Unable to stop thinking of Sally, Miss Trenchard picked up a magazine to read until Kenneth Burk called for her that evening. She didn’t have to force attention long. Thumbing through the pages of a sensational Sunday news-magazine supplement she saw an article that stopped her. “What is ESP?” the title demanded. “Noted doctor discusses Extra-Sensory Perception” read the subhead.
The teacher’s eyes were racing when Burk appeared. Miss Trenchard dropped the magazine, stood and smiled. Kenneth was so handsome he was almost pretty. Miss Trenchard was glad her fiance’s ears were a little too large; she didn’t want to marry a pretty man. A man as handsome as Kenneth was bound to have a few people make jealous, nasty remarks about him. Then, too, his father being wealthy didn’t help matters as far as gossip was concerned.
“Come on, woman,*’ he said softly after he had kissed her. “I have tickets to the Little Theater at Carson. We’re already late.”
Miss Trenchard forgot Sally, crosses over doors, ESP, and camp in general as she pulled a sequined stole over her shoulders and left with Kenneth.
The next morning on the way to school she was reminded by seeing another house with a cross over the door, and a third with a little bulb of garlic swaying in the early breeze. Apprehensively she knew afresh that old-world superstition was as close to these people as it had been in medieval Europe.
Sally was on the school ground as Miss Trenchard climbed the hill. Her smile was pathetically grateful when Miss Trenchard spoke. “What were you playing Sally?” the teacher asked.
“Counting,” Sally answered promptly.
“Counting what?”
“Hops and steps,” Sally said, a bit uneasily now.
“Why?”
“If you’re busy counting, your head can’t—” the child paused in confusion. “I don’t know the word for what it is Miss Trenchard,” she confessed.
“Think?” the teacher smiled sympathetically. “Is that the word you want?”
“I guess so,” Sally aimlessly kicked a small stone. She wore a curiously listening, unhappy expression. Characteristic, the teacher thought concernedly. With a gentle pat and a smile of farewell the teacher walked away. Back of her she could hear the plop-plop of Sally’s worn little shoe hitting the dust of the schoolyard.
Late in the afternoon, a note was delivered to the teacher. She read it, drawing in her breath sharply. Little Teddy Van Houten had been missing since around noon. Would she dismiss the upper grades to help search the camp, while adults spread afield?
Reflexively, Miss Trenchard looked at Sally. Again that curious listening look. Would Sally know where Teddy was? Could she find him?
Quickly she explained to the children, directing them to report to Mr. Corbett at the company store. “Wait for me Sally,” she commanded as she supervised the other children marching out “We’ll go down after I tell Miss Eckert.” Miss Eckert was the second teacher in this little school.
Sally nodded and sat down, her head held slightly to one side, a small pucker between her eyes. When Miss Trenchard returned, Sally didn’t seem to hear her. She was sitting quietly with an air of intense concentration.
“Do you know where Teddy is, Sally?” Miss Trenchard asked. If Sally knew, she was going to go herself and get Teddy, and not let Sally be exposed to the venom of camp incomprehension and fear.
Slowly Sally shook her head, green eyes wide. “I can’t find him Miss Trenchard. He ain’t—isn’t—talking.”
“You can’t hear people all over can you Sally7”
“Sort of,” Sally wriggled uncomfortably. “Sometimes,” she amended.
Miss Trenchard felt a sense of relief. Sally was observant, and unusually logical for a child, that was all. Then she recalled she was supposed to meet Kenneth after school to go to County Seat for dinner. He would not have left his boarding house yet. Swiftly she wrote a few words of explanation, inclosing the note that had been sent her about Teddy.
She didn’t want to stop at his boarding house. Mrs. Garton was his landlady, and she didn’t want to give her fuel for her tongue. She would have Sally deliver the note.
“Sally dear, will you take this note to Mr. Burk please? Run—and wait for me at the store.”
Sally’s green eyes were wide. “He’s already gone, Miss Trenchard,” the child said.
“Gone? How do—” she had started to ask the question that inevitably started Sally’s tears. “You mean he’s searching for Teddy! Naturally, he would be. I suppose everyone is, or they wouldn’t have asked help from school children.”
“No, ma’am; he’s gone to Carson.”
“Carson? What for?” Miss Trenchard voiced her question. She was disturbed. He wouldn’t have gone without telling her, when they had a date after school.
“He didn’t want to go,” Sally explained. “Vera said he had to, or she’d tell his paw about the baby.”
Anger flared in the teacher’s breast, blotting out the missing child, everything. Vera! A waitress in Carson. Her name had been linked with Kenneth’s, and Kenneth had told her there was nothing to it. Now here was this child calmly repeating gossip, telling her that Kenneth was seeing Vera!
“Sally,” her voice was stem. “Never repeat that to anyone. It isn’t so, do you hear me? It just isn’t so!”
Sally’s eyes were swimming in tears. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry Miss Trenchard. You didn’t ast me where Mr. Burk went; I shouldn’t have said nothing. I always go and forget.”
Miss Trenchard was too angry to soothe Sally now; she didn’t even want her around. “Go straight home Sally,” she ordered. “It will be better for you to stay with your mother.”
Sally nodded and quietly walked away, closing the door softly behind her. Miss Trenchard could hear her sobs, even with the door closed. She was sorry—but no wonder people were irritated! That thought predominated as she made her way to the company store to aid in the search for the missing Teddy.
The night that followed was a nightmare of voices clanging like gongs in the wind, flashlights and lanterns weaving in ever widening circles. No Teddy. Old mine shafts and caves dotted the area. It was dangerous for a child—or a man—lost at night.
The sky at dawn was slate gray, the taste of dull winter and snow in its mouth. No Teddy. Groups drifted in, drank coffee, and went out again. Miss Trenchard, making sandwiches, washing cups and spoons in search headquarters, had little time to think of Kenneth. By midnight she had quit scanning faces of incoming groups with eager eyes searching for his handsome face; he wasn’t out with the search parties.
State Police were on the scene by seven in the morning. The tired teacher was just turning her duties to a woman who had had some rest, if not sleep, when a green-eyed hurricane burst through the door.
“Miss Trenchard! Miss Trenchard! I know where Teddy is now,” she cried: “You wanted to go. He’s in a hole in back of the mule bam; he’s hurt, and awful scared. Hurry, Miss Trenchard! You gotta hurry,” the child insisted.
A State Policeman took Sally by the arm. “Show me,” he said.
Sally wrenched her arm free. “Miss Trenchard wanted to find him,” she cried. “Come on quick, please Miss Trenchard.”
“Yes, Sally. Come on dear; show us.”
Teddy’s weak voice cried from the bottom of a long-forgotten dry well mouth, boarded over and dirt piled over the boards. A gaping hole told of breakage. He was quickly brought to the surface and a doctor knelt over him.
“Hospital,” he ordered. “Concussion. He’s probably been unconscious most of the time. No—don’t touch him, Mrs. Van Houten. There may be other injuries. Let’s get him to the hospital at once.”
The man who had gone down in the well for Teddy now sent up his dog, a terrier pup. The boy put his hand out, patted the dog. “My puppy failed in hole, and I couldn’t get him,” he said, closing his eyes.
“Teddy’s been found,” the word spread like a broadcast through the camp. “Teddy’s found!”
“Who?” came like an
echo of “Where?”
“Sally Banim told ’em where he was, and sure enough, he was where she said.”
“How’d she know?”
“She wasn’t searching. I ask you how did she know if she didn’t have something to do with him being there?” Mrs. Garton asked.
The question was picked up, tossed, repeated, distorted. “Sally Banim pushed Teddy in an old well and kept quiet about it all night.” Ominously it gathered, festering in the breasts of tired men; shooting fear for their own children into breasts of women. Mrs. Garton picked up the end of the tale she had tossed out, and failed to recognize her own invention. “I, for one, don’t put it a bit past her,” she chattered viciously. “I wondered about it myself. I alius said that snoopy kid would cause trouble.” There was sadistic pleasure in her voice. “Now she has done it. We gotta get her outta camp.”
A police officer, standing uneasily by his car, lifted his head. Trained to know the temper of crowds, he opened the door of his car and commanded, “Get in, Sally. You, too—stay with her, Miss. Quick.”
Miss Trenchard got in with Sally, too tired to feel the surge that meant danger swelling in the crowd. Sally cowered against her side, hiding her face. She was trembling violently. Siren screaming, the car pulled out and headed toward County Seat.
“Where are we going?” Miss Trenchard asked.
“That crowd wants to know how Sally knew where the kid was if she didn’t have a hand in him being there,” the officer grunted.
“Oh—no!” Miss Trenchard began to cry. Sally was not crying, but her body shook like an unbolted dynamo. The officer reached over and snapped on the car radio. “Let’s see what the newscast has to say,” he mumbled.
“—doctor says he has been unconscious most of the time during the long hours in the well,” the newscaster was saying. The radio announcer’s voice changed in timbre, and he went on. “The surprise marriage of Kenneth Burk and Vera Cather at County Seat last night has been announced by the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Don Cather, of Carson. Burk is the son of J. R. Burk, president and general manager of Burk Consolidated Mines, and is—”
Miss Trenchard’s hand reached out and snapped the radio off. Her face was drawn, her eyes filled with fear. For one intense moment she hated Sally, sitting there next to her. As though it were Sally’s, doing that Kenneth—her Kenneth—was married to that woman. Her face crumpled like tissue paper and she sobbed aloud, then lifted her face as Sally spoke.
Sally’s voice was a sad, old one. “How far is it to the asylum?” she asked quietly.
“We’re not going to an asylum, Sally,” the bewildered officer said. “Just to County Seat.”
“Yes. You don’t have to go on, but I do,” Sally said slowly. “Miss Trenchard’s afraid of me now; there’s no one left.”
Her thin hands clenched and opened. The nails had cut little half moons in her palms, and from each a thin circle of blood welled up, rolled slowly down toward her fingers.
QUICK FREEZE
by Robert Silverberg
According to the ship’s mass detectors, Valdon’s Star lay dead ahead. In the fore cabin of the Calypso, Communications Tech Diem Mariksboorg tried to shut his ears to the angry, insistent shrill distress pulse coming from the Empire hyperliner that lay wrecked on Valdon’s Star’s lone planet.
Spectrometer analysis confirmed it. “We’re here,” he said. He turned to the Calypso’s captain, Vroi Werner, who was running possible orbits throught the computer. “You ready for the pickup, Vroi?”
Werner nodded abstractedly. “I figure we’ll make a jet landing, using the usual type orbit, and grab the survivors as quick as we can.”
“And no salvage.”
“Just people,” Werner said; and he picked up the sheaf of notes Mariksboorg had transcribed from the distress message, read them again, and laid them down. “There are twelve survivors. With a little shoe-homing, Diem, we can just about get twelve more aboard the Calypso” Mariksboorg peered at the growing bright image in the viewscreen, frowning moodily. “We’d be back snug on Gorbrough now if we hadn’t taken this cockeyed route. Whoever heard of a jetship making an emergency pickup?”
“We happened to be right where we were needed at just the right time,” Werner said stiffly. “There’s a time element involved in this, Diem. It turns out to be more efficient to use an inefficient old jet-powered tub to make the pickup than the shiniest new warpship…for the efficient reason that we’re already here.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the chastened tech replied.
Valdon’s Star was actually a triple system, consisting of a small, Sol-type main-sequence sun; a gray ghost companion sun, bulky and lifeless—a monstrous rarefied cinder and nothing more—and one unnamed planet, orbiting around the gray companion.
The Empire hyperliner Andromeda had been bound for the Deneb system out of Terra when something—a fused ultrone in the main generator, perhaps, or a cadmium damper inserted askew—went out of kilter, upsetting the delicate balance of the hyperdrive. Result: the liner was restored to normal space, and deposited abruptly on the frozen surface of Valdon’s Star’s solitary world.
A wrecked hyperliner is a thoroughly helpless object; the Bohling Hyperdrive is too complex for any journeyman engineer to repair, or even understand; with a conked-out drive, a hyperliner becomes—permanently—just so much junk.
To compensate for this, Galactic law requires that two automatic-break circuits be built into the cybernetic governors of all hyperdrive ships, in case of drive failure. The first of these is an instantaneous molecular disruptor that can, and will, volatilize the ship’s every milligram of mass immediately upon emergence from hyperspace within critical range of what is defined as a Stress Area. That is to say, the interior of a planet—or, more alarmingly, the interior of a sun, where a sudden materialization could precipitate a nova.
A Bohling-driv§ ship gone sour can materialize anywhere at all—but if it returned to space at some point already occupied by matter, the result would be spectacular. Just thirty-seven feet saved the Andromeda from a Circuit One volatilization: it was thirty-seven feet above the surface of Valdon’s World at the moment of materialization.
From this height, the liner dropped to the surface, cracking open like a split log. Twelve of the fifty-eight persons within survived, getting into their thermal suits before the ship’s atmosphere could rush from their bulkheaded compartment.
Circuit two then went automatically into effect: as distress-pulse, audible over a range of twenty light-years, fanned on a wideband, thirty-megacycle carrier to any and all craft in the vicinity. In this case, the wide range proved excessive.
The Calypso, an eight-man cargo ship, was traversing a minus-C orbit between two of the local stars; it happened to be only a half-hour’s journey from Valdon’s World when the distress-pulse exploded all over that segment of space. No other ship was within a light-year of the scene of the accident.
Central Control instantly checked with the Calypso; eleven seconds later, Captain Werner and his ship were willynilly bound for Valdon’s World on a top-emergency rescue mission.
Which was how the Calypso, its tail-jets blazing with atomic fury, came to roar down on the blue-white airless ball of ice and frozen methane that was Valdon’s World. The operation had to be carried out with utmost rapidity; Captain Werner had never landed on a methane planet before, but this was no time for maiden shyness.
Thermocouple readings showed a mean temperature of minus three-thirty F.; an abnormal albedo of 0.8 was recorded, and explained when spectroanalysis revealed a surface consisting of a frozen methane-ammonia atmosphere, covered with an icecarbon dioxide overlay. A sonic probe from turnover point indicated a heavy rock shelf beneath the frozen atmosphere.
Aboard the Calypso, the crew of eight prepared efficiently for the landing and readied the cabins for the twelve newcomers who would be jammed aboard. Captain Werner studied the fuel banks, running hasty computations that assured him that the ship w
ould still be stocked with sufficient fuel to handle the altered mass.
At eight minutes before planetfall, everything was checked out. Werner slumped back in his deceleration cradle, smiled grimly, flicked a glance at Mariksboorg.
“Here we come,” Mariksboorg murmured, as the Calypso swung downward, and the mirror-bright surface of Valdon’s World rose to meet the jetcraft.
“Here they come,” muttered Hideki Yatagawa, Commander of the former Terran hyperliner Andromeda. He folded his arms around his stomach and stamped his feet in mock reaction to the planet’s numbing cold. Actually, it was somewhat more than mockery: the thermal suit kept him at a cozy 68 °F. despite the minus three-thirty around him. But the thermal suits would register Overload in eight or nine hours; within seconds after that happened, Commander Yatagawa would be dead, his blood frozen to thin red pencils in his veins.
“Is that the rescue ship?” asked Dorvain Helmot, of Kollimun, former First Officer of the late Andromeda and sole non-Terran among the survivors. “By Klesh, it’s a jet!”
“They probably were closer to us than any warp-drive vessels when the distress signal went out,” suggested Colin Talbridge, ambassador-designate from the Court of St. James’s to the Free World of Deneb VII. “There’s some sort of time element in this, isn’t there?”
“There is,” Yatagawa said. “These suits can’t fight this sort of temperature indefinitely.”
“It’s a good thing the rescuers are here, then,” said Talbridge.
The Commander turned away. “Yes,” he said in a muffled voice. “But they’re not here yet.”
“Look at those jets!” Dorvain Helmot exclaimed, in frank admiration. Jetships were all but obsolete in the Kollimun system; Helmot was accustomed to dealing with fuelless warp-ships, and the torrent of flame pouring from the tail of the Calypso aroused his connoisseur’s love of the antique and the outmoded.
“Indeed,” Commander Yatagawa remarked sourly. “Look at those jets. Look at them!”
Those jets, at the moment, were bathing the planet below with fire. Hot tongues of flame licked down, beating against the thick carpet of ice and frozen CO2 that, along with a heavy swath of methane and ammonia, made up the surface of Valdon’s World.
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