Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  All at once the stars were darkened. From overhead as the ship was oriented, a long black shape, picked out by patterned lights, drove past and dwindled into the flaming constellations. The power shell had arrived. Words were at an end.

  Instead, there roared out the mighty voices of the after tubes. The sustained forward leap of the ship took breath from their bodies. But the colored lights came slipping back out of the starfields, their pattern expanding swiftly as seconds passed. As suddenly as he had accelerated, Mury closed the throttle, cut in the foredrive, and started braking his speed. Then, with delicate spurts of power from all the rockets, he brought the Shahrasad’s speed and course to parallel that of the great projectile which coasted effortlessly through space less than a mile away.

  In the weightless pause, Mury said quietly to the astrogator: “The magnet controls are before you, Arliess. Would it be too much strain on your conscience to operate them now?”

  The board had been built for efficiency; of the minor duties aboard the vessel, communications was assigned to the engineer, control of the powerful grapples to the astrogator, on the theory that while intership communication might be needed simultaneously with the use of the magnets, the plotting of the course would not so coincide. The strobophones and radio—the latter dead and lightless at the moment—fronted Ryd as he fidgeted in the engineer’s place.

  Arliess had delayed a moment. Now he answered harshly, “All right. What do you want?”

  “I was sure you would see. . . . Your cooperation won’t be difficult. The magnet rheostat is already stopped at the safety maximum for the fuel we’re going to handle. Give them all full power, then.” Ryd knew vaguely that too powerful magnetic fields upset delicate atomic balances, had in fact caused the great Tenebris disaster of 803 on Venus—a match-sputter, that, compared to what would soon hit North America—

  Woodenly, Arliess gave the magnets power. Unseen, his hands curled themselves tensely inside his sweat-slippery rubberized gloves; he was dangerously near hysteria. His keen, youthful imagination could see all too clearly into the near future. Over half of Earth, the skies would be red; there would be storm and earthquake, mountains splitting, rivers in flood, the fires of new volcanoes.

  Shahrazad picked up speed again, swinging in to intercept the power cylinder in its constant flight. She forged forward on bright wings of flame, a small, squat ship of Fate, not a part but a target, rest on her broad plated back.

  “Half magnets,” said Mury shortly, firing another bank of tubes to correct his course. Still robot-like, Arliess obeyed. His right hand obeyed. But his left snaked very slowly off the dash, under the detector box at his elbow, captured a dangling wire. Then—bend this way, bend that way, bend this way—

  The last power-thrust died. Inch by inch, Shahrazad and the fuel shell drifted together in their parallel courses. “Full magnets,” ordered Mury, and the drift accelerated. For two long, waiting minutes it continued; then the towship lurched slightly, like a boat meeting a long swell, and the great masses met with a prolonged grinding of curving steel on stegosauric plates of iron. A moment while they settled solidly together and clung, locked; then the rockets roared once more to life and Shahrazad surged ahead evenly. To the greatly-overpowered towship, the mere sixty tons of the loaded cargo shell made little or no difference.

  Mury sat bolt upright in his universal chair. His face was masked and serene, but the straight line of his head and neck was eloquent. His hand, resting lightly on the controls, was that of Zeus, gripping a thunderbolt.

  Slowly, without speaking, he drove the ship’s nose upward—upward as they were leveled off, but in reality downward, for gradually from overhead the great black curve of a planet’s dark limb crept down, shutting out the stars. Then its sunlit side burst into sight and the pallid glare came flooding through the great nose window to make the glow-lamps needless.

  It was Earth, and somewhere on that great globe, where the distorted shape of North America sprawled through half a dark hemisphere, was Pi Mesa. For this ship of Fate, not a port but a grim target.

  Then Yet Arliess’ voice fell hard and deadly on that triumphant moment. “Mury. Cut the drive!”

  Mury’s attention snapped to the astrogator. Even so with the back of his head to Ryd, the latter could see the slow tensing of his spare body, the sudden immobility that took him. Ryd froze.

  “You’d better think twice, Arliess,” said Mury in a low, brittle tone.

  “Cut the drive,” ordered Arliess again. “This is journey’s end, Mury. If you don’t cut it now, we’ll all die.”

  RYD INCHED forward in his seat; his fingers, numbed as if the cold of sheer space had crept into the cabin, found the release. Then he was able to see Arliess, hunched forward close to his control board. One hand clenched over the magnet rheostat: but something had gone wrong. The astrogator had bent the synthyl handle out and away from its contacts; and now something gleamed half-hidden in his hand. Its ends were almost touching the inner contact of the switch handle and the minimum-resistance tap of the rheostat coil—a short piece of bared silver wire, whose placing between those contacts would send current leaping through the shortened circuit and pouring full into the maget coils. It would envelop Shahrazad and power cylinder in a field of great intensity—but of brief duration, a fractional instant before the equilibrium of the stored atoms toppled and towship and cargo shell, together like one, vanished in one exploding flame, brighter than the Sun.

  This was the end. Mury was beaten, and of course he, Ryd, was beaten too. For keeps, this time. With maudlin self-pity, he saw himself as one caught and singled out for destruction by the gods in the machine.

  “Cut the drive,” repeated Arliess for the third time.

  Still the Panclast did not move, and his face betrayed none of what he must feel of the terrible irony by which a bit of wire, a short circuit, could wreck the plan that was to have shaken a planet. He said without stirring, “You can’t use bluff on me, Arliess.”

  “I know that and I’m not bluffing,” said young Arliess, pale to the lips, with burning eyes. “I know your type, Mury. The monomaniac. You’re not afraid of dying, but you are afraid when the success of your mission is threatened. But you can forget those plans now. We’re going to stop, flash a distress signal.”

  “I never meant we should escape the final crash of the power shell,” said Mury. “Escape was needless to the plan, and to die in such a cause . . . But I’ll make you a bargain now, Arliess. I’ll let you parachute to safety when we’re in the atmosphere, if you’ll swear to reveal nothing. Otherwise—perhaps you are aware of the power of—We.”

  Arliess’ grin was savage. “Don’t try to frighten me with children’s boogie-men. I know that such an organization exists, and I knew one of their members once—a poor, starved gutter-rat without principles or courage or anything but a vicious wish to kick the world that had kicked him. No, Mury, you’re something else again.”

  “I’ve explained my aims to you, Arliess. I have no private wrongs to avenge. I have acted because all history urges Earth and Mars to the death grapple; I have been an agent of history. You, not I, are the madman if you try to stand in the way.” Arliess laughed shortly. “I hold the final argument, though. . . . Cut the drive!”

  V

  FOR A moment their eyes met. Mury, all his weapons blunted, sat unmoving. Ryd, forehead beaded, gripping the arms of his chair, afraid to move or cry out lest he bring doom upon the ship, thought he saw Arliess’ fingers start to tighten.

  But in that instant a voice crashed into the death-still cabin. Harsh and vibrant, it rang through the open strobophones.

  “Shahrasad! Algol calling Shahrazad! You are twenty-one degrees off course and failing to correct as per schedule. What is the matter?”

  “All right,” said Arliess, his voice husky. “Last chance, Mury, before I blow us to atoms. Call them back. Tell them to overhaul us and board. From the intensity of that signal, they can’t be far away.” And inde
ed, even now the stars began to blur to the approach of the battle cruiser. Plainly, it had been trailing near; the dead detectors had told them nothing. Perhaps, after all, suspicion had been born behind the official calm facade. At any rate, here upon them were Algol and its guns. . . . Again the voice came through the phones, querulously now.

  Mury, without making any sudden motion, pressed his release. With equal care he came to his feet, standing without effort against a little more than one gravity.

  “The message sent,” he said coolly, “will be ‘Temporarily electrical failure. All under control.’ ” With that he knelt down in the narrow space between the crew-chairs and the instrument board.

  “If that fool tries to jump me, Ryd, use the gun.” His hands started to grope at the under panels of the control board, purposefully but without haste. “I’m going to disconnect the central fuse.”

  “You’ll never touch it,” said Arliess with a gasp. “I’m shorting the coil—now!”

  Ryd had, in a dazed automatism, lifted the gun. It was heavy and unsteady in his gloved right hand. He stared with eyes out of focus and with a sense of nightmare: death was coming and he wanted to live, had to stop it somehow, anyhow, now—

  Then all at once the gun steadied in his hand, burned hot as it spat its crisping thunderbolt. The cabin shook to the blast.

  And the weapon slipped from Ryd’s hand. He drew in air, sharp with ozone, in short sobbing gasps, and cowered in his padded seat, shaking uncontrollably. But he was alive, still alive.

  Arliess crouched half in and half out of his seat. He brought up the pistol which he had snatched almost as it fell, trained it across the motionless bundle between them on the floor. Mury was dead, as dead as many another dreamer whose human tools have turned in his hands.

  The astrogator snapped, “Take the strobophone sender and call Algol. Tell them—tell them—”

  “He’d have killed us all,” gasped Ryd, cringing.

  He choked off as the astrogator lashed out open-handed, knocking him to the floor. The young man stood for a moment gazing down on him, hands clenched at his sides; then—

  “You rat!” he snarled. “You filthy little rat!”

  1945

  THE CANAL BUILDERS

  They could see in their telescopes, geographical features of Mars. But their colonists who lived on Mars, reaching it through hyper spatial transmitters, couldn’t find those features!

  “Do you want to laugh?” demanded Dave Barkley. “No? Well, get a load of this, anyway.”

  He thrust the newspaper under the nose of his companion in the bus seat, a jowled, middle-aged man who stared at it with a sour lack of interest.

  “Hm-m-m,” he said just as sourly. “Back on Earth, they’ve gone crazy yet.”

  “No question about it,” agreed Dave cheerfully. He eyed the news item again and grinned. “A spaceship! And my own paper prints a story like that. I’ll have to give Elders a talking to.”

  Dave enjoyed planning to give Elders a talking to, because Elders was his managing editor. So far, it had always worked the other way, though. The sour chap seemed unimpressed, continued to gaze out the window across the aisle at the green luxury of the hydroponic farms rolling past. Plants brought from Earth grew there, but they exploded into wild new forms in the thin air and great temperature range of Mars. Above the fields of tenderer crops rose the mighty silvery standards of radiant heat lamps.

  The bus slowed. “ ‘Scuse me,” mumbled Dave, getting to his feet and groping overhead for his respirator. “Here’s where I get off.”

  “Hm-m-m,” said the other, reaching for the newspaper Dave was abandoning.

  After two minutes’ walk, Dave Barkley was taking off his respirator mask once more in the anteroom of the Martian Colonist’s editorial office. He was just zipping out of his insulated oversuit, as well, when Edgar, the office gremlin, came out to greet him, the pencil that was always behind his ear cocked at an angle that meant elation, which in turn meant that Edgar had news for somebody and hoped that it was bad. So far as Dave knew, that pencil served as nothing but an emotional indicator; he did not believe that Edgar could write. Nevertheless Edgar, due to a certain gift of omnipresence, was the boss’ right arm.

  Edgar flipped a thumb at the office. “The old man’s in there yoining for you,” he announced. “You better pick ’em up, bud.”

  Dave lifted both eyebrows. As a feature writer, one of the best on Mars, he was used to keeping bankers’ hours. If Elders was going to start rushing him, he told himself, Elders would have to be talked to.

  “Shut the door behind you,” growled Elders. “Sit down and listen.”

  Dave decided that the talking-to would have to be postponed. He sensed that at the moment the livers were not propitious—his editor’s liver, anyway, must have been acting up. Usually the latter’s speech was deceptively mild.

  Elders was talking jerkily. “Where have you been all morning? I sent you a call last night at eleven; you weren’t in and I put it on the recorder. I told you to be here at six.”

  “I was—” began Dave slowly.

  “Shut up,” snapped Elders. “I don’t care what, honka-tonk you were in. Right now, you’ve got just two hours to get to Earth and out to the Yuma Desert. Here”—he leaned forward across his desk—“is your teleport ticket to Tucson, Arizona. There’ll be a chartered plane waiting for you at the airport.”

  “Wait a minute!” gasped Dave. “If you’ve got a hot scoop, hand it to some bright young cub. Then, if you like, I’ll write his facts up into a killer-diller feature. But I’m not—”

  “You’re going to Earth,” said the editor, with something like his normal silky manner. “With or without a job. You know the law.”

  Dave knew the law. There were two ways to stay on Mars—with a visitor’s permit, or as a permanent working resident. There was a retirement provision, too, for those who wanted to stay after working age; but no one had yet been on Mars that long in the five years of colonization.

  Elders had never held that particular club over Dave’s head before. “Oh, oh,” said the writer to himself. “This must be something big.” Aloud he asked humbly, “Well, what is it?”

  “I want you to come back to Mars on the Callahan rocket, and write a story about it. They wired only last night to say they’d like a Martian journalist on the flight.”

  “Rocket . . . huh?” Dave’s eyes bulged. “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not kidding,” said Elders. “This is big stuff, Dave. Culmination of man’s dream of achievement, and all that.”

  “You want me to be killed?”

  Elders looked at him tenderly. “Do you think I’d risk my best feature writer . . . even if he is yellow . . . on a ship that wasn’t as safe as your Granny’s rocking chair? They’ve been working on this rocket stuff since before the second World War, thirty years before Ferency even dreamed up the mathematics that made the teleport. Now the problem’s immensely simplified, of course; they know just where they’re going and what landing conditions will be, they’ll have a welcoming committee to meet them, and they don’t have to carry fuel to get back. If you’d read the papers, you’d know what Callahan said in his last press interview: ‘The actual flight to Mars is merely a matter of doing in practice what we have already perfected in theory. There isn’t any chance or adventure left in it.’ ”

  “Then what’s the use of me going?” demanded Dave hopefully.

  “You, my boy, are the one who’s going to put in the adventure that ain’t there. You’re going to write about the first space trip like it was Dr. Livingstone finding the Congo.”

  “I’ve got acrophobia,” protested Dave weakly. “I’ll be so scared I won’t even know what’s going on.”

  “I know you’ll be scared,” answered Elders coolly. “You can write about bow scared you were. The public will eat it up. Now. on your way.” He extended the Earth ticket again; Dave took it numbly. “And,” added his editor, with a penetrating look, �
�if you stop so much as thirty seconds to whistle at one of those Mexican tamales, I’ll know it and have the oil boiling when you get back.”

  “If I get back,” mumbled Dave, “the oil will look good.” With the ticket clutched in his hand like a death sentence, he arose and stumbled out.

  It didn’t seem like anything, stepping through a little door in a teleport station in Aresia, and coming out in Arizona. Even though you knew that in doing so you walked through an interspace of barely-understood mathematics, that was something so far beyond the mind’s grasp that it left your thalamus untroubled. But the idea of plunging across forty million miles of vacuum in a fire-spewing steel shell was another thing, a concept close to the primal roots of fear. And it had never been done before.

  The rocket builders, these smoothfaced young technicians who had gathered about Callahan, were so calm about it. They pointed out to Dave that the last year had been spent in perfecting anti-acceleration devices, to give the crew the maximum degree of protection and comfort during take-off and landing; that the ship had been flown repeatedly in tests beyond the atmosphere; that everything was on paper, down to the eleventh decimal and corrections for the expansion rate of the Universe.

  He was talking to some of them when Callahan came into the concrete caisson that was built beside the launching tube, to shelter the workers who did not form the crew.

  Despite the funk he was in, Dave sized Callahan up with a newsman’s eye. The man was old with time and labor; most of a long lifetime had gone into the rocket that rested there above them. But there was a light in his sunken eyes that is seldom seen in the eyes of the aged. It was a light that made Dave feel queer.

  Callahan came straight toward him, a big bent man, leaning heavily on a cane; his broad, flat fingers were twisted by arthritis. He spoke bluntly, in a voice that still had force.

  “You’re one of the newspaper men. Oh, yes—Mr. Barkley. Well, Mr. Barkley, whether you come back or not from this expedition, your name will be immortal in history. And I think we will all come back.”