Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  It tickled his fancy. It would have tickled the fancy of any man, and it would have sent many an otherwise honest man along the trail of dishonesty because it was so simple and so safe.

  Yet Kingsley knew that sooner or later the Law and Order side would catch up, or possess similar machines, and that would spell the end of the free take and have. A criminal using a teleport would soon be forced into the constant running that he was in now, for authority could follow and trail him with a similar or even improved model, once the possibility were known.

  So Kingsley said “No!’’ and let it go at that while Blair shrugged, knowing that Kingsley would do as he was told or suffer the consequences.

  Periodically during the evening, Blair fired up the equipment and watched the police stations in both small towns nearby. In each things were running as normal. The main offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were looked into, and found clear of any but minor details.

  But while the game of business-as-normal was going on in official quarters to fool just such a spying operation, the forest rangers were combing the district carefully, and it was only ten o’clock in the evening when one of them found the stolen moving van in a small ravine not more than a mile from Blair’s hideaway.

  He found it because he was a forest man, and he knew that the trail of broken limbs and crushed twigs meant the passage of some large, hard body. The van was well-concealed, but not well enough concealed to hide it from the sight of a man standing before it with anger in his mind.

  The forest ranger lifted his walky-talky and called to give the alarm.

  A hundred men seeking the same thing heard, and they began to congregate. It could take hours, but they moved silently through the woods and in the dark, walking boldly because they knew their forests. Along the highway came Walter Murdoch in a borrowed automobile, to pause at the local electric distribution station.

  He dropped one officer and went on to within a mile of Blair’s summer cottage hideout. There he met the others and explained the situation to them. Then, as everything was clear, Murdoch took charge.

  He called the distributing station, and the attendant pulled the main switch.

  Every light in the district went out…

  BLAIR swore. He looked a bit worried, but arose from the sofa where he had been reading idly and went to the cellar where he worked by hurricane lamp to service an auxiliary power plant. With the auxiliary plant running, the lights came on again, but Blair was still worried.

  He fired up the teleport and the lights dimmed.

  “What gives?” he demanded of Kingsley.

  “That gear takes a lot of power. You haven’t got the capacity in that auxiliary.”

  Blair swore again and tried the teleport, sending the plane of view down the road toward the power distribution system. It entered, and he saw the policeman and the attendant beside the open power switch.

  Blair cursed. His hand hit the switch that thickened the connection so that teleportation would be possible—and the lights dimmed while the auxiliary power plant groaned with the unaccustomed load. There came the pungent odor of too-hot electrical machinery and as Blair snarled, he reached forward but hit the silver plate with his hand. “Not enough!” he gritted.

  He whirled the plane of view back along the road angrily until he caught sight of the approaching body of men. They had spread out in a vast circle and were closing in on the house.

  “Let’s get out of here!” exclaimed Sally.

  “Not on foot,” grunted Blair.

  A fuse blew in the auxiliary equipment.

  Blair swore again, and replaced it. The men were inside of the plane of view by the time it was reestablished again. Blair forgot them for the moment and sought over the neighborhood for some means of escape. On foot he would never make it, and so long as the main source of power was off he could go no further than perhaps a mile without blowing fuses. Even so. the auxiliary was groaning and straining and the odor of burning insulation filled the cellar.

  Then from the trees that surrounded the house came a burst of flame. It led across the clearing like a sword of light and it hit the house and burned its way through the metal wall. It erupted in the living room with a shattering crash and a welter of living flame. “Bazookas!” snarled Blair.

  He cranked the dial frantically to return the plane of view. From a cabinet he took a rifle and loaded it. He found a bazooka carrier and took a bead on him through the teleport. He snapped the switch, the plate opened long enough for Blair to fire.

  He did not see the result because the auxiliary generator blew another fuse.

  Swearing luridly, Blair went over to the machine and wired across the fuses with heavy copper strips. He returned to the machine, knowing that it was a matter of time before they blew him to bits. Another bazooka shell roared across the clearing and tore the kitchenette to shreds above their heads. Then Blair found the automobile that Walter Murdoch had used, and laughed with sardonic confidence.

  Another bazooka shell hit the upper part of the house. Apparently the attackers believed them to be upstairs.

  “Hurry!” breathed Sally.

  Blair nodded. He turned and grabbed Kingsley by the manacled wrists and dragged him toward the teleport.

  Blair materialized the teleport just outside of Murdoch’s car and handed Sally through first. She held the rifle there while Kingsley was shoved through and Sally held Joe at bay until Blair came through to stand beside her. Blair leaned back into the circle.

  “Hurry!” cried Sally again.

  Blair nodded, ran around the car and jumped into the driver’s seat. He started off down the road at a high speed just as the open face of the teleport erupted flame and a terrible roar that blew forward out of the hole in space for fifty feet, cutting down trees and scorching the very earth before it.

  THEN the circle was cut off abruptly, but the roaring flame of the dynamited hideaway still pillared a mile into the sky.

  “That,” gritted Blair coldly, “will take care of most of them! They won’t find enough to do ’em any good. What’s left of them, that is. But,” he added with a sour chuckle, “we’ve got the guy himself—and he’ll build another one!”

  They went down the road at a high rate of speed, away from the wreckage they left behind them. Blair grunted unhappily, and Sally, from the far side of Kingsley from Blair asked: “It is hard driving?”

  “Not too bad. Something you can get used to. Just a matter of using the left foot for gas and brakes and the right foot for the clutch. And staying on the wrong side of the road.”

  The car was mounting a hill now, and going at a terrific pace. Far behind them, men were bandaging themselves and calling for aid to quench the forest fire that had been started by the exploding dynamite. Blair had made good his escape.

  They came to the top of the hill and began to round a curve, Sally looked back at the flames mounting high in the distance.

  “Nice fire,” she commented.

  Blair took a quick glance behind him and smiled grimly. And Joe Kingsley, with a sudden convulsive movement, shouted:

  “Look out—car coming!”

  With the instinct born of years of driving, Norman Blair yanked the wheel to the right.

  But it was his right, and instead of hugging the inside of the road where there was a bit of cliff the car lurched, roared across the road, and hit the restraining fence with a splintering crash. Down the side of the hill rocketed the car. It hit a boulder and bounced. End over end it turned, then it slewed sideward and rolled to the bottom where it came to rest with all four wheels in the air.

  Kingsley, cushioned between Sally and Blair, came to consciousness first.

  They found him in the cold gray of dawn, sitting between a cursing woman and a groaning man, clumsily but effectively tied with strips of cloth torn from Blair’s shirt.

  “What happened?” asked Murdoch.

  Kingsley explained, and as he finished, Murdoch got the handcuff keys from th
e desk sergeant and freed the scientist.

  “But how did you accomplish this?” he asked, pointing at the wrecked car.

  “Blair messed everything up for everybody,” said Kingsley, with a bitter laugh. “We were teleported to the car, which reversed us left to right. I’ll have to build another machine to get back to normal again. But Blair,” he finished cheerfully, “never did anything right in all his life!”

  The End

  **************************************

  Spaceman's Luck,

  by George O. Smith

  Science Fiction Adventures Feb. 1953

  Short Story - 1818 words

  Holt wasn’t interested in mere glory. He was on his way to the Moon, but only because that’s where he’d find the road to all the money he could spend. Holt had it all planned…

  A flare of light arced upwards and moments later the shattering report dinned in the ears of the crowd, rolling across the field like thunder. The noise covered the sharply indrawn breath of ten thousand people. A sonorous voice, amplified a millionfold announced: “X Minus Fifteen Minutes!”

  There was a second or two of absolute silence and then the waiting crowd let out its breath all at once in an audible sigh. They wiped their glasses nervously, or poised their binoculars, or scratched, their heads for the last nervous time, hoping that they would not sneeze at the improper second and so miss the takeoff; it would be over just about that quickly.

  Out across the field, the focus of ten thousand pair of eyes; stood the Lady Luna. She looked small from the crowd, but the three men who stood at one tailfin were dwarfed by her size.

  “This is about it, Gordon,” said the oldest of the lot.

  Gordon Holt nodded. “I’ve about five minutes yet,” he said nervously.

  The middle-aged man said, “Time for a last cigarette, Gordon.”

  Holt shook his head. “Not after training to do without for six months. Save it until I come back.”

  Doctor Walsch nodded. “That’s good sense, Gordon. We’ll be waiting for you. How do you feel?”

  “Fine. Just a bit jumpy.”

  “You ought to feel as fit as a Guarnerius. You’ve been trained and you’re trim and fit. I doubt that you’ll ever feel any better in your life than you do right now.”

  General Towne nodded. “Don’t forget the honor, either,” he said. “The excitement should give your high feelings another lift. Imagine being the first man to ever set foot on the soil of another world.”

  “It’s a bit of a sterile world, I’m told. Not much more honor than the first man to put his sandal on the top of Pike’s Peak. They sell postcards there, now.”

  “Too bad we’ve named all the visible Lunar Craters,” said General Towne. “Seems to me that some signal honor—well, anyway, Gordon, we’ll name a big one on the other side after you.”

  “It—”

  A siren wailed and Holt jumped. “That’s it,” he said.

  “Good luck, Gordon,” said the general, wringing the spaceman’s hand. The doctor clapped Gordon on the back as he turned away.

  Doctor and general got into the waiting jeep, and the driver turned and called, “Don’t take any wooden moonbeams up there, Holt!”

  Holt shrugged noncommittally and climbed the ramp into the spacelock. He sneered at the crowd beyond closing spacelock.

  “Wooden moonbeams?” he said aloud. “Oh brother!”

  He went to the control chamber of the Lady Luna and ran through his checklist almost mechanically. He waited almost breathlessly until the radio barked the word that told him to hit the ignition switch, and when it came he hit it with a vigor and enjoyed the crushing sensation that followed. The thunder from below was music in his ears; now he was on his way and they wouldn’t call him back.

  Holt was no mere glory machine. Not for him was the simple honor. He had it planned, had it planned from the moment he was selected.

  For Holt, the honor of setting the first foot on another world was a flat and tasteless award. It would last only until someone else did something slightly better. What could he get out of driving a space rocket to Luna? Not a hell of a lot. He was not headed for an adventure and he knew it; with everything precalculated, including the risk, what adventure could he have? To land and collect a quart of pumice and a pound of rock and maybe a shiny stone. Look for lichen or moss. Listen to the Geiger.

  This sort of dry action would sell no books, collect no royalties, make no moving pictures, bring in no dough.

  Gordon took a deep breath as soon as the motor shut off. He was on his way and he knew how to handle everything from here on in.

  He had seen enough of human nature to foresee it all. A slight mishap and a call for help would start it. A landing just hard enough to bend the control vanes or to plug up the rocket exhaust. Maybe to ding up the spacecraft enough to make it unspaceworthy. Then—

  The cry for help and the whole world crying in return that a Human Being was marooned out there, helpless and alone.

  They’d come.

  They’d turn handsprings to get out there. Time and money would be tossed down the drain, and men would strive and women would cry, and the news would be filled with daily columns of how the rescue was progressing.

  Drop a man in the ocean and the navies of every country go out and comb the sea to find him. Put a cat on the telephone pole and three hundred people struggle to get the animal down. Drop a child in a well and the countryside turns out en masse to help.

  Well, maroon a man on the moon and watch ‘em struggle.

  He had air for ninety clays and food and water And just about anything a man would need. He could sit it out and he knew it. And he knew that there was a second rocket that could be put in space within a couple of months. Sixty days he’d sit it out and then—

  It would be the story of his life, the tale of his rescue, the bright lights and the personal appearances. Radio and television and endorsing this junk and that googoo. Women and liquor and money.

  He came down in the Crater Plato, tail first but far too fast. The tailfins crumpled and the sifting pumice drove up into the exhaust and packed like cement. A seam whistled far below to let out some air from a sealed compartment, cracked in the bump.

  The crash staggered him a bit, but all he suffered was a nosebleed and a set of sprained chest muscles. He sat up and looked around.

  The radio. He snapped it on and called: “Lady Luna Gordon Holt reporting. Made a crash landing. May be dangerous. Will check and call at 0300.”

  He eyed the radio thoughtfully; it only took about three seconds for an answer, but in that time Gordon considered smashing the radio in the middle of the next broadcast and. then discarded the idea because it might lead people to think that he, too, had been smashed. Gordon wanted to be rescued, not given a hero’s brief hail and farewell.

  “Calling Lady Luna. Holt! Are you all right? Explain!”

  “I am all right. I am not hurt. Crash landing rather rough but nothing broken. No air leakage, nothing completely ruined that I can tell. Landed as per program in the dead center of Plato, but a little too hard.”

  That ought to do it. Let ‘em get excited slowly. They’ll forget me less slowly.

  “Lady Luna what happened?” They were worried.

  “I don’t know. I have a hunch that the pumice does not provide a true ground-plane for the radar. We landed as though the ground were about thirty feet below the surface.”

  That sounds logical. Such things are entirely possible, I’m told. Powdery, filmy stuff with no water shouldn’t have a firm ground-plane.

  “Lady Luna inspect your damage and report as planned at 0300.”

  Holt checked his air first. Plenty of it. Not a bit gone. Water next and food next. He checked the hull as well as he could from the inside and then went out in his space suit to view the damage.

  He had done an admirable job. The tail fins were bent messily and the hull was crumpled a bit, just above the place where the rocket motor end
ed. If this ship took off—

  “Lady Luna calling home. Reporting as per plan. Hull bent, tail fins ruined. Crater filled with powdery pumice and I feel that the exhaust is packed. Shall I try a blast to clear it?”

  While he waited for the answer Gordon found a bit of wire and shorted the battery for a second. He had to fade out slowly enough to fool them completely.

  “Lady Luna, do not try a clearing blast. You’ll explode. Wait for instructions.”

  “Will do. Will do.”

  He shorted the battery a couple more times and watched the voltmeter drop.

  “Lady Luna can you dig down to the exhaust port?”

  “Will try. Note battery dropping. Nothing else in danger. Food, water, air all okay. Hull sound but battery dropping.”

  Seconds went on and Holt could see the resources of the entire world collecting to prepare the First Spacewreck Rescue. Complete with video, reporters, clergymen, politicians, and humanity waiting.

  “Lady Luna repeat. You are fading.”

  Holt repeated, insisting that he was all right. “I can stick it out. I can stick it out.”

  He watched the radio battery fade. ‘

  Let it fade. He could stand the silence for two months until rescue came.

  A billion people listened to his voice die away. And when their radio networks went dead, they raced to their telephones and clogged the land wires demanding that something had to be done.

  Congressmen gave speeches and clergymen spoke and doctors gave opinions and scientists differed. A government seldom known for its cooperation announced that its new atomic-powered rocket was about to effect the rescue single-handedly. But the atomic part blew up in front of the video cameras and took some of the landscape with it. The Council of the United Nations called a meeting. The newspapers and networks covered everything.