Mitchell." "You had certainly better help him, gentlemen." She stood out of the doorway for them to pass. Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline. The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them. "You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized injection," he said. It wasn't a question. "I don't like that 'unauthorized'," Ferris snapped. The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted a heavy eyebrow. "No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to treat illnesses?" "We weren't treating an illness," Mitchell said. "We were discovering a method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?" The colonel smiled thinly. "Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him." Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man. "Can we see him?" Mitchell asked. "Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be just as well. We have laws to cover that." The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room. Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to his home surroundings. On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect carpet. The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the scrupulously clean rug. "What's wrong with him, Sidney?" the other officer asked the doctor. "Not a thing," Sidney said. "He's the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson." "But—" Colonel Carson protested. "Oh, he's changed all right," the Army doctor answered. "He's not the same man as he used to be." "How is he different?" Mitchell demanded. The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. "He used to be a mathematical genius." "And now?" Mitchell said impatiently. "Now he is a moron," the medic said. III Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor mumbled he had a report to make. Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each other. "What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?" Mitchell asked. "Not an idiot," Colonel Carson corrected primly. "Dr. Macklin is a moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid." "I'm not so dumb," Macklin said defensively. "I beg your pardon, sir," Carson said. "I didn't intend any offense. But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you, your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron." "That's just on book learning," Macklin said. "There's a lot you learn in life that you don't get out of books, son." "I'm confident that's true, sir," Colonel Carson said. He turned to the two biologists. "Perhaps we had better speak outside." "But—" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. "Very well. Let's step into the hall." Ferris followed them docilely. "What have you done to him?" the colonel asked straightforwardly. "We merely cured him of his headaches," Mitchell said. "How?" Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus. "You mean," the Army officer said levelly "you have infected him with some kind of a disease to rot his brain?" "No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make him understand." "All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if he had been kicked in the head by a mule," Colonel Carson said. "I think I can explain," Ferris interrupted. "You can?" Mitchell said. Ferris nodded. "We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain cells to function properly." "Why won't they function?" Carson roared. "They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin," Ferris explained. "The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying." The colonel yelled. Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct. The colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides. "I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly once in a human race." "Just a moment," Mitchell interrupted, "we can cure Macklin." "You can ?" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees. "Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary." "Good!" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the knees. "Just you wait a second now, boys," Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning in the doorway, holding his pipe. "I've been listening to what you've been saying and I don't like it." "What do you mean you don't like it?" Carson demanded. He added, "Sir?" "I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be." "Yes, doctor," Mitchell said eagerly, "just as you used to be." " With my headaches, like before?" Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to frame an answer. "Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is a dismal failure." "I wouldn't go that far," Ferris remarked cheerfully. Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw Macklin slowly shaking his head. "No, sir!" the mathematician said. "I shall not go back to my original state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying, worrying." "You mean wondering," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing. How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say, what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?" Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it. "That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him," Mitchell said. "It's not his decision to make," the colonel said. "He's an idiot now." "No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't think you can." "No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state." The colonel looked momentarily glum that it wasn't. Mitchell looked back at Macklin. "Where did his wife get to, Colonel? I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions for himself. Perhaps she could influence him." "Maybe," the colonel said. "Let's find her." They found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached. "Mrs. Macklin," the colonel began, "these gentlemen believe they can cure your husband of his present condition." "Really?" she said. "Did you speak to Elliot about that?" "Y-yes," Colonel Carson said, "but he's not himself. He refused the treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence." She nodded. "If those are his wishes, I can't go against them." "But Mrs. Macklin!" Mitchell protested. "You will have to get a court order overruling your husband's wishes." She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. "That was my original thought. But I've redecided." "Redecided!" Carson burst out almost hysterically. "Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again, where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy now. Like a child, but happy." "Mrs. Macklin," the Army man said levelly, "if you don't help us restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order declaring him incompetent." "But he is not! Legally, I mean," the woman stormed. "Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin to sanity." "I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner," she said. The colonel looked smug. "Why not?" "Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is involved." "There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—" "It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority." "I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment there is no chance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell interjected. Her mouth grew petulant. "I don't care. I would rather have a live husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him comfortable...." Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led him back into the hall. "I'm no psychiatrist," Mitchell said, "but I think she wants Macklin stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life, and now she can dominate him completely." "What is she? A monster?" the Army officer muttered. "No," Mitchell said. "She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous of her husband's genius." "Maybe," Carson said. "I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk." "I'll go with you," Ferris said. Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist. Carson squinted. "Any particular reason, doctor?" "To celebrate," Ferris said. The colonel shrugged. "That's as good a reason as any." On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in bewilderment. IV Macklin was playing jacks. He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed "M" so it was all the same. Mitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty. He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger. After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer. "Hello?" Elliot Macklin said. Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the phone instead of his wife. "Can you speak freely, doctor?" Mitchell asked. "Of course," the mathematician said. "I can talk fine." "I mean, are you alone?" "Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give me anything, though." "Good boy," the biologist said. "Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son. I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me, don't you?" There was a slight hesitation. "Sure," Macklin said, "if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?" "But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if I could have some reason for not telling you the truth." "I suppose so," Macklin said humbly. "You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to have time to think about." "If you say so." "Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those worries just as you got rid of the others?" Mitchell asked. "I guess I'd like that," the mathematician replied. "Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't you?" "No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me back where I was instead of helping me more?" "I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!" "If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is watching me pretty close." "That's alright," Mitchell said quickly. "You can bring along Colonel Carson." "But he won't like you fixing me up more." "But he can't stop me! Not if you want me to do it. Now listen to me—I want you to come right on over here, El." "If you say so," Macklin said uncertainly.

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Why does the army get involved with the situation?

61228_GH2KIWTI_4

61228_GH2KIWTI

Gutenberg

The Big Headache

1972.0

Harmon, Jim

Science fiction; Scientists -- Fiction; Short stories; Experiments -- Fiction; PS

THE BIG HEADACHE BY JIM HARMON What's the principal cause of headaches? Why, having a head, of course! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I "Do you think we'll have to use force on Macklin to get him to cooperate in the experiment?" Ferris asked eagerly. "How are you going to go about forcing him, Doctor?" Mitchell inquired. "He outweighs you by fifty pounds and you needn't look to me for help against that repatriated fullback." Ferris fingered the collar of his starched lab smock. "Guess I got carried away for a moment. But Macklin is exactly what we need for a quick, dramatic test. We've had it if he turns us down." "I know," Mitchell said, exhaling deeply. "Somehow the men with the money just can't seem to understand basic research. Who would have financed a study of cyclic periods of the hedgehog? Yet the information gained from that study is vital in cancer research." "When we prove our results that should be of enough practical value for anyone. But those crummy trustees didn't even leave us enough for a field test." Ferris scrubbed his thin hand over the bony ridge of his forehead. "I've been worrying so much about this I've got the ancestor of all headaches." Mitchell's blue eyes narrowed and his boyish face took on an expression of demonic intensity. "Ferris, would you consider—?" "No!" the smaller man yelled. "You can't expect me to violate professional ethics and test my own discovery on myself." " Our discovery," Mitchell said politely. "That's what I meant to say. But I'm not sure it would be completely ethical with even a discovery partly mine." "You're right. Besides who cares if you or I are cured of headaches? Our reputations don't go outside our own fields," Mitchell said. "But now Macklin—" Elliot Macklin had inherited the reputation of the late Albert Einstein in the popular mind. He was the man people thought of when the word "mathematician" or even "scientist" was mentioned. No one knew whether his Theory of Spatium was correct or not because no one had yet been able to frame an argument with it. Macklin was in his early fifties but looked in his late thirties, with the build of a football player. The government took up a lot of his time using him as the symbol of the Ideal Scientist to help recruit Science and Engineering Cadets. For the past seven years Macklin—who was the Advanced Studies Department of Firestone University—had been involved in devising a faster-than-light drive to help the Army reach Pluto and eventually the nearer stars. Mitchell had overheard two coeds talking and so knew that the project was nearing completion. If so, it was a case of Ad astra per aspirin . The only thing that could delay the project was Macklin's health. Despite his impressive body, some years before he had suffered a mild stroke ... or at least a vascular spasm of a cerebral artery. It was known that he suffered from the vilest variety of migraine. A cycle of the headaches had caused him to be absent from his classes for several weeks, and there were an unusual number of military uniforms seen around the campus. Ferris paced off the tidy measurements of the office outside the laboratory in the biology building. Mitchell sat slumped in the chair behind the blond imitation wood desk, watching him disinterestedly. "Do you suppose the Great Man will actually show up?" Ferris demanded, pausing in mid-stride. "I imagine he will," Mitchell said. "Macklin's always seemed a decent enough fellow when I've had lunch with him or seen him at the trustees meetings." "He's always treated me like dirt," Ferris said heatedly. "Everyone on this campus treats biologists like dirt. Sometimes I want to bash in their smug faces." Sometimes, Mitchell reflected, Ferris displayed a certain lack of scientific detachment. There came a discreet knock on the door. "Please come in," Mitchell said. Elliot Macklin entered in a cloud of pipe smoke and a tweed jacket. He looked more than a little like a postgraduate student, and Mitchell suspected that that was his intention. He shook hands warmly with Mitchell. "Good of you to ask me over, Steven." Macklin threw a big arm across Ferris' shoulders. "How have you been, Harold?" Ferris' face flickered between pink and white. "Fine, thank you, doctor." Macklin dropped on the edge of the desk and adjusted his pipe. "Now what's this about you wanting my help on something? And please keep the explanation simple. Biology isn't my field, you know." Mitchell moved around the desk casually. "Actually, Doctor, we haven't the right to ask this of a man of your importance. There may be an element of risk." The mathematician clamped onto his pipe and showed his teeth. "Now you have me intrigued. What is it all about?" "Doctor, we understand you have severe headaches," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "That's right, Steven. Migraine." "That must be terrible," Ferris said. "All your fine reputation and lavish salary can't be much consolation when that ripping, tearing agony begins, can it?" "No, Harold, it isn't," Macklin admitted. "What does your project have to do with my headaches?" "Doctor," Mitchell said, "what would you say the most common complaint of man is?" "I would have said the common cold," Macklin replied, "but I suppose from what you have said you mean headaches." "Headaches," Mitchell agreed. "Everybody has them at some time in his life. Some people have them every day. Some are driven to suicide by their headaches." "Yes," Macklin said. "But think," Ferris interjected, "what a boon it would be if everyone could be cured of headaches forever by one simple injection." "I don't suppose the manufacturers of aspirin would like you. But it would please about everybody else." "Aspirins would still be used to reduce fever and relieve muscular pains," Mitchell said. "I see. Are you two saying you have such a shot? Can you cure headaches?" "We think we can," Ferris said. "How can you have a specific for a number of different causes?" Macklin asked. "I know that much about the subject." "There are a number of different causes for headaches—nervous strain, fatigue, physical diseases from kidney complaints to tumors, over-indulgence—but there is one effect of all of this, the one real cause of headaches," Mitchell announced. "We have definitely established this for this first time," Ferris added. "That's fine," Macklin said, sucking on his pipe. "And this effect that produces headaches is?" "The pressure effect caused by pituitrin in the brain," Mitchell said eagerly. "That is, the constriction of blood vessels in the telencephalon section of the frontal lobes. It's caused by an over-production of the pituitary gland. We have artificially bred a virus that feeds on pituitrin." "That may mean the end of headaches, but I would think it would mean the end of the race as well," Macklin said. "In certain areas it is valuable to have a constriction of blood vessels." "The virus," Ferris explained, "can easily be localized and stabilized. A colony of virus in the brain cells will relax the cerebral vessels—and only the cerebral vessels—so that the cerebrospinal fluid doesn't create pressure in the cavities of the brain." The mathematician took the pipe out of his mouth. "If this really works, I could stop using that damned gynergen, couldn't I? The stuff makes me violently sick to my stomach. But it's better than the migraine. How should I go about removing my curse?" He reinserted the pipe. "I assure you, you can forget ergotamine tartrate," Ferris said. "Our discovery will work." "Will work," Macklin said thoughtfully. "The operative word. It hasn't worked then?" "Certainly it has," Ferris said. "On rats, on chimps...." "But not on humans?" Macklin asked. "Not yet," Mitchell admitted. "Well," Macklin said. "Well." He thumped pipe ashes out into his palm. "Certainly you can get volunteers. Convicts. Conscientious objectors from the Army." "We want you," Ferris told him. Macklin coughed. "I don't want to overestimate my value but the government wouldn't like it very well if I died in the middle of this project. My wife would like it even less." Ferris turned his back on the mathematician. Mitchell could see him mouthing the word yellow . "Doctor," Mitchell said quickly, "I know it's a tremendous favor to ask of a man of your position. But you can understand our problem. Unless we can produce quick, conclusive and dramatic proof of our studies we can get no more financial backing. We should run a large-scale field test. But we haven't the time or money for that. We can cure the headaches of one person and that's the limit of our resources." "I'm tempted," Macklin said hesitantly, "but the answer is go. I mean ' no '. I'd like to help you out, but I'm afraid I owe too much to others to take the rest—the risk, I mean." Macklin ran the back of his knuckles across his forehead. "I really would like to take you up on it. When I start making slips like that it means another attack of migraine. The drilling, grinding pain through my temples and around my eyeballs. The flashes of light, the rioting pools of color playing on the back of my lids. Ugh." Ferris smiled. "Gynergen makes you sick, does it, doctor? Produces nausea, eh? The pain of that turns you almost wrong side out, doesn't it? You aren't much better off with it than without, are you? I've heard some say they preferred the migraine." Macklin carefully arranged his pipe along with the tools he used to tend it in a worn leather case. "Tell me," he said, "what is the worst that could happen to me?" "Low blood pressure," Ferris said. "That's not so bad," Macklin said. "How low can it get?" "When your heart stops, your blood pressure goes to its lowest point," Mitchell said. A dew of perspiration had bloomed on Macklin's forehead. "Is there much risk of that?" "Practically none," Mitchell said. "We have to give you the worst possibilities. All our test animals survived and seem perfectly happy and contented. As I said, the virus is self-stabilizing. Ferris and I are confident that there is no danger.... But we may be wrong." Macklin held his head in both hands. "Why did you two select me ?" "You're an important man, doctor," Ferris said. "Nobody would care if Mitchell or I cured ourselves of headaches—they might not even believe us if we said we did. But the proper authorities will believe a man of your reputation. Besides, neither of us has a record of chronic migraine. You do." "Yes, I do," Macklin said. "Very well. Go ahead. Give me your injection." Mitchell cleared his throat. "Are you positive, doctor?" he asked uncertainly. "Perhaps you would like a few days to think it over." "No! I'm ready. Go ahead, right now." "There's a simple release," Ferris said smoothly. Macklin groped in his pocket for a pen. II "Ferris!" Mitchell yelled, slamming the laboratory door behind him. "Right here," the small man said briskly. He was sitting at a work table, penciling notes. "I've been expecting you." "Doctor—Harold—you shouldn't have given this story to the newspapers," Mitchell said. He tapped the back of his hand against the folded paper. "On the contrary, I should and I did," Ferris answered. "We wanted something dramatic to show to the trustees and here it is." "Yes, we wanted to show our proof to the trustees—but not broadcast unverified results to the press. It's too early for that!" "Don't be so stuffy and conservative, Mitchell! Macklin's cured, isn't he? By established periodic cycle he should be suffering hell right now, shouldn't he? But thanks to our treatment he is perfectly happy, with no unfortunate side effects such as gynergen produces." "It's a significant test case, yes. But not enough to go to the newspapers with. If it wasn't enough to go to the press with, it wasn't enough to try and breach the trustees with. Don't you see? The public will hand down a ukase demanding our virus, just as they demanded the Salk vaccine and the Grennell serum." "But—" The shrill call of the telephone interrupted Mitchell's objections. Ferris excused himself and crossed to the instrument. He answered it and listened for a moment, his face growing impatient. "It's Macklin's wife," Ferris said. "Do you want to talk to her? I'm no good with hysterical women." "Hysterical?" Mitchell muttered in alarm and went to the phone. "Hello?" Mitchell said reluctantly. "Mrs. Macklin?" "You are the other one," the clear feminine voice said. "Your name is Mitchell." She couldn't have sounded calmer or more self-possessed, Mitchell thought. "That's right, Mrs. Macklin. I'm Dr. Steven Mitchell, Dr. Ferris's associate." "Do you have a license to dispense narcotics?" "What do you mean by that, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said sharply. "I used to be a nurse, Dr. Mitchell. I know you've given my husband heroin." "That's absurd. What makes you think a thing like that?" "The—trance he's in now." "Now, Mrs. Macklin. Neither Dr. Ferris or myself have been near your husband for a full day. The effects of a narcotic would have worn off by this time." "Most known narcotics," she admitted, "but evidently you have discovered something new. Is it so expensive to refine you and Ferris have to recruit new customers to keep yourselves supplied?" "Mrs. Macklin! I think I had better talk to you later when you are calmer." Mitchell dropped the receiver heavily. "What could be wrong with Macklin?" he asked without removing his hand from the telephone. Ferris frowned, making quotation marks above his nose. "Let's have a look at the test animals." Together they marched over to the cages and peered through the honeycomb pattern of the wire. The test chimp, Dean, was sitting peacefully in a corner scratching under his arms with the back of his knuckles. Jerry, their control in the experiment, who was practically Dean's twin except that he had received no injection of the E-M Virus, was stomping up and down punching his fingers through the wire, worrying the lock on the cage. "Jerry is a great deal more active than Dean," Mitchell said. "Yes, but Dean isn't sick. He just doesn't seem to have as much nervous energy to burn up. Nothing wrong with his thyroid either." They went to the smaller cages. They found the situation with the rats, Bud and Lou, much the same. "I don't know. Maybe they just have tired blood," Mitchell ventured. "Iron deficiency anemia?" "Never mind, doctor. It was a form of humor. I think we had better see exactly what is wrong with Elliot Macklin." "There's nothing wrong with him," Ferris snapped. "He's probably just trying to get us in trouble, the ingrate!" Macklin's traditional ranch house was small but attractive in aqua-tinted aluminum. Under Mitchell's thumb the bell chimbed dum-de-de-dum-dum-dum . As they waited Mitchell glanced at Ferris. He seemed completely undisturbed, perhaps slightly curious. The door unlatched and swung back. "Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell said quickly, "I'm sure we can help if there is anything wrong with your husband. This is Dr. Ferris. I am Dr. Mitchell." "You had certainly better help him, gentlemen." She stood out of the doorway for them to pass. Mrs. Macklin was an attractive brunette in her late thirties. She wore an expensive yellow dress. And she had a sharp-cornered jawline. The Army officer came out into the hall to meet them. "You are the gentlemen who gave Dr. Macklin the unauthorized injection," he said. It wasn't a question. "I don't like that 'unauthorized'," Ferris snapped. The colonel—Mitchell spotted the eagles on his green tunic—lifted a heavy eyebrow. "No? Are you medical doctors? Are you authorized to treat illnesses?" "We weren't treating an illness," Mitchell said. "We were discovering a method of treatment. What concern is it of yours?" The colonel smiled thinly. "Dr. Macklin is my concern. And everything that happens to him. The Army doesn't like what you have done to him." Mitchell wondered desperately just what they had done to the man. "Can we see him?" Mitchell asked. "Why not? You can't do much worse than murder him now. That might be just as well. We have laws to cover that." The colonel led them into the comfortable, over-feminine living room. Macklin sat in an easy chair draped in embroidery, smoking. Mitchell suddenly realized Macklin used a pipe as a form of masculine protest to his home surroundings. On the coffee table in front of Macklin were some odd-shaped building blocks such as were used in nursery schools. A second uniformed man—another colonel but with the snake-entwined staff of the medical corps in his insignia—was kneeling at the table on the marble-effect carpet. The Army physician stood up and brushed his knees, undusted from the scrupulously clean rug. "What's wrong with him, Sidney?" the other officer asked the doctor. "Not a thing," Sidney said. "He's the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted man I've ever examined, Carson." "But—" Colonel Carson protested. "Oh, he's changed all right," the Army doctor answered. "He's not the same man as he used to be." "How is he different?" Mitchell demanded. The medic examined Mitchell and Ferris critically before answering. "He used to be a mathematical genius." "And now?" Mitchell said impatiently. "Now he is a moron," the medic said. III Mitchell tried to stop Colonel Sidney as he went past, but the doctor mumbled he had a report to make. Mitchell and Ferris stared at Colonel Carson and Macklin and at each other. "What did he mean, Macklin is an idiot?" Mitchell asked. "Not an idiot," Colonel Carson corrected primly. "Dr. Macklin is a moron. He's legally responsible, but he's extremely stupid." "I'm not so dumb," Macklin said defensively. "I beg your pardon, sir," Carson said. "I didn't intend any offense. But according to all the standard intelligence tests we have given you, your clinical intelligence quotient is that of a moron." "That's just on book learning," Macklin said. "There's a lot you learn in life that you don't get out of books, son." "I'm confident that's true, sir," Colonel Carson said. He turned to the two biologists. "Perhaps we had better speak outside." "But—" Mitchell said, impatient to examine Macklin for himself. "Very well. Let's step into the hall." Ferris followed them docilely. "What have you done to him?" the colonel asked straightforwardly. "We merely cured him of his headaches," Mitchell said. "How?" Mitchell did his best to explain the F-M Virus. "You mean," the Army officer said levelly "you have infected him with some kind of a disease to rot his brain?" "No, no! Could I talk to the other man, the doctor? Maybe I can make him understand." "All I want to know is why Elliot Macklin has been made as simple as if he had been kicked in the head by a mule," Colonel Carson said. "I think I can explain," Ferris interrupted. "You can?" Mitchell said. Ferris nodded. "We made a slight miscalculation. It appears as if the virus colony overcontrols the supply of posterior pituitary extract in the cerebrum. It isn't more than necessary to stop headaches. But that necessary amount of control to stop pain is too much to allow the brain cells to function properly." "Why won't they function?" Carson roared. "They don't get enough food—blood, oxygen, hemoglobin," Ferris explained. "The cerebral vessels don't contract enough to pump the blood through the brain as fast and as hard as is needed. The brain cells remain sluggish, dormant. Perhaps decaying." The colonel yelled. Mitchell groaned. He was abruptly sure Ferris was correct. The colonel drew himself to attention, fists trembling at his sides. "I'll see you hung for treason! Don't you know what Elliot Macklin means to us? Do you want those filthy Luxemburgians to reach Pluto before we do? Macklin's formula is essential to the FTL engine. You might just as well have blown up Washington, D.C. Better! The capital is replaceable. But the chances of an Elliot Macklin are very nearly once in a human race." "Just a moment," Mitchell interrupted, "we can cure Macklin." "You can ?" Carson said. For a moment Mitchell thought the man was going to clasp his hands and sink to his knees. "Certainly. We have learned to stabilize the virus colonies. We have antitoxin to combat the virus. We had always thought of it as a beneficial parasite, but we can wipe it out if necessary." "Good!" Carson clasped his hands and gave at least slightly at the knees. "Just you wait a second now, boys," Elliot Macklin said. He was leaning in the doorway, holding his pipe. "I've been listening to what you've been saying and I don't like it." "What do you mean you don't like it?" Carson demanded. He added, "Sir?" "I figure you mean to put me back like I used to be." "Yes, doctor," Mitchell said eagerly, "just as you used to be." " With my headaches, like before?" Mitchell coughed into his fist for an instant, to give him time to frame an answer. "Unfortunately, yes. Apparently if your mind functions properly once again you will have the headaches again. Our research is a dismal failure." "I wouldn't go that far," Ferris remarked cheerfully. Mitchell was about to ask his associate what he meant when he saw Macklin slowly shaking his head. "No, sir!" the mathematician said. "I shall not go back to my original state. I can remember what it was like. Always worrying, worrying, worrying." "You mean wondering," Mitchell said. Macklin nodded. "Troubled, anyway. Disturbed by every little thing. How high was up, which infinity was bigger than what infinity—say, what was an infinity anyway? All that sort of schoolboy things. It's peaceful this way. My head doesn't hurt. I've got a good-looking wife and all the money I need. I've got it made. Why worry?" Colonel Carson opened his mouth, then closed it. "That's right, Colonel. There's no use in arguing with him," Mitchell said. "It's not his decision to make," the colonel said. "He's an idiot now." "No, Colonel. As you said, he's a moron. He seems an idiot compared to his former level of intelligence but he's legally responsible. There are millions of morons running around loose in the United States. They can get married, own property, vote, even hold office. Many of them do. You can't force him into being cured.... At least, I don't think you can." "No, I can't. This is hardly a totalitarian state." The colonel looked momentarily glum that it wasn't. Mitchell looked back at Macklin. "Where did his wife get to, Colonel? I don't think that even previously he made too many personal decisions for himself. Perhaps she could influence him." "Maybe," the colonel said. "Let's find her." They found Mrs. Macklin in the dining room, her face at the picture window an attractive silhouette. She turned as the men approached. "Mrs. Macklin," the colonel began, "these gentlemen believe they can cure your husband of his present condition." "Really?" she said. "Did you speak to Elliot about that?" "Y-yes," Colonel Carson said, "but he's not himself. He refused the treatment. He wants to remain in his state of lower intelligence." She nodded. "If those are his wishes, I can't go against them." "But Mrs. Macklin!" Mitchell protested. "You will have to get a court order overruling your husband's wishes." She smoothed an eyebrow with the third finger of her right hand. "That was my original thought. But I've redecided." "Redecided!" Carson burst out almost hysterically. "Yes. I can't go against Elliot's wishes. It would be monstrous to put him back where he would suffer the hell of those headaches once again, where he never had a moment's peace from worry and pressure. He's happy now. Like a child, but happy." "Mrs. Macklin," the Army man said levelly, "if you don't help us restore your husband's mind we will be forced to get a court order declaring him incompetent." "But he is not! Legally, I mean," the woman stormed. "Maybe not. It's a borderline case. But I think any court would give us the edge where restoring the mind of Elliot Macklin was concerned. Once he's certified incompetent, authorities can rule whether Mitchell and Ferris' antitoxin treatment is the best method of restoring Dr. Macklin to sanity." "I doubt very much if the court would rule in that manner," she said. The colonel looked smug. "Why not?" "Because, Colonel, the matter of my husband's health, his very life, is involved." "There is some degree of risk in shock treatments, too. But—" "It isn't quite the same, Colonel. Elliot Macklin has a history of vascular spasm, a mild pseudostroke some years ago. Now you want to give those cerebral arteries back the ability to constrict. To paralyze. To kill. No court would give you that authority." "I suppose there's some chance of that. But without the treatment there is no chance of your husband regaining his right senses, Mrs. Macklin," Mitchell interjected. Her mouth grew petulant. "I don't care. I would rather have a live husband than a dead genius. I can take care of him this way, make him comfortable...." Carson opened his mouth and closed his fist, then relaxed. Mitchell led him back into the hall. "I'm no psychiatrist," Mitchell said, "but I think she wants Macklin stupid. Prefers it that way. She's always dominated his personal life, and now she can dominate him completely." "What is she? A monster?" the Army officer muttered. "No," Mitchell said. "She's an intelligent woman unconsciously jealous of her husband's genius." "Maybe," Carson said. "I don't know. I don't know what the hell to tell the Pentagon. I think I'll go out and get drunk." "I'll go with you," Ferris said. Mitchell glanced sharply at the little biologist. Carson squinted. "Any particular reason, doctor?" "To celebrate," Ferris said. The colonel shrugged. "That's as good a reason as any." On the street, Mitchell watched the two men go off together in bewilderment. IV Macklin was playing jacks. He didn't have a head on his shoulders and he was squatting on a great curving surface that was Spacetime, and his jacks were Earth and Pluto and the rest of the planets. And for a ball he was using a head. Not his head. Mitchell's. Both heads were initialed "M" so it was all the same. Mitchell forced himself to awaken, with some initial difficulty. He lay there, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his heart race, and then convulsively snatched the telephone receiver from the nightstand. He stabbed out a number with a vicious index finger. After a time there came a dull click and a sleepy answer. "Hello?" Elliot Macklin said. Mitchell smiled to himself. He was in luck; Macklin had answered the phone instead of his wife. "Can you speak freely, doctor?" Mitchell asked. "Of course," the mathematician said. "I can talk fine." "I mean, are you alone?" "Oh, you want to know if my wife is around. No, she's asleep. That Army doctor, Colonel Sidney, he gave her a sedative. I wouldn't let him give me anything, though." "Good boy," the biologist said. "Listen, doctor—Elliot—El, old son. I'm not against you like all the others. I don't want to make you go back to all that worrying and thinking and headaches. You believe me, don't you?" There was a slight hesitation. "Sure," Macklin said, "if you say so. Why shouldn't I believe you?" "But there was a hesitation there, El. You worried for just a second if I could have some reason for not telling you the truth." "I suppose so," Macklin said humbly. "You've found yourself worrying—thinking—about a lot of other problems since we left you, haven't you? Maybe not the same kind of scientific problem. But more personal ones, ones you didn't used to have time to think about." "If you say so." "Now, you know it's so. But how would you like to get rid of those worries just as you got rid of the others?" Mitchell asked. "I guess I'd like that," the mathematician replied. "Then come on over to my laboratory. You remember where it's at, don't you?" "No, I—yes, I guess I do. But how do I know you won't try to put me back where I was instead of helping me more?" "I couldn't do that against your wishes. That would be illegal!" "If you say so. But I don't guess I can come anyway. The Army is watching me pretty close." "That's alright," Mitchell said quickly. "You can bring along Colonel Carson." "But he won't like you fixing me up more." "But he can't stop me! Not if you want me to do it. Now listen to me—I want you to come right on over here, El." "If you say so," Macklin said uncertainly.

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Why does Macklin have objections to going back?

61228_GH2KIWTI_5

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

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What is the main conflict at the start?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_1

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

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What happens after the blast?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_2

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/2/4/61242//61242-h//61242-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Why does the fact that Finogenov had a wooden desk sent up to space a point of contention for Winship?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_3

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/1/2/4/61242//61242-h//61242-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

What goes wrong just as Winship makes contact with earth?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_4

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

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What goes wrong with the calking compound?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_5

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

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Why do the Americans need to ask the Russians for help?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_6

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

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What reason would the Russians have to drive the Americans off?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_7

61242_KVDQ6X2A

Gutenberg

The Winning of the Moon

1952.0

Neville, Kris

Short stories; Moon -- Fiction; Cold War -- Fiction; PS; Survival -- Fiction; Science fiction

The Winning of the Moon BY KRIS NEVILLE The enemy was friendly enough. Trouble was—their friendship was as dangerous as their hate! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] General Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was scheduled for the following morning. Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with the three other Americans. Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision. Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base Gagarin. "Will you please request the general to keep us informed on the progress of the countdown?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Help?" " Nyet ," said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. "Count down. Progress. When—boom?" "Is Pinov," came the reply. "Boom! Boom!" said Major Winship in exasperation. "Boom!" said Pinov happily. "When?" "Boom—boom!" said Pinov. "Oh, nuts." Major Winship cut out the circuit. "They've got Pinov on emergency watch this morning," he explained to the other Americans. "The one that doesn't speak English." "He's done it deliberately," said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four Americans. "How are we going to know when it's over?" No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems. Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, "This is a little ridiculous. I'm going to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me." He sat transfixed for several minutes. "Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't tell a thing that's going on." In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon: no more. "Static?" "Nope." "We'll get static on these things." A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly. Major Winship shifted restlessly. "My reefer's gone on the fritz." Perspiration was trickling down his face. "Let's all go in," said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. "It's probably over by now." "I'll try again," Major Winship said and switched to the emergency channel. "Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?" "Is Pinov. Help?" " Nyet. " "Pinov's still there," Major Winship said. "Tell him, 'Help'," said Capt. Wilkins, "so he'll get somebody we can talk to." "I'll see them all in hell, first," Major Winship said. Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. "This is it," he said. "I'm going in." "Let's all—" "No. I've got to cool off." "Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here," Capt. Lawler said. "The shot probably went off an hour ago." "The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all." "Maybe," Lt. Chandler said, "it's buried too deep." "Maybe so," Major Winship said. "But we can't have the dome fall down around all our ears." He stood. "Whew! You guys stay put." He crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered, closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward, off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside the radio equipment. The ground moved again. "Charlie! Charlie!" "I'm okay," Major Winship answered. "Okay! Okay!" "It's—" There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased. "Hey, Les, how's it look?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?" "Okay," Major Winship said. "We told them this might happen," he added bitterly. There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their breath. "I guess it's over," said Major Winship, getting to his feet. "Wait a bit more, there may be an after-shock." He switched once again to the emergency channel. "Is Pinov," came the supremely relaxed voice. "Help?" Major Winship whinnied in disgust. " Nyet! " he snarled. To the other Americans: "Our comrades seem unconcerned." "Tough." They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal. "Well," Lt. Chandler commented, "even though we didn't build this thing to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right." "I guess I was just—" Major Winship began. "Oh, hell! We're losing pressure. Where's the markers?" "By the lug cabinet." "Got 'em," Major Winship said a moment later. He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as though it were breathing and then it ruptured. Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. "You guys wait. It's on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it." He moved for the plastic sheeting. "We've lost about three feet of calk out here," Capt. Lawler said. "I can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate." Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. "How's that?" "Not yet." "I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads." There was a splatter of static. "Damn!" Major Winship said, "they should have made these things more flexible." "Still coming out." "Best I can do." Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the floor. "Come on in," he said dryly. With the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling, radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting out from the walls about six feet from the floor. Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. "Well," he said wryly, "it doesn't smell as bad now." "Oops," said Major Winship. "Just a second. They're coming in." He switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov. "Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?" "This is Major Winship." "Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?" "Little leak. You?" "Came through without damage." General Finogenov paused a moment. When no comment was forthcoming, he continued: "Perhaps we built a bit more strongly, Major." "You did this deliberately," Major Winship said testily. "No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me. Is there anything at all we can do?" "Just leave us alone, thank you," Major Winship said and cut off the communication. "What'd they say?" Capt. Wilkins asked. "Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this." "That's nice," Lt. Chandler said. "I'll be damned surprised," Major Winship said, "if they got any seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?" "Larry, where's the inventory?" "Les has got it." Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted. "Larry," Major Winship said, "why don't you get Earth?" "Okay." Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended. "Got the inventory sheet, Les?" "Right here." Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. "We can't hear anything without any air." Major Winship looked at the microphone. "Well, I'll just report and—" He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. "Yes," he said. "That's right, isn't it." Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. "Some days you don't mine at all," he said. "Les, have you found it?" "It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here." "Well, find it." Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. "I saw it—" "Skip, help look." Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. "We haven't got all day." A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. "Here it is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff." Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up. "Marker showed it over here," Major Winship said, inching over to the wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger. "How does this stuff work?" Capt. Lawler asked. They huddled over the instruction sheet. "Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before service." Major Winship said dryly, "Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact with air." Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, "Now that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?" "How do they possibly think—?" "Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference," Lt. Chandler said. "Some air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A gorilla couldn't extrude it." "How're the other ones?" asked Major Winship. Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. "Oh, they're all hard, too." "Who was supposed to check?" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation. "The only way you can check is to extrude it," Lt. Chandler said, "and if it does extrude, you've ruined it." "That's that," Major Winship said. "There's nothing for it but to yell help." II Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip of approximately thirty exhausting minutes. Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt. Wilkins stayed for company. "I want a cigarette in the worst way," Capt. Wilkins said. "So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless something else goes wrong." "As long as they'll loan us the calking compound," Capt. Wilkins said. "Yeah, yeah," Major Winship said. "Let's eat." "You got any concentrate? I'm empty." "I'll load you," Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily. It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins cursed twice during the operation. "I'd hate to live in this thing for any period." "I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians," Major Winship said. "I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces of junk around." They ate. "Really horrible stuff." "Nutritious." After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, "Now I'd like a cup of hot tea. I'm cooled off." Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. "What brought this on?" "I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's only seven of them right now. That's living." "They've been here six years longer, after all." "Finogenov had a clay samovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real, by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And a wooden desk. A wooden desk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—" "They've got the power-plants for it." "Do you think he did that deliberately?" Major Winship asked. "I think he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?" "You told me," Capt. Wilkins said. After a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, "To hell with the Russian engineer." "If you've got all that power...." "That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean? It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off. Like a little kid." "Maybe they don't make aluminum desks." "They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is aluminum. You know they're just showing off." "Let me wire you up," Capt. Wilkins said. "We ought to report." "That's going to take awhile." "It's something to do while we wait." "I guess we ought to." Major Winship came down from the bunk and sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back. Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network. "Okay?" "Okay," Major Winship gestured. They roused Earth. "This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the American moonbase." At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet. "This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship." "Just a moment." "Is everything all right?" Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed. "A-Okay," he said. "Just a moment." "What's wrong?" came the worried question. In the background, he heard someone say, "I think there's something wrong." Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a savage grimace. Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously large to the other. Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in involuntary realism. This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth. Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word "Leak?" Air, Major Winship said silently. Leak? Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive. Comprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away. Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack. Oh. Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the speaker in again. "... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!" "We're here," Major Winship said. "All right? Are you all right?" "We're all right. A-Okay." Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his potential audience, took a deep breath. "Earlier this morning, the Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the ostensible purpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of vigorous American protests." Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around. The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle. "These protests have proved well founded," Major Winship continued. "Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage." Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation. "However," he continued, "we did experience a minor leak in the dome, which is presently being repaired." "The Soviet Union," came the reply, "has reported the disturbance and has tendered their official apology. You want it?" "It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the necessary replacement." The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave the conversation a tone of deliberation. A new voice came on. "We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will be able to deliver replacements in about ten days." "I will forward a coded report on the occurrence," Major Winship said. "Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak repaired?" "The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out." He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back. Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the transmitter. "Wow!" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. "For a moment there, I thought...." "What?" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest. "I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle. I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left, and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you, that was rough." III Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It was a fifty-five gallon drum. The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. "What is that ?" asked Major Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight. "That," said Capt. Lawler, "is the calking compound." "You're kidding," said Capt. Wilkins. "I am not kidding." Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk. "Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?" Major Winship said sarcastically. "It's this way," Lt. Chandler said. "They didn't have anything but 55-gallon drums of it." "Oh, my," said Capt. Wilkins. "I suppose it's a steel drum. Those things must weigh...." "Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong," Capt. Lawler said. "He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad." "He's too damned suspicious," Major Winship said. "You know and I know why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!" "About this drum," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well, like I said, it's this way," Lt. Chandler resumed. "I told him we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little scale—" "A little scale?" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome. "That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale." "Yeah," said Captain Lawler, "and he looked at us with that mute, surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little scales." "Well, anyway," Lt. Chandler continued, "he told us just to mix up the whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't need." "Somehow, that sounds like him," Major Winship said. "He had five or six of them." "Jesus!" said Capt. Wilkins. "That must be three thousand pounds of calking compound. Those people are insane." "The question is," Capt. Lawler said, "'How are we going to mix it?' It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly." They thought over the problem for a while. "That will be a man-sized job," Major Winship said. "Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad," said Capt. Wilkins. "If I took the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if we could...." It took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer. Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated. "Now," Major Winship said, "we can either bring the drum inside or take the mixer out there." "We're going to have to bring the drum in," Capt. Wilkins said. "Well," said Capt. Lawler, "that will make it nice and cozy." It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was interposing itself. Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. "Damn these suits," he said. "You've got it stuck between the bunk post." "I know that." "I don't think this is the way to do it," Major Winship said. "Let's back the drum out." Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It rested uneasily on the uneven surface. "Now, let's go," said Major Winship. Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring. "It's not the weight, it's the mass," said Capt. Wilkins brightly. "The hell it isn't the weight," said Lt. Chandler. "That's heavy." "With my reefer out," said Major Winship, "I'm the one it's rough on." He shook perspiration out of his eyes. "They should figure a way to get a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes." "It's the salt." "Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets," Major Winship said. "I've never sweat so much since basic." "Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?" "No!" Major Winship snapped. With the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing attachment. "I feel crowded," he said. "Cozy's the word." "Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!" "Sorry." At length the mixer was in operation in the drum. "Works perfectly," said Capt. Wilkins proudly. "Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English." "You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area thoroughly around the leak." "With what?" asked Major Winship. "Sandpaper, I guess." "With sandpaper?" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into the drum. "We don't have any sandpaper." "It's been a long day," Capt. Wilkins said. "Mix it thoroughly," Lt. Chandler mused. "I guess that means let it mix for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe." "I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air." "No," Capt. Lawler said. "It sets by some kind of chemical action. General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of plastic." "Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak," Major Winship said. "Say, I—" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern in his voice. "This is a hell of a time for this to occur to me. I just wasn't thinking, before. You don't suppose it's a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you? " "Larry," said Major Winship, "I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing epoxy resin from—" "Hey!" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. "The mixer's stopped." He bent forward and touched the drum. He jerked back. "Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's harder than a rock! It is an epoxy! Let's get out of here." "Huh?" "Out! Out!" Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red. "Let's go!" Capt. Wilkins said. He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms and legs. At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right. The table remained untouched. When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, "Get to one side, it may go off like shrapnel." They obeyed. "What—what—what?" Capt. Lawler stuttered. They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the other. "I'm going to try to look," Capt. Wilkins said. "Let me go." He lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the table, on a line of sight with the airlock. "I can see it," he said. "It's getting redder. It's ... it's ... melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh." "What?" said Capt. Lawler. "Watch out! There. There! " Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position. He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly. "There went the air," Capt. Lawler commented. "We got T-Trouble," said Lt. Chandler.

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What is the new problem the American astronauts are left with at the end of the passage?

61242_KVDQ6X2A_8

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

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What is the purpose of the Orthan taking over a human host?

62198_H1IWTV7E_1

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/1/9/62198//62198-h//62198-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Lew's memories are intermingling with Thigs, making him feel what?

62198_H1IWTV7E_2

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/1/9/62198//62198-h//62198-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

What is the major difference between Orthan and Earth culture that appeals to Thig?

62198_H1IWTV7E_3

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

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Why does Thig change his mind about the invasion?

62198_H1IWTV7E_4

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

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What saves Thig life in his fight with Torp?

62198_H1IWTV7E_5

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

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What ultimately brings Torp down?

62198_H1IWTV7E_6

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/1/9/62198//62198-h//62198-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Why is Thig's return to Earth bittersweet?

62198_H1IWTV7E_7

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

http://aleph.gutenberg.org/6/2/1/9/62198//62198-h//62198-h.htm

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Please refer to https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html for the detailed license.

Why does Thig leave a note at Torp's desk?

62198_H1IWTV7E_8

62198_H1IWTV7E

Gutenberg

Quest of Thig

1958.0

Wells, Basil

Short stories; PS; Science fiction; Long Island (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Human-alien encounters -- Fiction

QUEST OF THIG By BASIL WELLS Thig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering "HORDE." He had blasted across trackless space to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Thig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully because of the lesser gravitation. Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens. The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans. Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet, however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets. The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha. Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished metal at the reflection of himself! The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped across the mouth and neck of the stranger.... Lewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't dared touch the machine since. For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on a trailer tour of the West that very summer. Since that promise, he could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out of his subconscious. Yet he had to write at least three novelets and a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great adventure—or the trip was off. So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a salable yarn.... "Hey!" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the road. "What's the trouble?" Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more. "There it is," announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured Earthman to the metal deck-plates. "It is a male of the species that must have built the cities we saw as we landed." "He resembles Thig," announced Kam. "But for the strange covering he wears he might be Thig." "Thig will be this creature!" announced Torp. "With a psychic relay we will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the two inner planets." "You are the commander," said Thig. "But I wish this beast did not wear these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use of our limbs so." "Do not question the word of your commander," growled Torp, swelling out his thick chest menacingly. "It is for the good of our people that you disguise yourself as an Earthman." "For the good of the Horde," Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted Terry's body and headed for the laboratory. Service for the Horde was all that the men of Ortha knew. Carefully cultured and brought to life in the laboratories of their Horde, they knew neither father nor mother. Affection and love were entirely lacking in their early training and later life. They were trained antlike from childhood that only the growth and power of the Horde were of any moment. Men and women alike toiled and died like unfeeling robots of flesh and bone for the Horde. The Horde was their religion, their love-life, their everything! So it was that the bodies of the Earthman and the Orthan were strapped on two parallel tables of chill metal and the twin helmets, linked to one another by the intricacies of the psychic relay, put upon their heads. For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet. "There is nothing more to learn," he informed his impassive comrades. "Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly." An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running inland to his home. Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach! He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from around his heart. Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding the emotions that swept through his acquired memory. Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed, trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked achingly up into his throat. "Lew, dear," Ellen was asking, "where have you been all day? I called up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for "Reversed Revolvers" and three other editors asked for shorts soon." "Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn," grunted Thig, and gasped. For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this way, he realized—more natural. "Sorry I was late," he said, digging into his pocket for the glittering baubles, "but I was poking around on the beach where we used to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing but a handful of these." He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung, unbelieving, to his arm. "Why, Lew," she gasped, "they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!" "Uh huh," agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he hoped that the west had reformed. "I saved some kraut and weiners," Ellen said. "Get washed up while I'm warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?" "Mmmmmm," came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin. "Home again," whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it. "The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful," she went on as they climbed the steps, "but nowhere was there any place as beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water." Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the chaos of his cool Orthan brain. Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world, including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would, of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people, imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the Hordes? Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty added zest to every day's life. The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered, would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast mechanical hives. There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever, who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son of Ellen and the man he had destroyed. Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the road toward the beach. The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the door and called after him. "Hurry home, dear," she said. "I'll have a bite ready in about an hour." He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound. Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that lived no longer. He mentally titled it: "Rustlers' Riot" and blocked in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never be written, but he toyed with the idea. So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from the unquestioning worship of the Horde! "You have done well," announced Torp when Thig had completed his report on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. "We now have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to Ortha at once. "I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient for the purposes of complete liquidation." "But why," asked Thig slowly, "could we not disarm all the natives and exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own degree of knowledge and comfort?" "Only the good of the Horde matters!" shouted Torp angrily. "Shall a race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking." "Let us get back to Ortha at once, then," gritted out Thig savagely. "Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet. There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long forgotten." "Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam," ordered Torp shortly. "His words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha." Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes. The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an empty world—this planet was not for them. "Turn back!" he cried wildly. "I must go back to Earth. There is a woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need this planet." Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac of the finest members of the Horde. "No human being is more important than the Horde," he stated baldly. "This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we must eliminate for the good of the Horde." Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it could be uttered. Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand fought against that lone arm of Thig. The scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked. Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the narrowed icy eyes of his commander. He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way. His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon. Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow.... Bam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head. Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body. Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness. The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free. In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled out into a senseless whinny. Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman! The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of the Orthan. So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along. He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all. He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines: Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of.... And there his writing ended abruptly. Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message. Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's hull, and cut free from the mother vessel. He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his. Thig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. He swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first existence. He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days he had spent on his three month trip over Earth. He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates. He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind. He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a space ship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space. He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories were hot, bitter pains. Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family. The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered. The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight. A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them.... He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!

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What was it that ultimately converted Thig to being human?

62198_H1IWTV7E_9

63398_X7DLF0GV

Gutenberg

The Hairy Ones

1950.0

Wells, Basil

Adventure stories; Water -- Fiction; Science fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Short stories

THE HAIRY ONES by BASIL WELLS Marooned on a world within a world, aided by a slim girl and an old warrior, Patrolman Sisko Rolf was fighting his greatest battle—to bring life to dying Mars. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "The outlaw ships are attacking!" Old Garmon Nash's harsh voice snapped like a thunderclap in the cramped rocket flyer's cabin. "Five or six of them. Cut the searchlights!" Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away. "Trapped us neatly," Rolf said through clenched teeth. "Tolled into their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than.... We'll down some of them, though." "Right!" That was old Garmon Nash, his fellow patrolman aboard the Planet Patrol ship as he swung the deadly slimness of his rocket blast's barrel around to center on the fiery jets that betrayed the approaching outlaw flyers. Three times he fired the gun, the rocket projectiles blasting off with their invisible preliminary jets of gas, and three times an enemy craft flared up into an intolerable torch of flame before they realized the patrol ship had fired upon them. Then a barrage of enemy rocket shells exploded into life above and before them. Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him. In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal, and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail. Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved into an inferno of flame. The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew that he lay crushed against a rocky wall. Much later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs. There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a deep crevice. In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the higher levels would spell death. Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden. The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the pit. He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor stretching out ahead. Light! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white light reached his eyes Rolf did not know—it had seemed an eternity of endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel. Rolf capped the solar torch. No use wasting the captive energy needlessly he reasoned. And he loosened the expoder in its holster as he moved carefully forward. The outlaw headquarters might be close ahead, headquarters where renegade Frogs, Venusians from the southern sunken marshes of Mars, and Earthmen from dusty North Mars, concealed their precious hoard of water from the thirsty colonists of North Mars. "They may have found the sunken seas of Mars," thought Rolf as he moved alertly forward, "water that would give the mining domes new life." His fists clenched dryly. "Water that should be free!" Then the light brightened before him as he rounded a shouldering wall of smoothly trimmed stone, and the floor fell away beneath his feet! He found himself shooting downward into a vast void that glowed softly with a mysterious all-pervading radiance. His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss. It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet! The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall he could scout out the country beyond. The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled crevices sprouted green life. So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him. A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up mass of stone blocks that was the wall. Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged bushes. "Down, Altha," a deeper voice rumbled from above, "it's one of the Enemy." The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern floor might be their headquarters. "But, Mark," the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, "he wears the uniform of a patrolman." "May be a trick." The deep voice was doubtful. "You know their leader, Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and kidnap you." The girl's voice was merry. "Come on Spider-legs," she said. Rolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was, with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down. "Hello, patrol-a-man," she said shyly. An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side. "Altha," he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a long-fingered hand, "why do you never listen to me? I promised your father I'd look after you." He hitched at his tattered skin robe. The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump faster. "This Mark Tanner of mine," she explained to the patrolman, "is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the minds of others." She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. "Do not be ashamed," she said. "I am not angry that you think I am—well, not too unattractive." Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded. "That is better, perhaps." The girl's face was demure. "And now perhaps you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk." "Sorry," said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to their side. "I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the Hairy People." "She one of them?" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch. "Mother was." Mark Tanner's voice was louder. "Father was Wayne Stark. Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant." "Sure." Rolf nodded. "Lost in equatorial wastelands—uh, about twenty years ago—2053, I believe." "Only we were not lost on the surface," explained Tanner, his booming voice much too powerful for his reedy body, "Wayne Stark was searching for the lost seas of Mars. Traced them underground. Found them too." He paused to look nervously out across the blasted wasteland. "We ran out of fuel here on Lomihi," he finished, "with the vanished surface waters of Mars less than four miles beneath us." Rolf followed the direction of the other's pale blue eyes. Overhead now hung the bottom of the cavern. An almost circular island of pale yellow lifted above the restless dark waters of a vast sea. Rolf realized with a wrench of sudden fear that they actually hung head downward like flies walking across a ceiling. "There," roared Tanner's voice, "is one of the seas of Mars." "One," repeated Rolf slowly. "You mean there are more?" "Dozens of them," the older man's voice throbbed with helpless rage. "Enough to make the face of Mars green again. Cavern after cavern lies beyond this first one, their floors flooded with water." Rolf felt new strength pump into his tired bruised muscles. Here lay the salvation of Earth's thirsting colonies almost within reach. Once he could lead the scientists of North Mars to this treasure trove of water.... "Mark!" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved gray bushes. "The Furry Women attack!" A hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of the desert half of Lomihi. "Enemies?" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely. "Right." The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. "They cross the Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They take them for slaves." "I must warn them." Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes flamed. "The outlaws may capture," warned Tanner. "They have taken over the canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember." "I will take the glider." Altha was on her feet, her body crouched over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward the ruins of ancient Aryk. Tanner shrugged his shoulders. "What can I do? Altha has the blood of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the outlaws have turned her people against her." Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier. Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully. "They will pass within a few feet!" he hissed. "Right." Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. "Pray that the wind does not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they resemble." Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer. Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl. "See!" Tanner's voice was muted. "Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!" Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged litter. Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered with a silky coat of reddish hair. Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two races mingled they hate the Furry Ones." A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred. Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons of the Hairy People. They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People. Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet. Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came, bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats. Rolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran fearlessly into that rain of death. The expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist. Tanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. "Retreat!" he gasped. The Furry Amazons swarmed up over the lower terraces of rocks, their snaky heads thrust forward and their swords slashing. The two Earthmen bounded up and backward to the next jumbled layer of giant blocks behind them, their powerful earthly muscles negating Lomihi's feeble gravity. Spears showered thick about them and then they dropped behind the sheltering bulk of a rough square boulder. "Now where?" Rolf snapped another burst of expoder needles at the furry attackers as he asked. "To the vaults beneath the Forbidden City," Mark Tanner cried. "None but the Outcasts and we two have entered the streets of deserted Aryk." The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive needles at the Furry Ones and followed. Darkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence. Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp. Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock dungeon rose above him. Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the desolate land of the Hairy People. Tanner's finger pointed. "Altha!" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. "She had warned the Hairy People, and now she returns." "The weasel heads won't follow us here?" asked Rolf. Tanner laughed. "Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls." "Then how about telling me about this hanging world?" "Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own." Rolf laughed. "Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth." "Right." Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's flyer as he spoke. "Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the surface wars. "The Hairy People were the rulers," he went on, "and the Furry Ones were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races." "But," Rolf frowned thoughtfully, "what keeps Lomihi from crashing into the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?" "The island is the answer," said Tanner. "Somehow it blocks the force of gravity—shields Lomihi from...." He caught his breath suddenly. "The outlaws!" he cried. "They're after Altha." Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer wall of the rock chamber. Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side. "Let me follow," he said. "I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder." The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then suddenly thought better of it. "You're right," he agreed. "Help her if you can. Your weapon is our only hope now." Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles. The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders. He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of limitless water again. A man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good. There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the first to fire—his was the element of surprise. A score of feet lay between them, and suddenly the outlaw whirled about. Rolf pressed the firing button; the expoder clicked over once and the trimmer key jammed, and the doughy-faced Venusian swung up his own long-barreled expoder! Rolf snapped his weapon overhand at the Frog's hairless skull. The fish-bellied alien ducked but his expoder swung off the target momentarily. In that instant Rolf launched himself from the open framework of the slowly diving glider, full upon the Venusian. They went down, Rolf swinging his fist like a hammer. He felt the Frog go limp and he loosed a relieved whistle. Now with a rocket flyer and the guard's rifle expoder in his grasp the problem of escape from the inner caverns was solved. He would rescue the girl, stop at the Forbidden City for Mark Tanner, and blast off for the upper crust forty miles and more overhead. He knelt over the prostrate Venusian, using his belt and a strip torn from his greenish tunic to bind the unconscious man. The knots were not too tight, the man could free himself in the course of a few hours. He shrugged his shoulders wearily and started to get up. A foot scraped on stone behind him. He spun on bent knees and flung himself fifty feet to the further side of the narrow gulch with the same movement. Expoder needles splintered the rocks about him as he dropped behind a sheltering rocky ledge, and he caught a glimpse of two green-clad men dragging the bronze-haired body of the girl he had come to save into the shelter of the flyer. A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had not blasted a vital spot in the man's body. The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end of the ship's squatty fuselage. And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered endlessly at his skull. This sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate. Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting for the moment. By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there. The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased. The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats. Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar torch away from his body and freed it. Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him. "Fire!" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees in the blanketing fog and looked forward. One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could drop to his belted expoder. The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat and squeezed hard. The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and now he felt victory slipping from his grasp. He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat. His eyes cleared. He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face. Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin. No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air. "Patrolman," the girl's voice was beside him. "We're safe!" "Everything bongo?" Rolf wanted to know. "Of course," she smiled crookedly. "Glad of that." Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact. Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. "Do you know," she said, "even yet I do not know your name." Rolf grinned up at her. "Need to?" he asked. The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. "Handier than calling you Shorty all the time," she quipped. Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in plenty again. Rolf snorted. "Shorty," he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.

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What is so significant about this new area that Rolf is in?

63398_X7DLF0GV_1

63398_X7DLF0GV

Gutenberg

The Hairy Ones

1950.0

Wells, Basil

Adventure stories; Water -- Fiction; Science fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Short stories

THE HAIRY ONES by BASIL WELLS Marooned on a world within a world, aided by a slim girl and an old warrior, Patrolman Sisko Rolf was fighting his greatest battle—to bring life to dying Mars. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "The outlaw ships are attacking!" Old Garmon Nash's harsh voice snapped like a thunderclap in the cramped rocket flyer's cabin. "Five or six of them. Cut the searchlights!" Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away. "Trapped us neatly," Rolf said through clenched teeth. "Tolled into their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than.... We'll down some of them, though." "Right!" That was old Garmon Nash, his fellow patrolman aboard the Planet Patrol ship as he swung the deadly slimness of his rocket blast's barrel around to center on the fiery jets that betrayed the approaching outlaw flyers. Three times he fired the gun, the rocket projectiles blasting off with their invisible preliminary jets of gas, and three times an enemy craft flared up into an intolerable torch of flame before they realized the patrol ship had fired upon them. Then a barrage of enemy rocket shells exploded into life above and before them. Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him. In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal, and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail. Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved into an inferno of flame. The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew that he lay crushed against a rocky wall. Much later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs. There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a deep crevice. In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the higher levels would spell death. Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden. The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the pit. He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor stretching out ahead. Light! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white light reached his eyes Rolf did not know—it had seemed an eternity of endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel. Rolf capped the solar torch. No use wasting the captive energy needlessly he reasoned. And he loosened the expoder in its holster as he moved carefully forward. The outlaw headquarters might be close ahead, headquarters where renegade Frogs, Venusians from the southern sunken marshes of Mars, and Earthmen from dusty North Mars, concealed their precious hoard of water from the thirsty colonists of North Mars. "They may have found the sunken seas of Mars," thought Rolf as he moved alertly forward, "water that would give the mining domes new life." His fists clenched dryly. "Water that should be free!" Then the light brightened before him as he rounded a shouldering wall of smoothly trimmed stone, and the floor fell away beneath his feet! He found himself shooting downward into a vast void that glowed softly with a mysterious all-pervading radiance. His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss. It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet! The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall he could scout out the country beyond. The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled crevices sprouted green life. So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him. A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up mass of stone blocks that was the wall. Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged bushes. "Down, Altha," a deeper voice rumbled from above, "it's one of the Enemy." The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern floor might be their headquarters. "But, Mark," the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, "he wears the uniform of a patrolman." "May be a trick." The deep voice was doubtful. "You know their leader, Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and kidnap you." The girl's voice was merry. "Come on Spider-legs," she said. Rolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was, with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down. "Hello, patrol-a-man," she said shyly. An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side. "Altha," he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a long-fingered hand, "why do you never listen to me? I promised your father I'd look after you." He hitched at his tattered skin robe. The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump faster. "This Mark Tanner of mine," she explained to the patrolman, "is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the minds of others." She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. "Do not be ashamed," she said. "I am not angry that you think I am—well, not too unattractive." Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded. "That is better, perhaps." The girl's face was demure. "And now perhaps you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk." "Sorry," said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to their side. "I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the Hairy People." "She one of them?" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch. "Mother was." Mark Tanner's voice was louder. "Father was Wayne Stark. Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant." "Sure." Rolf nodded. "Lost in equatorial wastelands—uh, about twenty years ago—2053, I believe." "Only we were not lost on the surface," explained Tanner, his booming voice much too powerful for his reedy body, "Wayne Stark was searching for the lost seas of Mars. Traced them underground. Found them too." He paused to look nervously out across the blasted wasteland. "We ran out of fuel here on Lomihi," he finished, "with the vanished surface waters of Mars less than four miles beneath us." Rolf followed the direction of the other's pale blue eyes. Overhead now hung the bottom of the cavern. An almost circular island of pale yellow lifted above the restless dark waters of a vast sea. Rolf realized with a wrench of sudden fear that they actually hung head downward like flies walking across a ceiling. "There," roared Tanner's voice, "is one of the seas of Mars." "One," repeated Rolf slowly. "You mean there are more?" "Dozens of them," the older man's voice throbbed with helpless rage. "Enough to make the face of Mars green again. Cavern after cavern lies beyond this first one, their floors flooded with water." Rolf felt new strength pump into his tired bruised muscles. Here lay the salvation of Earth's thirsting colonies almost within reach. Once he could lead the scientists of North Mars to this treasure trove of water.... "Mark!" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved gray bushes. "The Furry Women attack!" A hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of the desert half of Lomihi. "Enemies?" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely. "Right." The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. "They cross the Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They take them for slaves." "I must warn them." Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes flamed. "The outlaws may capture," warned Tanner. "They have taken over the canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember." "I will take the glider." Altha was on her feet, her body crouched over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward the ruins of ancient Aryk. Tanner shrugged his shoulders. "What can I do? Altha has the blood of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the outlaws have turned her people against her." Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier. Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully. "They will pass within a few feet!" he hissed. "Right." Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. "Pray that the wind does not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they resemble." Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer. Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl. "See!" Tanner's voice was muted. "Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!" Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged litter. Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered with a silky coat of reddish hair. Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two races mingled they hate the Furry Ones." A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred. Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons of the Hairy People. They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People. Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet. Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came, bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats. Rolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran fearlessly into that rain of death. The expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist. Tanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. "Retreat!" he gasped. The Furry Amazons swarmed up over the lower terraces of rocks, their snaky heads thrust forward and their swords slashing. The two Earthmen bounded up and backward to the next jumbled layer of giant blocks behind them, their powerful earthly muscles negating Lomihi's feeble gravity. Spears showered thick about them and then they dropped behind the sheltering bulk of a rough square boulder. "Now where?" Rolf snapped another burst of expoder needles at the furry attackers as he asked. "To the vaults beneath the Forbidden City," Mark Tanner cried. "None but the Outcasts and we two have entered the streets of deserted Aryk." The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive needles at the Furry Ones and followed. Darkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence. Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp. Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock dungeon rose above him. Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the desolate land of the Hairy People. Tanner's finger pointed. "Altha!" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. "She had warned the Hairy People, and now she returns." "The weasel heads won't follow us here?" asked Rolf. Tanner laughed. "Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls." "Then how about telling me about this hanging world?" "Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own." Rolf laughed. "Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth." "Right." Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's flyer as he spoke. "Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the surface wars. "The Hairy People were the rulers," he went on, "and the Furry Ones were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races." "But," Rolf frowned thoughtfully, "what keeps Lomihi from crashing into the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?" "The island is the answer," said Tanner. "Somehow it blocks the force of gravity—shields Lomihi from...." He caught his breath suddenly. "The outlaws!" he cried. "They're after Altha." Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer wall of the rock chamber. Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side. "Let me follow," he said. "I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder." The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then suddenly thought better of it. "You're right," he agreed. "Help her if you can. Your weapon is our only hope now." Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles. The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders. He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of limitless water again. A man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good. There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the first to fire—his was the element of surprise. A score of feet lay between them, and suddenly the outlaw whirled about. Rolf pressed the firing button; the expoder clicked over once and the trimmer key jammed, and the doughy-faced Venusian swung up his own long-barreled expoder! Rolf snapped his weapon overhand at the Frog's hairless skull. The fish-bellied alien ducked but his expoder swung off the target momentarily. In that instant Rolf launched himself from the open framework of the slowly diving glider, full upon the Venusian. They went down, Rolf swinging his fist like a hammer. He felt the Frog go limp and he loosed a relieved whistle. Now with a rocket flyer and the guard's rifle expoder in his grasp the problem of escape from the inner caverns was solved. He would rescue the girl, stop at the Forbidden City for Mark Tanner, and blast off for the upper crust forty miles and more overhead. He knelt over the prostrate Venusian, using his belt and a strip torn from his greenish tunic to bind the unconscious man. The knots were not too tight, the man could free himself in the course of a few hours. He shrugged his shoulders wearily and started to get up. A foot scraped on stone behind him. He spun on bent knees and flung himself fifty feet to the further side of the narrow gulch with the same movement. Expoder needles splintered the rocks about him as he dropped behind a sheltering rocky ledge, and he caught a glimpse of two green-clad men dragging the bronze-haired body of the girl he had come to save into the shelter of the flyer. A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had not blasted a vital spot in the man's body. The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end of the ship's squatty fuselage. And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered endlessly at his skull. This sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate. Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting for the moment. By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there. The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased. The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats. Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar torch away from his body and freed it. Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him. "Fire!" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees in the blanketing fog and looked forward. One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could drop to his belted expoder. The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat and squeezed hard. The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and now he felt victory slipping from his grasp. He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat. His eyes cleared. He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face. Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin. No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air. "Patrolman," the girl's voice was beside him. "We're safe!" "Everything bongo?" Rolf wanted to know. "Of course," she smiled crookedly. "Glad of that." Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact. Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. "Do you know," she said, "even yet I do not know your name." Rolf grinned up at her. "Need to?" he asked. The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. "Handier than calling you Shorty all the time," she quipped. Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in plenty again. Rolf snorted. "Shorty," he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.

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What is the relationship between the Hairy people and the Furry people?

63398_X7DLF0GV_2

63398_X7DLF0GV

Gutenberg

The Hairy Ones

1950.0

Wells, Basil

Adventure stories; Water -- Fiction; Science fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Short stories

THE HAIRY ONES by BASIL WELLS Marooned on a world within a world, aided by a slim girl and an old warrior, Patrolman Sisko Rolf was fighting his greatest battle—to bring life to dying Mars. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "The outlaw ships are attacking!" Old Garmon Nash's harsh voice snapped like a thunderclap in the cramped rocket flyer's cabin. "Five or six of them. Cut the searchlights!" Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away. "Trapped us neatly," Rolf said through clenched teeth. "Tolled into their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than.... We'll down some of them, though." "Right!" That was old Garmon Nash, his fellow patrolman aboard the Planet Patrol ship as he swung the deadly slimness of his rocket blast's barrel around to center on the fiery jets that betrayed the approaching outlaw flyers. Three times he fired the gun, the rocket projectiles blasting off with their invisible preliminary jets of gas, and three times an enemy craft flared up into an intolerable torch of flame before they realized the patrol ship had fired upon them. Then a barrage of enemy rocket shells exploded into life above and before them. Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him. In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal, and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail. Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved into an inferno of flame. The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew that he lay crushed against a rocky wall. Much later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs. There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a deep crevice. In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the higher levels would spell death. Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden. The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the pit. He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor stretching out ahead. Light! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white light reached his eyes Rolf did not know—it had seemed an eternity of endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel. Rolf capped the solar torch. No use wasting the captive energy needlessly he reasoned. And he loosened the expoder in its holster as he moved carefully forward. The outlaw headquarters might be close ahead, headquarters where renegade Frogs, Venusians from the southern sunken marshes of Mars, and Earthmen from dusty North Mars, concealed their precious hoard of water from the thirsty colonists of North Mars. "They may have found the sunken seas of Mars," thought Rolf as he moved alertly forward, "water that would give the mining domes new life." His fists clenched dryly. "Water that should be free!" Then the light brightened before him as he rounded a shouldering wall of smoothly trimmed stone, and the floor fell away beneath his feet! He found himself shooting downward into a vast void that glowed softly with a mysterious all-pervading radiance. His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss. It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet! The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall he could scout out the country beyond. The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled crevices sprouted green life. So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him. A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up mass of stone blocks that was the wall. Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged bushes. "Down, Altha," a deeper voice rumbled from above, "it's one of the Enemy." The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern floor might be their headquarters. "But, Mark," the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, "he wears the uniform of a patrolman." "May be a trick." The deep voice was doubtful. "You know their leader, Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and kidnap you." The girl's voice was merry. "Come on Spider-legs," she said. Rolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was, with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down. "Hello, patrol-a-man," she said shyly. An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side. "Altha," he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a long-fingered hand, "why do you never listen to me? I promised your father I'd look after you." He hitched at his tattered skin robe. The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump faster. "This Mark Tanner of mine," she explained to the patrolman, "is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the minds of others." She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. "Do not be ashamed," she said. "I am not angry that you think I am—well, not too unattractive." Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded. "That is better, perhaps." The girl's face was demure. "And now perhaps you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk." "Sorry," said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to their side. "I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the Hairy People." "She one of them?" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch. "Mother was." Mark Tanner's voice was louder. "Father was Wayne Stark. Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant." "Sure." Rolf nodded. "Lost in equatorial wastelands—uh, about twenty years ago—2053, I believe." "Only we were not lost on the surface," explained Tanner, his booming voice much too powerful for his reedy body, "Wayne Stark was searching for the lost seas of Mars. Traced them underground. Found them too." He paused to look nervously out across the blasted wasteland. "We ran out of fuel here on Lomihi," he finished, "with the vanished surface waters of Mars less than four miles beneath us." Rolf followed the direction of the other's pale blue eyes. Overhead now hung the bottom of the cavern. An almost circular island of pale yellow lifted above the restless dark waters of a vast sea. Rolf realized with a wrench of sudden fear that they actually hung head downward like flies walking across a ceiling. "There," roared Tanner's voice, "is one of the seas of Mars." "One," repeated Rolf slowly. "You mean there are more?" "Dozens of them," the older man's voice throbbed with helpless rage. "Enough to make the face of Mars green again. Cavern after cavern lies beyond this first one, their floors flooded with water." Rolf felt new strength pump into his tired bruised muscles. Here lay the salvation of Earth's thirsting colonies almost within reach. Once he could lead the scientists of North Mars to this treasure trove of water.... "Mark!" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved gray bushes. "The Furry Women attack!" A hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of the desert half of Lomihi. "Enemies?" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely. "Right." The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. "They cross the Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They take them for slaves." "I must warn them." Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes flamed. "The outlaws may capture," warned Tanner. "They have taken over the canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember." "I will take the glider." Altha was on her feet, her body crouched over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward the ruins of ancient Aryk. Tanner shrugged his shoulders. "What can I do? Altha has the blood of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the outlaws have turned her people against her." Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier. Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully. "They will pass within a few feet!" he hissed. "Right." Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. "Pray that the wind does not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they resemble." Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer. Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl. "See!" Tanner's voice was muted. "Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!" Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged litter. Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered with a silky coat of reddish hair. Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two races mingled they hate the Furry Ones." A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred. Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons of the Hairy People. They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People. Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet. Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came, bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats. Rolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran fearlessly into that rain of death. The expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist. Tanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. "Retreat!" he gasped. The Furry Amazons swarmed up over the lower terraces of rocks, their snaky heads thrust forward and their swords slashing. The two Earthmen bounded up and backward to the next jumbled layer of giant blocks behind them, their powerful earthly muscles negating Lomihi's feeble gravity. Spears showered thick about them and then they dropped behind the sheltering bulk of a rough square boulder. "Now where?" Rolf snapped another burst of expoder needles at the furry attackers as he asked. "To the vaults beneath the Forbidden City," Mark Tanner cried. "None but the Outcasts and we two have entered the streets of deserted Aryk." The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive needles at the Furry Ones and followed. Darkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence. Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp. Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock dungeon rose above him. Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the desolate land of the Hairy People. Tanner's finger pointed. "Altha!" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. "She had warned the Hairy People, and now she returns." "The weasel heads won't follow us here?" asked Rolf. Tanner laughed. "Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls." "Then how about telling me about this hanging world?" "Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own." Rolf laughed. "Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth." "Right." Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's flyer as he spoke. "Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the surface wars. "The Hairy People were the rulers," he went on, "and the Furry Ones were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races." "But," Rolf frowned thoughtfully, "what keeps Lomihi from crashing into the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?" "The island is the answer," said Tanner. "Somehow it blocks the force of gravity—shields Lomihi from...." He caught his breath suddenly. "The outlaws!" he cried. "They're after Altha." Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer wall of the rock chamber. Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side. "Let me follow," he said. "I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder." The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then suddenly thought better of it. "You're right," he agreed. "Help her if you can. Your weapon is our only hope now." Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles. The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders. He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of limitless water again. A man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good. There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the first to fire—his was the element of surprise. A score of feet lay between them, and suddenly the outlaw whirled about. Rolf pressed the firing button; the expoder clicked over once and the trimmer key jammed, and the doughy-faced Venusian swung up his own long-barreled expoder! Rolf snapped his weapon overhand at the Frog's hairless skull. The fish-bellied alien ducked but his expoder swung off the target momentarily. In that instant Rolf launched himself from the open framework of the slowly diving glider, full upon the Venusian. They went down, Rolf swinging his fist like a hammer. He felt the Frog go limp and he loosed a relieved whistle. Now with a rocket flyer and the guard's rifle expoder in his grasp the problem of escape from the inner caverns was solved. He would rescue the girl, stop at the Forbidden City for Mark Tanner, and blast off for the upper crust forty miles and more overhead. He knelt over the prostrate Venusian, using his belt and a strip torn from his greenish tunic to bind the unconscious man. The knots were not too tight, the man could free himself in the course of a few hours. He shrugged his shoulders wearily and started to get up. A foot scraped on stone behind him. He spun on bent knees and flung himself fifty feet to the further side of the narrow gulch with the same movement. Expoder needles splintered the rocks about him as he dropped behind a sheltering rocky ledge, and he caught a glimpse of two green-clad men dragging the bronze-haired body of the girl he had come to save into the shelter of the flyer. A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had not blasted a vital spot in the man's body. The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end of the ship's squatty fuselage. And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered endlessly at his skull. This sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate. Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting for the moment. By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there. The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased. The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats. Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar torch away from his body and freed it. Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him. "Fire!" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees in the blanketing fog and looked forward. One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could drop to his belted expoder. The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat and squeezed hard. The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and now he felt victory slipping from his grasp. He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat. His eyes cleared. He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face. Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin. No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air. "Patrolman," the girl's voice was beside him. "We're safe!" "Everything bongo?" Rolf wanted to know. "Of course," she smiled crookedly. "Glad of that." Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact. Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. "Do you know," she said, "even yet I do not know your name." Rolf grinned up at her. "Need to?" he asked. The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. "Handier than calling you Shorty all the time," she quipped. Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in plenty again. Rolf snorted. "Shorty," he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.

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Why is Rolf's weapon so valuable in the fights with the Furry?

63398_X7DLF0GV_3

63398_X7DLF0GV

Gutenberg

The Hairy Ones

1950.0

Wells, Basil

Adventure stories; Water -- Fiction; Science fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; PS; Short stories

THE HAIRY ONES by BASIL WELLS Marooned on a world within a world, aided by a slim girl and an old warrior, Patrolman Sisko Rolf was fighting his greatest battle—to bring life to dying Mars. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "The outlaw ships are attacking!" Old Garmon Nash's harsh voice snapped like a thunderclap in the cramped rocket flyer's cabin. "Five or six of them. Cut the searchlights!" Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away. "Trapped us neatly," Rolf said through clenched teeth. "Tolled into their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than.... We'll down some of them, though." "Right!" That was old Garmon Nash, his fellow patrolman aboard the Planet Patrol ship as he swung the deadly slimness of his rocket blast's barrel around to center on the fiery jets that betrayed the approaching outlaw flyers. Three times he fired the gun, the rocket projectiles blasting off with their invisible preliminary jets of gas, and three times an enemy craft flared up into an intolerable torch of flame before they realized the patrol ship had fired upon them. Then a barrage of enemy rocket shells exploded into life above and before them. Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him. In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal, and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail. Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved into an inferno of flame. The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew that he lay crushed against a rocky wall. Much later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs. There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a deep crevice. In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the higher levels would spell death. Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden. The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the pit. He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor stretching out ahead. Light! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white light reached his eyes Rolf did not know—it had seemed an eternity of endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel. Rolf capped the solar torch. No use wasting the captive energy needlessly he reasoned. And he loosened the expoder in its holster as he moved carefully forward. The outlaw headquarters might be close ahead, headquarters where renegade Frogs, Venusians from the southern sunken marshes of Mars, and Earthmen from dusty North Mars, concealed their precious hoard of water from the thirsty colonists of North Mars. "They may have found the sunken seas of Mars," thought Rolf as he moved alertly forward, "water that would give the mining domes new life." His fists clenched dryly. "Water that should be free!" Then the light brightened before him as he rounded a shouldering wall of smoothly trimmed stone, and the floor fell away beneath his feet! He found himself shooting downward into a vast void that glowed softly with a mysterious all-pervading radiance. His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss. It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet! The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall he could scout out the country beyond. The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled crevices sprouted green life. So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him. A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up mass of stone blocks that was the wall. Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged bushes. "Down, Altha," a deeper voice rumbled from above, "it's one of the Enemy." The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern floor might be their headquarters. "But, Mark," the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, "he wears the uniform of a patrolman." "May be a trick." The deep voice was doubtful. "You know their leader, Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and kidnap you." The girl's voice was merry. "Come on Spider-legs," she said. Rolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was, with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down. "Hello, patrol-a-man," she said shyly. An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side. "Altha," he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a long-fingered hand, "why do you never listen to me? I promised your father I'd look after you." He hitched at his tattered skin robe. The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump faster. "This Mark Tanner of mine," she explained to the patrolman, "is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the minds of others." She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. "Do not be ashamed," she said. "I am not angry that you think I am—well, not too unattractive." Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded. "That is better, perhaps." The girl's face was demure. "And now perhaps you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk." "Sorry," said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to their side. "I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the Hairy People." "She one of them?" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch. "Mother was." Mark Tanner's voice was louder. "Father was Wayne Stark. Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant." "Sure." Rolf nodded. "Lost in equatorial wastelands—uh, about twenty years ago—2053, I believe." "Only we were not lost on the surface," explained Tanner, his booming voice much too powerful for his reedy body, "Wayne Stark was searching for the lost seas of Mars. Traced them underground. Found them too." He paused to look nervously out across the blasted wasteland. "We ran out of fuel here on Lomihi," he finished, "with the vanished surface waters of Mars less than four miles beneath us." Rolf followed the direction of the other's pale blue eyes. Overhead now hung the bottom of the cavern. An almost circular island of pale yellow lifted above the restless dark waters of a vast sea. Rolf realized with a wrench of sudden fear that they actually hung head downward like flies walking across a ceiling. "There," roared Tanner's voice, "is one of the seas of Mars." "One," repeated Rolf slowly. "You mean there are more?" "Dozens of them," the older man's voice throbbed with helpless rage. "Enough to make the face of Mars green again. Cavern after cavern lies beyond this first one, their floors flooded with water." Rolf felt new strength pump into his tired bruised muscles. Here lay the salvation of Earth's thirsting colonies almost within reach. Once he could lead the scientists of North Mars to this treasure trove of water.... "Mark!" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved gray bushes. "The Furry Women attack!" A hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of the desert half of Lomihi. "Enemies?" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely. "Right." The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. "They cross the Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They take them for slaves." "I must warn them." Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes flamed. "The outlaws may capture," warned Tanner. "They have taken over the canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember." "I will take the glider." Altha was on her feet, her body crouched over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward the ruins of ancient Aryk. Tanner shrugged his shoulders. "What can I do? Altha has the blood of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the outlaws have turned her people against her." Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier. Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully. "They will pass within a few feet!" he hissed. "Right." Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. "Pray that the wind does not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they resemble." Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer. Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl. "See!" Tanner's voice was muted. "Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!" Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged litter. Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered with a silky coat of reddish hair. Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two races mingled they hate the Furry Ones." A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred. Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons of the Hairy People. They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People. Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet. Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came, bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats. Rolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran fearlessly into that rain of death. The expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist. Tanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. "Retreat!" he gasped. The Furry Amazons swarmed up over the lower terraces of rocks, their snaky heads thrust forward and their swords slashing. The two Earthmen bounded up and backward to the next jumbled layer of giant blocks behind them, their powerful earthly muscles negating Lomihi's feeble gravity. Spears showered thick about them and then they dropped behind the sheltering bulk of a rough square boulder. "Now where?" Rolf snapped another burst of expoder needles at the furry attackers as he asked. "To the vaults beneath the Forbidden City," Mark Tanner cried. "None but the Outcasts and we two have entered the streets of deserted Aryk." The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive needles at the Furry Ones and followed. Darkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence. Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp. Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock dungeon rose above him. Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the desolate land of the Hairy People. Tanner's finger pointed. "Altha!" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. "She had warned the Hairy People, and now she returns." "The weasel heads won't follow us here?" asked Rolf. Tanner laughed. "Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls." "Then how about telling me about this hanging world?" "Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own." Rolf laughed. "Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth." "Right." Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's flyer as he spoke. "Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the surface wars. "The Hairy People were the rulers," he went on, "and the Furry Ones were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races." "But," Rolf frowned thoughtfully, "what keeps Lomihi from crashing into the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?" "The island is the answer," said Tanner. "Somehow it blocks the force of gravity—shields Lomihi from...." He caught his breath suddenly. "The outlaws!" he cried. "They're after Altha." Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer wall of the rock chamber. Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side. "Let me follow," he said. "I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder." The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then suddenly thought better of it. "You're right," he agreed. "Help her if you can. Your weapon is our only hope now." Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles. The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders. He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of limitless water again. A man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good. There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the first to fire—his was the element of surprise. A score of feet lay between them, and suddenly the outlaw whirled about. Rolf pressed the firing button; the expoder clicked over once and the trimmer key jammed, and the doughy-faced Venusian swung up his own long-barreled expoder! Rolf snapped his weapon overhand at the Frog's hairless skull. The fish-bellied alien ducked but his expoder swung off the target momentarily. In that instant Rolf launched himself from the open framework of the slowly diving glider, full upon the Venusian. They went down, Rolf swinging his fist like a hammer. He felt the Frog go limp and he loosed a relieved whistle. Now with a rocket flyer and the guard's rifle expoder in his grasp the problem of escape from the inner caverns was solved. He would rescue the girl, stop at the Forbidden City for Mark Tanner, and blast off for the upper crust forty miles and more overhead. He knelt over the prostrate Venusian, using his belt and a strip torn from his greenish tunic to bind the unconscious man. The knots were not too tight, the man could free himself in the course of a few hours. He shrugged his shoulders wearily and started to get up. A foot scraped on stone behind him. He spun on bent knees and flung himself fifty feet to the further side of the narrow gulch with the same movement. Expoder needles splintered the rocks about him as he dropped behind a sheltering rocky ledge, and he caught a glimpse of two green-clad men dragging the bronze-haired body of the girl he had come to save into the shelter of the flyer. A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had not blasted a vital spot in the man's body. The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end of the ship's squatty fuselage. And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered endlessly at his skull. This sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate. Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting for the moment. By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there. The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased. The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats. Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar torch away from his body and freed it. Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him. "Fire!" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees in the blanketing fog and looked forward. One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could drop to his belted expoder. The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat and squeezed hard. The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and now he felt victory slipping from his grasp. He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat. His eyes cleared. He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face. Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin. No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air. "Patrolman," the girl's voice was beside him. "We're safe!" "Everything bongo?" Rolf wanted to know. "Of course," she smiled crookedly. "Glad of that." Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact. Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. "Do you know," she said, "even yet I do not know your name." Rolf grinned up at her. "Need to?" he asked. The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. "Handier than calling you Shorty all the time," she quipped. Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in plenty again. Rolf snorted. "Shorty," he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.

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What is Rolf's new plan when he spots the rocket?

63398_X7DLF0GV_4

20015_DIAMWBW8

Slate

Goings On About Town

1998.0

Jim Holt

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

Why is it suspected that William Shawn blushed at Green's remark?

20015_DIAMWBW8_1

20015_DIAMWBW8

Slate

Goings On About Town

1998.0

Jim Holt

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

What's true of Ross's accounts of Shawn?

20015_DIAMWBW8_2

20015_DIAMWBW8

Slate

Goings On About Town

1998.0

Jim Holt

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

What is the writer's view of Mehta's works?

20015_DIAMWBW8_3

20015_DIAMWBW8

Slate

Goings On About Town

1998.0

Jim Holt

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

What stance does the writer take in regards to Tina Brown.

20015_DIAMWBW8_4

20015_DIAMWBW8

Slate

Goings On About Town

1998.0

Jim Holt

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

What is an underlying issue that the writer touches upon throughout the whole passage?

20015_DIAMWBW8_5

20015_DIAMWBW8

Slate

Goings On About Town

1998.0

Jim Holt

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

How do Ross and Mehta view Brown's acquisition of the magazine?

20015_DIAMWBW8_6

20015_DIAMWBW8

Slate

Goings On About Town

1998.0

Jim Holt

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Goings On About Town One of the funniest moments in Brendan Gill's 1975 memoir, Here at "The New Yorker ," comes during a luncheon at the now vanished Ritz in Manhattan. At the table are Gill; William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker ; and the reclusive English writer Henry Green. Green's new novel, Loving , has just received a very favorable review in The New Yorker . Shawn--"with his usual hushed delicacy of speech and manner"--inquires of the novelist whether he could possibly reveal what prompted the creation of such an exquisite work. Green obliges. "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest times of his life," he says. "The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.' " This was not the explanation Shawn was expecting, Gill tells us. "Discs of bright red begin to burn in his cheeks." Was Shawn blushing out of prudishness, as we are meant to infer? This was, after all, a man renowned for his retiring propriety, a man who sedulously barred anything smacking of the salacious--from lingerie ads to four-letter words--from the magazine he stewarded from 1952 until 1987, five years before his death. But after reading these two new memoirs about Shawn, I wonder. "He longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures," Lillian Ross discloses in hers, adding that he lusted after Hannah Arendt, Evonne Goolagong, and Madonna. As for Ved Mehta, he reports that Shawn's favorite thing to watch on television was "people dancing uninhibitedly" ( Soul Train , one guesses). I suspect Shawn did not blush at the "cunty fingers" remark out of prudery. He blushed because it had hit too close to home. Both these memoirs must be read by everyone--everyone, that is, who takes seriously the important business of sorting out precisely how he or she feels about The New Yorker , then and now. Of the two, Mehta's is far and away the more entertaining. This may seem odd, for Mehta is reputed to be a very dull writer whereas Ross is a famously zippy one. Moreover, Mehta writes as Shawn's adoring acolyte, whereas Ross writes as his longtime adulterous lover. Just knowing that Mrs. Shawn is still alive adds a certain tension to reading much of what this Other Woman chooses to divulge. Evidently, "Bill" and Lillian loved each other with a fine, pure love, a love that was more than love, a love coveted by the winged seraphs of heaven. "We had indeed become one," she tells us, freely venting the inflations of her heart. Shawn was managing editor of The New Yorker when he hired Ross in 1945 as the magazine's second woman reporter (the first was Andy Logan). He was short and balding but had pale blue eyes to die for. As for Ross, "I was aware of the fact that I was not unappealing." During a late-night editorial session, she says, Shawn blurted out his love. A few weeks later at the office, their eyes met. Without a word--even, it seems, to the cab driver--they hied uptown to the Plaza, where matters were consummated. Thereafter, the couple set up housekeeping together in an apartment 20 blocks downtown from the Shawn residence on upper Fifth Avenue and stoically endured the sufferings of Shawn's wife, who did not want a divorce. Now, Ross seems like a nice lady, and I certainly have nothing against adultery, which I hear is being carried on in the best circles these days. But the public flaunting of adultery--especially when spouses and children are around--well, it brings out the bourgeois in me. It also made me feel funny about William Shawn, whom I have always regarded as a great man. I loved his New Yorker . The prose it contained--the gray stuff around the cartoons--was balm for the soul: unfailingly clear, precise, logical, and quietly stylish. So what if the articles were occasionally boring? It was a sweet sort of boredom, serene and restorative, not at all like the kind induced by magazines today, which is more akin to nervous exhaustion. Besides, the moral tone of the magazine was almost wholly admirable--it was ahead of the pack on Hiroshima, civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the environment--and this was very much Shawn's doing. I do not like to think of him in an illicit love nest, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers. Happily, Ross has sprinkled her memoir with clues that it is not to be taken as entirely factual. To say that Shawn was "a man who grieved over all living creatures" is forgivable hyperbole; but later to add that he "mourned" for Si Newhouse when Newhouse unceremoniously fired him in 1987 (a couple of years after buying the magazine)--well, that's a bit much. Even Jesus had his limits. Elsewhere, Ross refers to her lover's "very powerful masculinity," only to note on the very next page that "if he suffered a paper cut on a finger and saw blood, he would come into my office, looking pale." She declares that "Bill was incapable of engendering a cliché, in deed as well as in word." But then she puts the most toe-curling clichés into his mouth: "Why am I more ghost than man?" Or: "We must arrest our love in midflight. And we fix it forever as of today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity." (File that under Romantic Effusions We Doubt Ever Got Uttered.) Nor is Ross incapable of a melodramatic cliché herself. "Why can't we just live, just live ?" she cries in anguish when she and Shawn, walking hand in hand out of Central Park, chance to see Shawn's wife slowly making her way down the block with a burden of packages. And what does she think of Mrs. Shawn? "I found her to be sensitive and likeable." Plus, she could "do a mean Charleston." There is nothing more poignant than the image of an openly cheated-upon and humiliated wife doing "a mean Charleston." William Shawn's indispensability as an editor is amply manifest in Ross' memoir. Word repetition? "Whatever reporting Bill asked me to do turned out to be both challenging and fun. ... For me, reporting and writing for the magazine was fun, pure fun. ... It was never 'work' for me. It was fun." Even in praising his skill as an editor, she betrays the presence of its absence. "All writers, of course, have needed the one called the 'editor,' who singularly, almost mystically, embodies the many-faceted, unique life force infusing the entire enchilada." Nice touch, that enchilada. When cocktail party malcontents mocked Shawn's New Yorker in the late '70s and early '80s, they would make fun of such things as E.J. Kahn's five-part series on "Grains of the World" or Elizabeth Drew's supposedly soporific reporting from Washington. But Ved Mehta was always the butt of the worst abuse. Shawn was allowing him to publish an autobiography in the pages of the magazine that was mounting up to millions of words over the years, and the very idea of it seemed to bore people silly. After the publication of two early installments, "Daddyji" and "Mamaji," each the length of a book, one critic cried: "Enoughji!" But it kept coming. And I, for one, was grateful. Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition, a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3, roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then, decades later, having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College, Oxford, to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ... ! Mehta's multivolume autobiography, titled Continents of Exile , has loss as its overarching theme: loss of sight, of childhood, of home and country, and now--with this volume--loss of Mr. Shawn's New Yorker . The memoir takes us from the time the author was hired as a staff writer in the early '60s up to 1994, when he was "terminated" by the loathed Tina Brown in her vandalization of his cherished magazine. Mehta evidently loved William Shawn at least as much as Lillian Ross did, although his love was not requited in the same way. He likens the revered editor to the character Prince Myshkin in The Idiot : innocent and vulnerable, someone who must be protected. And long-suffering, one might infer: "He was so careful of not hurting anyone's feelings that he often listened to utterly fatuous arguments for hours on end." Like Ross, Mehta struggles to express William Shawn's ineffable virtues. "It is as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception," Janet Flanner tells him once to calm him down. At times I wondered whether the author, in his ecstasies of devotion, had not inadvertently committed plagiarism. His words on Mr. Shawn sound suspiciously like those of Mr. Pooter on his boss Mr. Perkupp in The Diary of a Nobody . Compare. Mehta on Shawn: "His words were so generous that I could scarcely find my tongue, even to thank him." Pooter on Perkupp: "My heart was too full to thank him." Mehta: "I started saying to myself compulsively, 'I wish Mr. Shawn would ring,' at the oddest times of the day or night. ... How I longed for the parade of proofs, the excitement of rewriting and perfecting!" Pooter: "Mr. Perkupp, I will work night and day to serve you!" I am not sure I have made it sound this way so far, but Mehta's book is completely engrossing--the most enjoyable book, I think, I have ever reviewed. It oozes affection and conviction, crackles with anger, and is stuffed with thumping good stories. Many are about Mehta's daft colleagues at The New Yorker , such as the guy in the next office: His door was always shut, but I could hear him through the wall that separated his cubicle from mine typing without pause. ... Even the changing of the paper in the typewriter seemed somehow to be incorporated into the rhythmic rat-tat-tat ... year after year went by to the sound of his typing but without a word from his typewriter appearing in the magazine. Or the great and eccentric Irish writer Maeve Breenan, who fetched up as a bag lady. Or the legendary St. Clair McKelway, whose decisive breakdown came when he hailed a cab and prevailed upon the driver to take him to the New Yorker office at 24 West 43 rd St. "O.K., Mac, if that's what you want." He was in Boston at the time. (McKelway later told Mehta that if the cabby had not called him "Mac," his nickname, an alarm might have gone off in his head.) Mehta's writerly persona, a disarming mixture of the feline and the naive, is perfect for relating the little scandals that worried The New Yorker in the late '70s (plagiarism, frozen turbot), the drama of finding a worthy candidate to succeed the aging Shawn as editor, the purchase of the magazine by the evil Si Newhouse ("We all took fright") and the resultant plague of Gottliebs and Florios visited upon it, and what he sees as the final debacle: Tinaji. Lillian Ross, by contrast, takes a rather cheerful view of the Brown dispensation. Indeed, the new editor even coaxed Ross into re-joining the magazine, just as she was booting Mehta out. "I found that she possessed--under the usual disguises--her own share of Bill's kind of naivete, insight, and sensitivity," Ross says of Brown. "She, too, 'got it.' " A few months after Brown was appointed editor, Shawn died at the age of 85. He had long since stopped reading his beloved magazine, in sorrow and relief. That's if you believe Mehta. Ross assures us that Mr. Shawn was reading Tina Brown's New Yorker "with new interest" in the weeks prior to his death. Has Tina Brown betrayed the legacy of William Shawn, as Mehta fiercely believes, or has she continued and built upon it, as Ross is evidently convinced? Have the changes she has wrought enlivened a stodgy magazine or vulgarized a dignified one--or both? These are weighty questions, and one is of course loath to compromise one's life chances by hazarding unripe opinions in a public forum such as this.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

What best summarizes what the author has to say about William Shawn?

20015_DIAMWBW8_7

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

Why was human cloning banned?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_1

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

What is the main reason the writer takes issue with the Pope's stance on cloning?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_2

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

Why does the writer use other medical procedures as evidence to support cloning?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_3

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

How does the writer use twins in their argument?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_4

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

How do plants factor into the cloning argument?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_5

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

How would jealously possibly factor into the issue of cloning?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_6

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

Why, according to the writer, is the main underlying reason that people are opposed to cloning?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_7

20001_LKWTQ4I2

Slate

Human Clones: Why Not?

1997.0

Nathan Myhrvold

Periodicals; Specialized Magazine; Media Coverage

Human Clones: Why Not? If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly clone a human being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt compelled to act against this threat. President Clinton swiftly imposed a ban on federal funding for human-cloning research. Bills are in the works in both houses of Congress to outlaw human cloning--a step urged on all governments by the pope himself. Cloning humans is taken to be either 1) a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least, 2) a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But what, exactly, is so bad about it? Start by asking whether human beings have a right to reproduce. I say "yes." I have no moral right to tell other people they shouldn't be able to have children, and I don't see that Bill Clinton has that right either. When Clinton says, "Let us resist the temptation to copy ourselves," it comes from a man not known for resisting other temptations of the flesh. And for a politician, making noise about cloning is pretty close to a fleshly temptation itself. It's an easy way to show sound-bite leadership on an issue that everybody is talking about, without much risk of bitter consequences. After all, how much federally funded research was stopped by this ban? Probably almost none, because Clinton has maintained Ronald Reagan's policy of minimizing federal grants for research in human reproduction. Besides, most researchers thought cloning humans was impossible--so, for the moment, there's unlikely to be a grant-request backlog. There is nothing like banning the nonexistent to show true leadership. The pope, unlike the president, is known for resisting temptation. He also openly claims the authority to decide how people reproduce. I respect the pope's freedom to lead his religion, and his followers' freedom to follow his dictate. But calling for secular governments to implement a ban, thus extending his power beyond those he can persuade, shows rather explicitly that the pope does not respect the freedom of others. The basic religious doctrine he follows was set down some two millennia ago. Sheep feature prominently in the Bible, but cloning does not. So the pope's views on cloning are 1 st century rules applied using 15 th century religious thinking to a 21 st century issue. If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days with medical help--at delivery, and often before. Truly natural human reproduction would mean 50 percent infant mortality and make pregnancy-related death the No. 1 killer of adult women. True, some forms of medical help are more invasive than others. With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg are combined in the lab and surgically implanted in the womb. Less than two decades ago, a similar concern was raised over the ethical issues involved in "test-tube babies." To date, nearly 30,000 such babies have been born in the United States alone. Many would-be parents have been made happy. Who has been harmed? The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle--secular, humanist, or religious--says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not? No matter how closely you study the 1 st century texts, I don't think you'll find the answer. Even if people have the right to do it, is cloning a good idea? Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here. Hating a world of clones is hating the current populace. Never before was Pogo so right: We have met the enemy, and he is us ! Adifferent scare scenario is a world filled with copies of famous people only. We'll treat celebrity DNA like designer clothes, hankering for Michael Jordan's genes the way we covet his Nike sneakers today. But even celebrity infatuation has its limits. People are not more taken with celebrities than they are with themselves. Besides, such a trend would correct itself in a generation or two, because celebrity is closely linked to rarity. The world seems amused by one Howard Stern, but give us a hundred or a million of them, and they'll seem a lot less endearing. Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins. Scientific studies on such twins--reared together or apart--show that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few individual characteristics twins--or other clones--have in common, they are different people in the most fundamental sense . They have their own identities, their own thoughts, and their own rights. Should you be confused on this point, just ask a twin. Suppose that Unsolved Mysteries called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people--like the lost identical twin, only younger than you. A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA. Twins aren't the only clones in everyday life. Think about seedless grapes or navel oranges--if there are no seeds, where did they come from? It's the plant equivalent of virgin birth--which is to say that they are all clones, propagated by cutting a shoot and planting it. Wine is almost entirely a cloned product. The grapes used for wine have seeds, but they've been cloned from shoots for more than a hundred years in the case of many vineyards. The same is true for many flowers. Go to a garden store, and you'll find products with delightful names like "Olivia's Cloning Compound," a mix of hormones to dunk on the cut end of a shoot to help it take root. One recurring image in anti-cloning propaganda is of some evil dictator raising an army of cloned warriors. Excuse me, but who is going to raise such an army ("raise" in the sense used by parents)? Clones start out life as babies . Armies are far easier to raise the old fashioned way--by recruiting or drafting naive young adults. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori has worked well enough to send countless young men to their deaths through the ages. Why mess with success? Remember that cloning is not the same as genetic engineering. We don't get to make superman--we have to find him first. Maybe we could clone the superwarrior from Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Their bravery might--or might not--be genetically determined. But, suppose that it is. You might end up with such a brave battalion of heroes that when a grenade lands in their midst, there is a competition to see who gets to jump on it to save the others. Admirable perhaps, but not necessarily the way to win a war. And what about the supply sergeants? The army has a lot more of them than heroes. You could try to breed an expert for every job, including the petty bureaucrats, but what's the point? There's not exactly a shortage of them. What if Saddam Hussein clones were to rule Iraq for another thousand years? Sounds bad, but Saddam's natural son Uday is reputed to make his father seem saintly by comparison. We have no more to fear from a clone of Saddam, or of Hitler, than we do from their natural-born kin--which is to say, we don't have much to fear: Dictators' kids rarely pose a problem. Stalin's daughter retired to Arizona, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea is laughable as Great Leader, Version 2.0. The notion of an 80-year-old man cloning himself to cheat death is quaint, but it is unrealistic. First, the baby wouldn't really be him. Second, is the old duffer really up to changing diapers? A persistent octogenarian might convince a younger couple to have his clone and raise it, but that is not much different from fathering a child via a surrogate mother. Fear of clones is just another form of racism. We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against people based on a set of genetic characteristics known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount to discrimination against people based on another genetic trait--the fact that somebody already has an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme form of discrimination is genocide--seeking to eliminate that which is different. In this case, the genocide is pre-emptive--clones are so scary that we must eliminate them before they exist with a ban on their creation. What is so special about natural reproduction anyway? Cloning is the only predictable way to reproduce, because it creates the identical twin of a known adult. Sexual reproduction is a crap shoot by comparison--some random mix of mom and dad. In evolutionary theory, this combination is thought to help stir the gene pool, so to speak. However, evolution for humans is essentially over, because we use medical science to control the death rate. Whatever the temptations of cloning, the process of natural reproduction will always remain a lot more fun. An expensive and uncomfortable lab procedure will never offer any real competition for sex. The people most likely to clone will be those in special circumstances--infertile couples who must endure IVF anyway, for example. Even there, many will mix genetics to mimic nature. Another special case is where one member of a couple has a severe genetic disease. They might choose a clone of the healthy parent, rather than burden their child with a joint heritage that could be fatal. The most upsetting possibility in human cloning isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people with big egos will clone themselves. The common practice of giving a boy the same name as his father or choosing a family name for a child of either sex reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try and stop them. The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive advantage--say by diddling your spouse. Cloning is less personal than cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: Someone has got the reproductive edge on you. Once the fuss has died down and further animal research has paved the way, direct human cloning will be one more option among many specialized medical interventions in human reproduction, affecting only a tiny fraction of the population. Research into this area could bring far wider benefits. Clinton's knee-jerk policy changes nothing in the short run, but it is ultimately a giant step backward. In using an adult cell to create a clone, the "cellular clock" that determines the difference between an embryo and adult was somehow reset. Work in this area might help elucidate the process by which aging occurs and yield a way to reset the clocks in some of our own cells, allowing us to regenerate. Selfishly speaking, that would be more exciting to me than cloning, because it would help me . That's a lot more directly useful than letting me sire an identical twin 40 years my junior. To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mysteries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illuminating the processes that make the universe work and making us better through that knowledge. Various arguments can be advanced toward either view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast majority of people, including those who rail against science, owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of darkness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research. Instead, let us raise--and yes, even clone--new generations of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the discoveries of the next age.

https://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt

What is the underlying defence that the writer has in defence of cloning?

20001_LKWTQ4I2_8

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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From the passage, what can be inferred about Retief's personality?

61097_L4LGF3WL_1

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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What can be inferred from the passage about Jorgensen's Worlds?

61097_L4LGF3WL_2

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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How do you think Retief felt during his time on the ship?

61097_L4LGF3WL_3

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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What would have likely happened if Tony had attempted to apprehend and remove Retief himself?

61097_L4LGF3WL_4

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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Why did the guard tell Retief that the schedule for Jorgensen's World was filled up?

61097_L4LGF3WL_5

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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Why did the Captain decide to change course and skip Jorgensen's World?

61097_L4LGF3WL_6

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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What can be inferred about the destination decision at the end of the passsage?

61097_L4LGF3WL_7

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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Why was Retief's mission to Jorgensen's Worlds so important?

61097_L4LGF3WL_8

61097_L4LGF3WL

Gutenberg

The Frozen Planet

1959.0

Laumer, Keith

Space ships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Retief (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; PS; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Diplomats -- Fiction

THE FROZEN PLANET By Keith Laumer [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It is rather unusual," Magnan said, "to assign an officer of your rank to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission." Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew awkward, Magnan went on. "There are four planets in the group," he said. "Two double planets, all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti have been penetrating. "Now—" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—"we have learned that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force." Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned. "This is open aggression, Retief," he said, "in case I haven't made myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien species. Obviously, we can't allow it." Magnan drew a large folder from his desk. "A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately, Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war potential, by conventional standards, is nil." Magnan tapped the folder before him. "I have here," he said solemnly, "information which will change that picture completely." He leaned back and blinked at Retief. "All right, Mr. Councillor," Retief said. "I'll play along; what's in the folder?" Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down. "First," he said. "The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti." He folded another finger. "Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by the Theory group." He wrestled a third finger down. "Lastly; an Utter Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been holding in reserve for just such a situation." "Is that all?" Retief said. "You've still got two fingers sticking up." Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away. "This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave this building." "I'll carry it, sealed," Retief said. "That way nobody can sweat it out of me." Magnan started to shake his head. "Well," he said. "If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—" "I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "I remember an agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with cards and dice. Never played for money, though." "Umm," Magnan said. "Don't make the error of personalizing this situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its natural course, as always." "When does this attack happen?" "Less than four weeks." "That doesn't leave me much time." "I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest of the way." "That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?" Magnan looked sour. "Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is not misplaced." "This antiac conversion; how long does it take?" "A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of some sort." Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets inside. "Less than four hours to departure time," he said. "I'd better not start any long books." "You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination," Magnan said. Retief stood up. "If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon." "The allusion escapes me," Magnan said coldly. "And one last word. The Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't get yourself interned." "I'll tell you what," Retief said soberly. "In a pinch, I'll mention your name." "You'll be traveling with Class X credentials," Magnan snapped. "There must be nothing to connect you with the Corps." "They'll never guess," Retief said. "I'll pose as a gentleman." "You'd better be getting started," Magnan said, shuffling papers. "You're right," Retief said. "If I work at it, I might manage a snootful by takeoff." He went to the door. "No objection to my checking out a needler, is there?" Magnan looked up. "I suppose not. What do you want with it?" "Just a feeling I've got." "Please yourself." "Some day," Retief said, "I may take you up on that." II Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend "ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY." A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching Retief from the corner of his eye. Retief glanced at him. The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and spat it on the floor. "Was there something?" he said. "Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group," Retief said. "Is it on schedule?" The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. "Filled up. Try again in a couple of weeks." "What time does it leave?" "I don't think—" "Let's stick to facts," Retief said. "Don't try to think. What time is it due out?" The clerk smiled pityingly. "It's my lunch hour," he said. "I'll be open in an hour." He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it. "If I have to come around this counter," Retief said, "I'll feed that thumb to you the hard way." The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye, closed his mouth and swallowed. "Like it says there," he said, jerking a thumb at the board. "Lifts in an hour. But you won't be on it," he added. Retief looked at him. "Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation," he said. He hooked a finger inside the sequined collar. "All tourist reservations were canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship next—" "Which gate?" Retief said. "For ... ah...?" "For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds," Retief said. "Well," the clerk said. "Gate 19," he added quickly. "But—" Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign reading To Gates 16-30 . "Another smart alec," the clerk said behind him. Retief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him. "Lessee your boarding pass," he muttered. Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over. The guard blinked at it. "Whassat?" "A gram confirming my space," Retief said. "Your boy on the counter says he's out to lunch." The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back against the handrail. "On your way, bub," he said. Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and went to his knees. "You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked past while you were resting your eyes." He picked up his bag, stepped over the man and went up the gangway into the ship. A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor. "Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?" Retief asked. "Up there." The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven. The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the floor. It was expensive looking baggage. Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall, florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder. "Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out." He rolled a cold eye at Retief as he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared. "What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?" he barked. "Never mind! Clear out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting." "Too bad," Retief said. "Finders keepers." "You nuts?" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. "I said it's Mr. Tony's room." "I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters." "We'll see about you, mister." The man turned and went out. Retief sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it, glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned. "All right, you. Out," he growled. "Or have I got to have you thrown out?" Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the door. "Catch," he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the far wall of the corridor and burst. Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb. "Mister, you must be—" "If you'll excuse me," Retief said, "I want to catch a nap." He flipped the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Five minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open. Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye stared at Retief. "Is this the joker?" he grated. The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted, "That's him, sure." "I'm captain of this vessel," the first man said. "You've got two minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster." "When you can spare the time from your other duties," Retief said, "take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code. That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in interplanetary commerce." "A space lawyer." The captain turned. "Throw him out, boys." Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief. "Go on, pitch him out," the captain snapped. Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk. "Don't try it," he said softly. One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and stepped forward, then hesitated. "Hey," he said. "This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?" "That's him," the thick-necked man called. "Spilled Mr. Tony's possessions right on the deck." "Deal me out," the bouncer said. "He can stay put as long as he wants to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe." "You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain," Retief said. "We're due to lift in twenty minutes." The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The Captain's voice prevailed. "—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?" "Close the door as you leave," Retief said. The thick-necked man paused at the door. "We'll see you when you come out." III Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm. At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional glances Retief's way. A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes peered out from under a white chef's cap. "Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?" "Looks like it, old-timer," Retief said. "Maybe I'd better go join the skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun." "Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there." "I see your point." "You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate." Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed up with mushrooms and garlic butter. "I'm Chip," the chef said. "I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties, look at a man like he was a worm." "You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the right idea on the Soetti, too," Retief said. He poured red wine into a glass. "Here's to you." "Dern right," Chip said. "Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em. Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert. You like brandy in yer coffee?" "Chip, you're a genius." "Like to see a feller eat," Chip said. "I gotta go now. If you need anything, holler." Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct, there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against. Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table. As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth. The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing. "You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad," the thug said in a grating voice. "What's your game, hick?" Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up. "I don't think I want my coffee," he said. He looked at the thug. "You drink it." The thug squinted at Retief. "A wise hick," he began. With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug went down. Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed. "You can take your playmates away now, Tony," he said. "And don't bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough." Mr. Tony found his voice. "Take him, Marbles!" he growled. The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in. Retief heard the panel open beside him. "Here you go, Mister," Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed french knife lay on the sill. "Thanks, Chip," Retief said. "I won't need it for these punks." Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol from his shoulder holster. "Aim that at me, and I'll kill you," Retief said. "Go on, burn him!" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared, white-faced. "Put that away, you!" he yelled. "What kind of—" "Shut up," Mr. Tony said. "Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum later." "Not on this vessel, you won't," the captain said shakily. "I got my charter to consider." "Ram your charter," Hoany said harshly. "You won't be needing it long." "Button your floppy mouth, damn you!" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at the man on the floor. "Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the slob." He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room. The panel opened. "I usta be about your size, when I was your age," Chip said. "You handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day." "How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?" Retief said. "Sure, Mister. Anything else?" "I'll think of something," Retief said. "This is shaping up into one of those long days." "They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin," Chip said. "But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They won't mess with me." "What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?" Retief asked. "They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more smoked turkey?" "Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?" "Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was yer age." "I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's Worlds like?" "One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin' his own cookin' like he does somebody else's." "That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got aboard for Jorgensen's?" "Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says. Don't know what we even run in there for." "Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?" "To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?" "Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship." "Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins." Chip puffed the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and brandy. "Them Sweaties is what I don't like," he said. Retief looked at him questioningly. "You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin' head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled." "I've never had the pleasure," Retief said. "You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'." There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor. "I ain't superstitious ner nothin'," Chip said. "But I'll be triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now." Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door, accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy knock shook the door. "They got to look you over," Chip whispered. "Nosy damn Sweaties." "Unlock it, Chip." The chef opened the door. "Come in, damn you," he said. A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees. Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously. "Yo' papiss," the alien rasped. "Who's your friend, Captain?" Retief said. "Never mind; just do like he tells you." "Yo' papiss," the alien said again. "Okay," Retief said. "I've seen it. You can take it away now." "Don't horse around," the captain said. "This fellow can get mean." The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle, clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose. "Quick, soft one." "Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and I'm tempted to test it." "Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those snappers." "Last chance," Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch from Retief's eyes. "Show him your papers, you damned fool," the captain said hoarsely. "I got no control over Skaw." The alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering from the burst joint. "I told you he was brittle," Retief said. "Next time you invite pirates aboard, don't bother to call." "Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!" the captain gasped, staring at the figure flopping on the floor. "Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat," Retief said. "Tell him to pass the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in Terrestrial space." "Hey," Chip said. "He's quit kicking." The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close and sniffed. "He's dead." The captain stared at Retief. "We're all dead men," he said. "These Soetti got no mercy." "They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over." "They got no more emotions than a blue crab—" "You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back. We know their secret now." "What secret? I—" "Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n," Chip said. "Sweaties die easy; that's the secret." "Maybe you got a point," the captain said, looking at Retief. "All they got's a three-man scout. It could work." He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien gingerly into the hall. "Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti," the captain said, looking back from the door. "But I'll be back to see you later." "You don't scare us, Cap'n," Chip said. "Him and Mr. Tony and all his goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket." "You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your getting involved in my problems." "They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts." "They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers." "They don't scare me none." Chip picked up the tray. "I'll scout around a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try nothin' close to port." "Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now." Chip looked at Retief. "You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much. You didn't come out here for fun, did you?" "That," Retief said, "would be a hard one to answer." IV Retief awoke at a tap on his door. "It's me, Mister. Chip." "Come on in." The chef entered the room, locking the door. "You shoulda had that door locked." He stood by the door, listening, then turned to Retief. "You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?" "That's right, Chip." "Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give some orders to the Mate." Retief sat up and reached for a cigar. "Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?" "He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a gun?" "A 2mm needler. Why?" "The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute." Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip. "Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's cabin?" "This is it," Chip said softly. "You want me to keep an eye on who comes down the passage?" Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain looked up from his desk, then jumped up. "What do you think you're doing, busting in here?" "I hear you're planning a course change, Captain." "You've got damn big ears." "I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's." "You do, huh?" the captain sat down. "I'm in command of this vessel," he said. "I'm changing course for Alabaster." "I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster," Retief said. "So just hold your course for Jorgensen's." "Not bloody likely." "Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to change course." The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key. "Power Section, this is the captain," he said. Retief reached across the desk, gripped the captain's wrist. "Tell the mate to hold his present course," he said softly. "Let go my hand, buster," the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike. "You busted it, you—" "And one to go," Retief said. "Tell him." "I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!" "You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley hoods." "You can't put it over, hick." "Tell him." The captain groaned and picked up the mike. "Captain to Power Section," he said. "Hold your present course until you hear from me." He dropped the mike and looked up at Retief. "It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?" Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door. "Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with a sick friend." "Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery." "What are you going to do?" the captain demanded. Retief settled himself in a chair. "Instead of strangling you, as you deserve," he said, "I'm going to stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds." The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark. "Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me." Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him. "If anything happens that I don't like," he said, "I'll wake you up. With this."

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What can be inferred about the personality of Chip?

61097_L4LGF3WL_9

63442_IZ24VQ04

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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What can be inferred about the personality of Grannie Annie from the passage?

63442_IZ24VQ04_1

63442_IZ24VQ04

Gutenberg

Double Trouble

1970.0

Jacobi, Carl

PS; Older women -- Fiction; Flowers, Annabella C. (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Authors -- Fiction; Short stories

DOUBLE TROUBLE by CARL JACOBI Grannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees, I was running in circles—especially since Grannie became twins every now and then. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We had left the offices of Interstellar Voice three days ago, Earth time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky, entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in this desert as the trees. Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful wind that blew from all quarters. As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt. "This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit it at its narrowest spot." Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. "It looks like the rest of this God-forsaken moon," he said, "'ceptin for them sticks." Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that, taciturn, speaking only when spoken to. He could be excused this time, however, for this was only our third day on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, and the country was still strange to us. When Annabella C. Flowers, that renowned writer of science fiction, visiphoned me at Crater City, Mars, to meet her here, I had thought she was crazy. But Miss Flowers, known to her friends as Grannie Annie, had always been mildly crazy. If you haven't read her books, you've missed something. She's the author of Lady of the Green Flames , Lady of the Runaway Planet , Lady of the Crimson Space-Beast , and other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are, however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background. Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from visiting her "stage" in person. Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of Interstellar Voice on Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another novel in the state of embryo. What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book. Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the offices of Interstellar Voice . And then I was shaking hands with Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself. "Glad to meet you," he said cordially. "I've just been trying to persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric." "What's the Baldric?" I had asked. Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged. "Will you believe me, sir," he said, "when I tell you I've been out here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?" I scowled at that; it didn't make sense. "However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix. It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication. The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts' transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases. Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding apparatus, and the rush was on." "What do you mean?" Park leaned back. "The rush to find more of the ore," he explained. "But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found. "There are two companies here," he continued, " Interstellar Voice and Larynx Incorporated . Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that. However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric. "There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has crossed the Baldric without trouble." "What sort of trouble?" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, "Fiddlesticks, I never saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour." So now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and supplies. I walked forward to get a closer view of one of the flagpole trees. And then abruptly I saw something else. A queer-looking bird squatted there in the sand, looking up at me. Silver in plumage, it resembled a parrot with a crest; and yet it didn't. In some strange way the thing was a hideous caricature. "Look what I found," I yelled. "What I found," said the cockatoo in a very human voice. "Thunder, it talks," I said amazed. "Talks," repeated the bird, blinking its eyes. The cockatoo repeated my last statement again, then rose on its short legs, flapped its wings once and soared off into the sky. Xartal, the Martian illustrator, already had a notebook in his hands and was sketching a likeness of the creature. Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter began to descend toward the horizon. And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had just crossed. "Billy-boy," she said to me in a strange voice, "look down there and tell me what you see." I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat, another Earth man, and a Martian. Detail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves! "A mirage!" said Ezra Karn. But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way. Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away, they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared. "What do you make of it?" I said in a hushed voice. Grannie shook her head. "Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced by some chemical radiations," she replied. "Whatever it is, we'd better watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead." We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no repetition of the "mirage." The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery. For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it. "It's a kite," she nodded. "There should be a car attached to it somewhere." She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite. A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions. "This is Jimmy Baker," she said. "He manages Larynx Incorporated , and he's the real reason we're here." I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties, he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand goggles could not conceal. "I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie," he said. "If anybody can help me, you can." Grannie's eyes glittered. "Trouble with the mine laborers?" she questioned. Jimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the car's ability to move in any direction. "If I weren't a realist, I'd say that Larynx Incorporated has been bewitched," he began slowly. "We pay our men high wages and give them excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year. Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them." "Red Spot Fever?" Grannie looked at him curiously. Jimmy Baker nodded. "The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness on the part of the patient. Then they disappear." He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass. "They walk out into the Baldric," he continued, "and nothing can stop them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes are turned, they give us the slip." "But surely you must have some idea of where they go," Grannie said. Baker lit a cigarette. "There's all kinds of rumors," he replied, "but none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie ahead of us." I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but they didn't move. After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of Larynx Incorporated . As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp, a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was drawn. "Mr. Baker," he said breathlessly, "seventy-five workers at Shaft Four have headed out into the Baldric." Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely. "Shaft Four, eh?" he repeated. "That's our principal mine. If the fever spreads there, I'm licked." He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained standing. Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to the bottle of Martian whiskey there. "There must be ways of stopping this," she said. "Have you called in any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the men away until the plague has died down?" Baker shook his head. "Three doctors from Callisto were here last month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away, I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all rights." A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said "Okay" and threw off the switch. "The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric," he said slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk. Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings. "Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that corridor is at its widest," she said. Baker looked up. "That's right. We only began operations there a comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of Interstellar Voice , our rival, in a year." Grannie nodded. "I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up there," she said. "But first I want to see your laboratory." There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire and other items. The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to roll down the ramp. Not until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and neither would her millions of readers. Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled. "Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet." A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long corridor which ended at a staircase. "Let's look around," I said. We passed down the corridor and climbed the staircase to the second floor. Here were the general offices of Larynx Incorporated , and through glass doors I could see clerks busy with counting machines and report tapes. In another chamber the extremely light Acoustix ore was being packed into big cases and marked for shipment. At the far end a door to a small room stood open. Inside a young man was tilted back in a swivel chair before a complicated instrument panel. "C'mon in," he said, seeing us. "If you want a look at your friends, here they are." He flicked a stud, and the entire wall above the panel underwent a slow change of colors. Those colors whirled kaleidescopically, then coalesced into a three-dimensional scene. It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me, were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing directly behind them. "It's Mr. Baker's own invention," the operator said. "An improvement on the visiphone." "Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?" "Sure." The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice entered the room. It stopped abruptly. "The machine uses a lot of power," the operator said, "and as yet we haven't got much." The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself posted of Grannie's movements. Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing. I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of Antlers Park flashed on the screen. "Hello," he said in his friendly way. "I see you arrived all right. Is Miss Flowers there?" "Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four," I said. "There's trouble up there. Red spot fever." "Fever, eh?" repeated Park. "That's a shame. Is there anything I can do?" "Tell me," I said, "has your company had any trouble with this plague?" "A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula. I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any trouble, I shouldn't either." We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room. Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos. "There's an eyrie over there," Jimmy Baker was saying. "We might as well camp beside it." Moments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in the visiscreen room, I watched him. There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park took form. Ezra spoke over my shoulder. "He's doing scenes for Grannie's new book," he said. "The old lady figures on using the events here for a plot. Look at that damned nosy bird! " A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird companions. And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw the image of Jimmy Baker. The real Jimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. "I've got it!" she said. "Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images. They're Xartal's drawings!" "Don't you see," the lady continued. "Everything that Xartal put on paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images." The Larynx manager nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "But why don't the birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?" "Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and made a greater impression on their brains," Grannie replied. Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park. Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank. "Sorry," the operator said. "I've used too much power already. Have to give the generators a chance to build it up again." Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs. "That explains something at any rate," the old prospector said. "But how about that Red spot fever?" On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been attacked by the strange malady. Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while sleeping or lounging in the barracks. Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds. Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those bunks some thirty men lay sleeping. The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk toward that window. "Look here," he said. Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work. All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men. I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run. Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator: "Turn it on!" The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel. I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice. Ezra Karn jabbed my elbow. "Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be getting sick of this blamed moon." It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers, never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues and facts to a logical conclusion. "Ezra," I said, "we're going to drive out and meet them. There's something screwy here." Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw another car approaching. It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said: "We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin." He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind. Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me. "Ezra!" I yelled, swinging the car. "That wasn't Grannie! That was one of those damned cockatoo images. We've got to catch him." The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead. I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in. The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head. "Heat gun!" Ezra yelled. Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole shattered our windscreen. The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared, but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of speed, I raced alongside. The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and sent it coiling across the intervening space. The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free from his grasp. "What have you done with Miss Flowers?" I demanded. The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest. "Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees." I leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths. Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or doorway between. I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power with an exclamation of astonishment. There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing. "Grannie!" I yelled. "What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?" She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock. "Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers," she said, a twinkle in her eyes. "I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of trouble." She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve. "Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you." She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement. Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down the center of the gorge toward the entrance. But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian. "Ultra violet," Grannie Annie explained. "The opposite end of the vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've reached Shaft Four." Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four. We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always ahead of us. Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if worked successfully would see Larynx Incorporated become a far more powerful exporting concern than Interstellar Voice . Antlers Park didn't want that. It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx barracks. For he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself, capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness. Then suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove to head her off before she reached Shaft Four. He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague. Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.

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Why was Baker hesitant to send his employees on an enforced vacation?

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