Dimensiion X

by Jerry eBooks

  SUBJECT: Secret weapon X-39, failure of.

  1. Research project X-39. a scmiliving chemical process attacking all forms of protoplasm, was released on the South American front according to plan last night.

  2. Secret weapon X-39 was found to be uncontrollable and is spreading throughout our own armies all over the world. In addition, infection centering on the secret research laboratories has covered at least one third of Asia.

  3. You are directed to—

  “Well?” demanded Sanderson.

  “That’s all, sir.” Culver replied quietly.

  The room immediately exploded into conversation, all pretense at military discipline forgotten. The commander shouted for order. He stood even straighter than his normally stiff military bearing allowed; he was the picture of triumph and confidence.

  “This interrupted message can be interpreted in only one way,” he declared ringingly. “Ensign Becker, you will inform all hands that the enemy’s suicide is worldwide and that the war is over!”

  For a long, long moment there was dead silence. The last peace rumor had died when most of these men were children. It took much time for the realization to sink in that the senseless murder was over at last.

  Then—cheering, laughing, slapping one another’s backs, the officers gave way to their emotions. Many became hysterical; a few still stood dumbly, failing to comprehend what “peace” was.

  Battle-hardened, stiffly militaristic Sanderson’s face was wet with tears.

  And then Lieutenant Carpenter screamed.

  All eyes were riveted on the psycho officer, a hideous suspicion growing in their minds as he cringed in a corner and yelled meaninglessly, his whole body shaking with unutterable terror. They had all seen men afraid of death—but in Carpenter’s mad eyes was reflected the essence of all the hells conceived in the ancient religions—he slavered, he whimpered, and suddenly his body began to ripple.

  His fellow officers stood rooted to the deck in sheer fright as he slid rather than fell to a huddled heap that continued to sink down after he had fallen, spreading and flowing and finally running like water.

  Sanderson stared in stunned horror at a pool of sticky yellow fluid that dripped through a bronze grating in the floor.

  Culver grinned foolishly. “Yes, commander,” he said airily, “you were right—the war is over.”

  Sanderson gingerly picked Carpenter’s notebook out of the sodden pile of clothing and bandages and the broken glass of the psycho officer’s spectacles. “Read that radiogram again,” he ordered hoarsely, signaling to the two crewmen to release their prisoner.

  The exec rubbed his wrists to restore circulation as the handcuffs were removed. Then he picked up the crumpled paper, smoothed it out.

  “Research Project X-39, a semiliving chemical process attacking all forms of protoplasm, was released—Culver choked over the words. “Sir, I—”

  And then in a few terrible minutes of screams and curses and hideous dissolution, all the officers understood why the Asiatics had committed suicide.

  Sergeant Fontaine tor some reason kept his head. He fired four shots rapidly from his pistol; one missed Carson, the others found their mark in Sanderson, Culver, and Becker, who looked oddly grateful as their bodies jerked under the impact and they slumped in unholy disintegration.

  Sanderson saluted solemnly with a dissolving arm.

  Fontaine had one more pellet in his. gun. He hesitated, looked inquiringly for a moment at the inscrutable Carson, then as he felt a subtle loosening under his skin he turned the weapon on himself and tired.

  Private Carson puffed nervously at a cigarette, staring in shocked, horrible fascination at the weird carnage—then ran blindly, fleeing from he knew not what.

  The terror flew on wings of light through the ruined enemy ship. Technicians, bridge watches, the ten enemy prisoners, psych corpsmen, navigators, combat crewmen—even the dead Oriental commanders joined the dissolving tide. Richards and Sheehan were the last to go; they hysterically accused each other of causing the horror, trying desperately to find some tangible cause for the Doom—they fought like great beasts, and fat Koch was not there to stop the fight—they struggled, and coalesced suddenly into one rippling yellow pool.

  Carson, still incased in his armor, raced and clattered through the deserted ship—the sound of his passing was almost sacrilegious, like the desecration of a tomb. Everywhere silence, smashed walls, empty suits of armor, little bundles of wet clothing, and curious yellow stains. Die, why can’t you die?

  Carson, the strange one—separated by more than aloofness from his fellows—spawned in a laboratory, the culmination of thousands of experiments in the vain hope of circumventing the extremity of the slaughter by manufacturing men. His metabolism was subtly different from that of normal man; he needed nicotine in his system for some reason—that was why he chain-smoked—but tobacco was a narcotic; it could not protect protoplasm. Why can’t you die, Carson? All through the ship, silence, wet clothing, little pools—not even the dead had escaped—nothing moved or lived except this running, half-mad man—or Thing—born in a laboratory, if one could say he had been “born.”

  A quick movement of his gloved hands sealed the round helmet on his shoulders. He ran and stumbled and climbed through passageways and down ladders; he fairly flew down the landing ramp and soon disappeared in the black depths of the tunnel.

  And the nighted cavern so recently hacked from the outraged crust was given back to the darkness and the silence it had always known.

  THE END.

  The Green Hills of Earth

  Robert A. Heinlein

  SOME REMEMBER RHYSLING FOR HIS SONGS; SOME BECAUSE HE WAS A PIONEER OF THE SPACEWAYS. BUT NO ONE WILL EVER FORGET HIS HEROISM ON THE FLIGHT FROM VENUS TO EARTH.

  THIS is the story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways—but not the official version. You sang his words in school:

  I pray for one last landing

  On the globe that gave me birth;

  Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies

  And the cool, green hills of Earth.

  Or perhaps you sang in French or German. Or it might have been Esperanto, while Terra’s rainbow banner rippled over your head.

  The language does not matter—it was certainly an Earth tongue. No one has ever translated Green Hills into the lisping Venusian speech; no Martian ever croaked and whispered it in the dry corridors. This is ours. We of Earth have exported everything from Hollywood crawlies to synthetic radioactives, but this belongs solely to Terra, and to her sons and daughters wherever they may be.

  We have all heard stories of Rhysling. You may even be one of the many who have sought degrees by scholarly evaluations of his published works—Songs of the Spaceways; The Grand Canal, and Other Poems; High and Far; and Up Ship!

  Nevertheless, although you have sung his songs and read his verses, in school and out, your whole life, it is at least an even-money bet—unless you are a spaceman yourself—that you have never even heard of most of Rhysling’s unpublished songs, such items as Since the Pusher Met My Cousin; That Red-headed Venusberg Gal; Keep Your Pants On, Skipper; or A Space Suit Built for Two. Nor can we quote them here.

  Rhysling’s reputation was protected by a careful literary executor and by the happy chance that he was never interviewed. Songs of the Spaceways appeared the week he died; when it became a best seller, the publicity stories about him were pieced together from what people remembered about him plus the highly colored handouts from his publishers. The resulting traditional picture of Rhysling is about as authentic as George Washington’s hatchet or King Alfred’s cakes.

  In truth, you would not have wanted him in your parlor; he was not socially acceptable. He had a permanent case of sun itch, which he scratched continually, adding nothing to his negligible beauty.

  Van der Voort’s portrait of him for the Harriman Centennial edition of his works shows a figure of high tragedy, a solemn mouth, sightless eyes concealed by bla
ck silk bandage. He was never solemn! His mouth was always open, singing, grinning, drinking or eating. The bandage was any rag, usually dirty. After he lost his sight he became less and less neat about his person.

  “Noisy” Rhysling was a jetman, second class, with eyes as good as yours, when he signed on for a loop trip to the Jovian asteroids in the I.R.S. Goshawk. The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went farther than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the two hundredth floor of Harriman Tower to ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.

  Jetmen were the most carefree of the lot and the meanest. Compared with them the masters, the radarmen, and the astrogators (there were no supers or stewards in those days) were gentle vegetarians. Jetmen knew too much. The others trusted the skill of the captain to get them down safely; jetmen knew that skill was useless against the blind and fitful devils chained inside their rocket motors.

  The Goshawk was the first of Harriman’s ships to be converted from chemical fuel to atomic power piles—or rather the first that did not blow up. Rhysling knew her well; she was an old tub that had plied the Luna City run, Supra-New York space station to Leyport and back, before she was converted for deep space. He had worked the Luna run in her and had been along on the first deep-space trip, to Drywater, on Mars—and back, to everyone’s surprise.

  He should have made chief engineer by the time he signed for the Jovian loop trip, but, after the Drywater pioneer run, he had been fired, blacklisted, and grounded at Luna City for having spent his time writing a chorus and several verses when he should have been watching his gauges. The song was the infamous The Skipper Is a Father to His Crew, with the uproariously unprintable final couplet.

  The blacklist did not bother him. He won an accordion from a Chinese barkeep in Luna City by cheating at one-thumb and thereafter kept going by singing to miners for drinks and tips until the rapid attrition in spacemen caused the company agent there to give him another chance. He kept his nose clean on the Luna run for a year or two, got back into deep space, helped give Venusberg its original ripe reputation, strolled the banks of the Grand Canal when a second colony was established at the ancient Martian capital, and froze his toes and ears on the second trip to Titan.

  Things moved fast in those days. Once the power-pile drive was accepted, the number of ships that put out from the Luna-Terra system was limited only by the availability of crews. Jetmen were scarce; the shielding was cut to a minimum to save weight, and few married men cared to risk possible exposure to radioactivity. Rhysling did not want to be a father, so jobs were always open to him during the golden days of the claiming boom. He crossed and recrossed the system, singing the doggerel that boiled up in his head and chording it out on his accordion.

  The master of the Goshawk knew him; Captain Hicks had been astrogator on Rhysling’s first trip in her. “Welcome home, Noisy,” Hicks had greeted him. “Are you sober, or shall I sign the book for you?”

  “You can’t get drunk on the bugjuice they sell here, skipper.” He signed and went below, lugging his accordion.

  Ten minutes later he was back. “Captain,” he stated darkly, “that Number Two jet ain’t fit. The cadmium dampers are warped.”

  “Why tell me? Tell the chief.”

  “I did, but he says they’ll do. He’s wrong.”

  The captain gestured at the book. “Scratch out your name and scram. We raise ship in thirty minutes.”

  Rhysling looked at him, shrugged, and went below again.

  It is a long climb to the Jovian planetoids; a Hawk-class clunker had to blast for three watches before going into free flight. Rhysling had the second watch. Damping was done by hand then, with a multiplying vernier and a danger gauge. When the gauge showed red, he tried to correct it—no luck.

  Jetmen don’t wait; that’s why they are jetmen. He slapped the emergency discover and fished at the hot stuff with the tongs. The lights went out, he went right ahead. A jetman has to know his power room the way your tongue knows the inside of your mouth.

  He sneaked a quick look over the top of the lead baffle when the lights went out. The blue radioactive glow did not help him any; he jerked his head back and went on fishing by touch.

  When he was done he called over the tube, “Number Two jet out. And for gosh sake get me some light down here!”

  There was light—the emergency circuit—but not for him. The blue radioactive glow was the last thing his optic nerve ever responded to.

  • • •

  As Time and Space come bending back

  to shape this star-specked scene,

  The tranquil tears of tragic joy still spread

  their silver sheen;

  Along the Grand Canal still soar the

  fragile Towers of Truth;

  Their fairy grace defends this place of

  Beauty, calm and couth.

  Bone-tired the race that raised the

  Towers, forgotten are their lores;

  Long gone the gods who shed the tears

  that lap these crystal shores.

  Slow beats the time-worn heart of Mars

  beneath this icy sky;

  The thin air whispers voicelessly that all

  who live must die—

  Yet still the lacy Spires of Truth sing

  Beauty’s madrigal

  And she herself will ever dwell along the

  Grand Canal!

  —From The Grand Canal, by permission of Lux Transcriptions, Ltd., London and Luna City.

  On the swing back they set Rhysling down on Mars at Drywater; the boys passed the hat and the skipper kicked in a half month’s pay. That was all—finis—just another space bum who had not had the good fortune to finish it off when his luck ran out. He holed up with the prospectors and archaeologists at How-Far? for a month or so, and could probably have stayed forever in exchange for his songs and his accordion playing. But spacemen die if they stay in one place; he hooked a crawler over to Drywater again and thence to Marsopolis.

  The capital was well into its boom; the processing plants lined the Grand Canal on both sides and roiled the ancient waters with the filth of the run-off. This was before the Tri-Planet Treaty forbade disturbing cultural relics for commerce; half the slender, fairy-like towers had been torn down, and others were disfigured to adapt them as pressurized buildings for earthmen.

  Now Rhysling had never seen any of these changes and no one described them to him; when he “saw” Marsopolis again, he visualized it as it had been before it was rationalized for trade. His memory was good. He stood on the riparian esplanade where the ancient great of Mars had taken their ease, and saw its beauty spreading out before his blinded eyes—ice-blue plain of water unmoved by tide, untouched by breeze, and reflecting serenely the sharp, bright stars of the Martian sky, and beyond the water the lacy buttresses and flying towers of an architecture too delicate for our rumbling, heavy planet. The result was The Grand Canal.

  The subtle change in his orientation which enabled him to see beauty at Marsopolis when beauty was not, now began to affect his whole life. All women became beautiful to him. He knew them by their voices and fitted their appearance to the sounds. It is a mean spirit indeed who will speak to a blind man other than in gentle friendliness; scolds who had given their husbands no peace sweetened their voices to Rhysling.

  It populated his world with beautiful women and gracious men. Dark Star Passing, Berenices Hair, Death Song of a Wood’s Colt, and his other love songs of the wanderers, the womenless men of space, were the direct result of the fact that his conceptions were unsullied by tawdry truths. It mellowed his approach, changed his doggerel to verse, and sometimes
even to poetry.

  He had plenty of time to think now, time to get all the lovely words just so, and to worry a verse until it sang true in his head. The monotonous beat of Jet Song—

  When the field is clear, the reports

  all seen,

  When the lock sighs shut, when the

  lights wink green,

  When the check-off’s done, when it’s

  time to pray,

  When the captain nods, when she

  blasts away—

  Hear the jets!

  Hear them snarl at your back

  When you’re stretched on the rack;

  Feel your ribs clamp your chest,

  Feel your neck grind its rest.

  Feel the pain in your ship,

  Feel her strain in their grip.

  Feel her rise! Feel her drive!

  Straining steel, come alive,

  On her jets!

  —came to him not while he himself was a jetman, but later while he was hitch-hiking from Mars to Venus and sitting out a watch with an old shipmate.

  At Venusberg he sang his new songs and some of the old, in the bars. Someone would start a hat around for him; it would come back with a minstrel’s usual take doubled or tripled in recognition of the gallant spirit behind the bandaged eyes.

  It was an easy life. Any space port was his home and any ship his private carriage. No skipper cared to refuse to lift the extra mass of blind Rhysling and his squeeze box; he shuttled from Venusberg to Leyport to Drywater to New Shanghai, or back again, as the whim took him.

  He never went closer to Earth than Supra-New York Space Station. Even when signing the contract for Songs of the Spaceways he made his mark in a cabin-class liner somewhere between Luna City and Ganymede. Horowitz, the original publisher, was aboard for a second honeymoon and heard Rhysling sing at a ship’s party. Horowitz knew a good thing when he heard it; the entire contents of Songs were sung directly into the tape in the communications room of that ship before he let Rhysling out of his sight. The next three volumes were squeezed out of Rhysling at Venusberg, where Horowitz had sent an agent to keep him liquored up until he had sung all he could remember.