by Jerry eBooks
So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?
It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again. He bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous. It cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head whirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened up and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.
“Hollis?”
Hollis nodded sleepily, tired of waiting for death.
“This is Applegate again,” said the voice.
“Yes.”
“I’ve had time to think. I listened to you. This isn’t good. It makes us bad. This is a bad way to die. It brings all the bile out. You listening, Hollis?”
“Yes.”
“I lied. A minute ago. I lied. I didn’t blackball you. I don’t know why I said that. Guess I wanted to hurt you. You seemed the one to hurt. We’ve always fought. Guess I’m getting old fast and repenting fast. I guess listening to you be mean made me ashamed. Whatever the reason, I want you to know I was an idiot too. There’s not an ounce of truth in what I said. To hell with you.”
HOLLIS felt his heart begin to work again. It seemed as if it hadn’t worked for five minutes, but now all of his limbs began to take color and warmth. The shock was over, and the successive shocks of anger and terror and loneliness were passing. He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day.
“Thanks, Applegate.”
“Don’t mention it. Up your nose, you bastard.”
“Hey,” said Stone.
“What?” Hollis called across space; for Stone, of all of them, was a good friend.
“I’ve got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.”
“Meteors?”
“I think it’s the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth once every five years. I’m right in the middle. It’s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes. God, it’s beautiful, all that metal.”
Silence.
“I’m going with them,” said Stone. “They’re taking me off with them. I’ll be damned.” He laughed.
Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million centuries, Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.
“So long, Hollis.” Stone’s voice, very faint now. “So long.”
“Good luck,” shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.
“Don’t be funny,” said Stone, and was gone.
The stars closed in.
Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space. And Hollis himself . . . He looked down. He, of all the others, was going back to Earth alone.
“So long.”
“Take it easy.”
“So long, Hollis.” That was Applegate.
The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.
They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.
And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth’s atmosphere.
I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.
He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everything was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.
When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor.
“I wonder,” he said, “if anyone’ll see me?”
The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”
The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois.
“Make a wish,” said his mother. “Make a wish.”
The Outer Limit
Graham Doar
He had fuel for ten minutes. Ten hours later he hadn’t come back. He was the first man to reach
Patrolship S2J3, Galactic Guard. Sector K. reporting. . . . Pursuant to instructions from the Central Council: Planet 3, Star 5, Galaxy C, Sector K, has been placed under absolute quarantine. Notification to inhabitants made. Mission accomplished. XEGLON, Commanding
AT fifty thousand feet he began to feel the loss of power, the thinner air starving the oxygen-eating turbojets. Their thunderous whisper rose to a screaming whine.
His air speed dropped from six hundred to four-eighty in the while it took to pull the lever that dropped the jet assembly, white cloud of parachute mushrooming as the heavy engines plummeted earthward. He switched on the flow of lox and alky pressured by the nitrogen flasks under his seat. The liquid oxygen and alcohol sparked and caught, there was a hissing roar and he felt a sledge-hammer blow against his back and shoulders. Rocket No. 1 was firing, and his air-speed indicator whirled under the almost instantaneous acceleration, the sharklike ship leaping forward in a flashing upward glide.
This was the new one. The unknown. He’d flown her before, a dozen times, but not for speed and altitude, never at full power. Behind him, crowding the narrow fuselage, was fuel for ten minutes with all eight rockets firing full thrust. This was the new one and t his was the day. He was going higher and faster than man had ever gone. He switched on No. 2.
He passed one hundred thousand feet at eighteen hundred miles an hour with only four rockets blasting. Counting slowly, his eyes glued to the clock on the instrument panel, he reached and turned No. 5 switch. Again the ship bucked, only slightly now, and the speed indicator rolled upward.
He was flying in absolute dead quiet. Only the sounds within the pressurized tiny cockpit reached his ears, the ticking of the clock, the beating of his heart, the small hissing of the nitrogen flow. The ca
taclysmic roar of his ship’s passing formed miles in his wake, t he mighty voice of the rockets was left far behind. He was traveling at nearly four times the speed of sound. He wondered what old terra firma would look like at this altitude. Jammed into the crowded cockpit, his lap full of instruments, his helmeted head almost touching the canopy, there is was no way he could manage to look down. But he knew the clicking camera in the floor of his plane was making a record. He cut in the seventh rocket, wondering if the recording instruments were working. The colonel wasn’t going to believe this without proof. Mach 5—it was strictly a guess at this altitude—and still accelerating, still climbing.
He saw it just as he reached to switch on No. 8. He was pulling the ship in a wide circle, trying it for maneuverability at this altitude and speed. The ship jumped and side-slipped a bit when the last rocket fired. At that moment the sunlight glinted on some object far ahead and above him.
He didn’t believe it. He knew all the standard explanations of the great flying-saucer plague—the runaway balloons, the planet Venus, hallucinations brought on by strain and weariness. Whatever this object was, this metallic ellipsoid turning slowly above him, it wasn’t a ship. He knew that.
But he had six minutes’ fuel left and with all eight rockets boosting him along, he could run rings around anything. A closer look wouldn’t hurt. He pointed the shark’s nose at that far-off gleam.
A long while ago the colonel had been worried. Now he was no longer worried. He had given up. He’d had the search planes out for hours now, looking for any sign of that double-damned X2JTO that had almost certainly killed his best pilot. The colonel wasn’t kidding himself that the captain might have parachuted safely. You don’t hit the silk at rocket speeds forty miles up. Radar reported the ship that high when the screen went blank.
The F-80 chase planes that had been sent up to observe the test had radioed in, almost immediately after he’d dropped the turbojet take-off assembly. They’d lost him about the time he cut in the fourth rocket. The ship was flying like a dream, they’d reported, but they couldn’t keep him in sight.
The colonel looked at his watch and sighed. The search had been on for nine hours, and not even a nibble yet. It was hopeless. Sometime in the next few days—or weeks—reports would begin to drift in of pieces of the ship being picked up here and there. Maybe pieces of the pilot too. In the meantime, they’d build another one. And some flying fool would take it up. Death, the fear of death couldn’t stop them. It never had and it never would. They had no fear, not that kind. Thank God, the colonel thought, for the flying fools. They had punched holes in the so-called sonic barrier and were beating their stubborn heads against the walls of space itself. He himself was getting old, the colonel realized. He himself was afraid of a great many things. Once he’d been one of the flying fools, but now the palms of his hands were wet at the thought of sending another of his pilots up in one of those skyrockets. He wondered if there was a drink left in the bottle he had in his desk, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to look and see.
The telephone at his elbow tinkled sharply. He spoke quietly, holding his voice firm with an effort. “All right.”
“Colonel! He’s in!”
“Who is this speaking?”
“Staff Sergeant Smith, sir.”
The colonel’s voice was sharp now. “Have you been drinking, sergeant?”
“He’s landing right now, sir. The tower sighted him just a minute ago. The ship looks all right.” He slammed down the phone and was through the door in three long strides. His driver had seen the plane. He spun the colonel’s car to the door, motor roaring, and in a split second they were tearing across the field.
There was a drink left in the bottle after all. The colonel split it between two glasses and handed one to the pilot. The junior officer, both in age and rank, was not a big man, maybe an inch or two shorter than the six-foot colonel. He was lean, whipped by strenuous play and more strenuous work into one hundred and sixty-five pounds of bone and sinew. His normally good-natured, rather boyish face with the steel-blue eyes was now a yellowish purple, the hue that passes for pallor on a deeply tanned skin. The finely tuned nerves brought a quiver to the fingers that held a cigarette, and the golden-brown liquid shivered in the glass, but his grin was easy and the deep voice came out firm and low. “Sit down. Hank. This one will knock you over.”
The colonel’s answering grin was friendly, if uneasy, and he said, “Bill, I’ve called off the search, but I’d already shot the word to Washington. I’ve got to get an explanation on the wire soon, so let’s have it.”
“What’s your idea about the flying saucers, Hank?”
“Not now, Bill. First things first. I want to know—I’ve got to know-how you stretched ten minutes’ fuel to keep you in the air over ten hours.”
“Believe me, this is it.” The captain leaned forward in his chair. “One thing before I start to talk. Will you have the Geiger men run over that ship before it goes to the technicians?”
“What did you run into?”
“So help me, Hank, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s radioactivity, but we better know for sure.”
The colonel reached one hand for the phone. “We’d better have you looked over, too, hadn’t we?”
“No. No, I’ll be all right. They said I’d be all right.”
The colonel started to speak, but he checked himself and picked up the phone. He gave the orders for the Geiger team to inspect the ship for fission products, then added as an obvious afterthought, “After you complete your inspection, lieutenant, have that ship sealed. Whatever your findings, understand? Have the ship sealed, to be opened only on a direct order from me. . . . Right.”
He hung up slowly, not turning back to face the pilot. His voice was tired as he spoke. “All right, Bill. This ‘they’ you speak of—that’s going to be a little hard to get across.” If he’s getting ready to feed me one of those men from Mars yarns, he thought, l should get the psychos in right now. But I know this boy. A night’s sleep—he’ll be all right.
“Well, Hank, I chased me a flying saucer. And I caught it. Or rather it caught me.” The captain finished his drink and placed the glass with gentle precision on the corner of the desk.” I was cruising nicely about two hundred thousand feet out at about four thousand m-p-h. I spotted—something, and decided to take a look at it. It must have been going at about half my speed. I caught up fast. It was—oh—egg-shaped and perfectly smooth. No visible openings anywhere. I made two passes looking it over and started back for a third. There was a humming sound—a kind of gentle vibration—and I blacked out. I was bending straight at the thing. Hank, and I felt this—sort of twang, as though I’d run into a harp string, and the—the black came down over me. I thought—I felt it coming for a split second—I thought—— Is there another drink left. Hank?” Sweat glistened on the pilot’s forehead. The colonel passed his own still-full glass across the desk. This was probably the wrong treatment, he thought, but the guy needed a drink.
The captain took only a small swallow, but some of the flutter went out of the strong, lean hands. “Hank, I thought it was going to be the biggest smash since Hiroshima. Well, it wasn’t. I came to—inside their ship!”
The colonel spoke gently. “Bill, this is obviously a hell of a strain on you. And you’ll have to run through it again, you know. Shall I call the—Major Donaldson in and let him hear it now?”
“The psychiatrist? Yeah, I guess he’ll want to test my jerks. Well, Hank, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to put it off till tomorrow. I’d like to finish telling you, then go out and get good and drunk. Because, Hank, unless I miss my guess. I’ve just been tipped off to the way the world ends.”
“Okay, Bill. But don’t let Donaldson know you read Eliot or he’ll certify you nuts. He thinks pilots read the comics.”
“Thanks, Hank. Well, I came to, inside the ship, and I was surrounded by—let’s call them men.”
“The men from Mars, eh
?”
A surge of color rode up the pilot’s lean face. “Mars, Hank? No.” He considered. He spoke slowly. “I hadn’t thought—I couldn’t quite grasp where—— Hank, this solar system of ours—it’s a pretty big thing. I mean—you know—to us. They were frying to impress me with the importance, the absoluteness of their message, and they pointed out the terrific trouble they had gone to, the miracles of space navigation they’d had to perform in order to find us. Not our planet, Hank, but our sun! That greatblazing orb of unbearable brightness, Hank, became a pinpoint glimmer to them when nine tenths of their journey was completed. How far would that be, Hank? You tell me where they came from.”
The colonel was reasonable. “Then how did they find us in the first place? What brought them here?”
“You know the old one about the man whose reach exceeds his grasp? That’s us. Hank. All of us. We rang their bell, Hank. We tolled them in.”
“Suppose you just tell it straight.” There was the faintest reminder of his rank in the colonel’s voice. He was uneasy, he was tired and he liked this kid. It wasn’t pleasant to watch this sort of thing, though he’d seen it before in these hot pilots. Let him talk it out, that might do the trick. Thank God, it was always temporary; nearly always.
“Right.” Unconsciously the captain sat straighter in his chair. His tone became more clipped. “They looked—I don’t know what they looked like. They were just—presences. There were a lot of them—I don’t know how many. The inside of the ship was jammed completely full of incredibly intricate-looking machinery, and the noise was utterly deafening. After a few seconds I couldn’t, hear a sound. I—I just didn’t believe it at first. Then—well, there it was. You laid to believe it. I was angry, too—it. seemed so-so belittling. But then suddenly I wasn’t angry. There was nothing to strike at. Anyway, they seemed friendly, even gentle.”
“Just one thing, Bill. If you couldn’t hear anything, how did they speak to you? And in English, I suppose?”
“Funny.” The pilot looked startled. “I hadn’t thought of that. They didn’t speak. They just—planted the ideas in my own head. It was just—suddenly, it was there—in my mind.”