Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  Afoot and by jetcopter that englobed the area, they closed in. By the application of stored memory and studied information they erected invisible barriers at every exposed point along the most probable trail of their quarry, from the street outside of her apartment door to the garage stall in Monticello. Then, as a final clincher, they installed three men in Gloria Hanford’s airscooter itself.

  By virtue of the unexpected movement one can elude the cops for a time. Gloria, on the street before her apartment building, almost went into despair when she saw that there was no skycab within hailing distance. She almost took it as a personal affront.

  But this was hardly the time to stamp her sandals on the hard pavement or to write letters to the Commissioner of Public Carriers.

  * * * *

  She turned and disappeared into the tramway entrance heading North along Waterfront Avenue. Her coin had hardly hit the bottom of its slot when the mobile police converged to land on the spot she’d just vacated. The foremost of them saw her trim figure disappearing into the distance, eclipsed by the myriads of innocent souls whose only desire was to make use of the same Northbound Tramway.

  The pursuit began to reshape its surface of detection from englobement to a cylinder, the axis of which lay congruent with the Northbound Tramway.

  Again, she held the advantage of knowing her own decision whereas her pursuit had to divine her plans by analysis of her actions and making use of extrapolation. Gloria Hanford abruptly stepped off the Tramway at Fifty-third, walked briskly three long blocks to LaGuardia’s Sixth, found herself facing a group of burly policemen, and stopped long enough to think. One of the cops shoved a galton whistle between his teeth and blew a supersonic blast that registered on every cop’s detector within a quarter mile. Audibly a siren wailed. Inaudibly and invisibly the drawstring web of civic forces began to close in.

  Once more Gloria stepped into the kiosk of a tramway, the Crosstown. She rode one more block to Ancient Fifth and stepped off. With a wave of her hand, and then the most startling process to be found in a woman, Gloria Hanford poked two fingers in her mouth and let go with a shrill, piercing whistle that made every skycab driver within a half mile come to the point of ‘customer’s alert!’

  She made her point.

  The one accessory that Junior Spaceman Howard Reed needed was a passenger, preferably a female passenger that could be identified as a female for a hundred yards through a high fog driven by a blinding gale. Old, beautiful, young or ugly didn’t matter, so long as it was unmistakably woman. The Military wouldn’t stop a skycab with a female passenger.

  He needed his passenger because, until he could pull the taxi-meter flag—having filled the compartment with a customer—he was constrained by law to cruise. Cruising would get him nowhere; what he needed was the flag-down ticket of admission to the upper traffic levels.

  The whistle shrilled at him; he looked; and then with his spaceman’s skill, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed made a mad reverse spiral landing that nosed out a half dozen other cursing drivers. He hit ground zero at velocity zero on target zero and flipped open the skycab door so close that Gloria Hanford did not have to take a middle ground step to gain entry.

  He took off with a rush that tossed his passenger into the deep seat and slammed the compartment door without human effort. Then he went into a cruel climbing turn that wore away twenty thousand flight miles of the engine bearings. He leveled off a thousand feet above Ancient Fifth Avenue’s top-most fast traffic level, and set his homing and warning beacon to zero on the spaceport.

  It did not bother him that his passenger hadn’t taken the time to supply him with the destination she desired. After all, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed was not really a skycab driver. He didn’t care.

  Gloria Hanford rebounded from the soft cushions of the skycab compartment and struggled her way into a position that gave her a good look out of the broad rear window. Her driver’s mad upward spiral made her dizzy, but from the higher levels it was definitely obvious that there was considerable concentration of movement down there below. Men and ground cars as well as jetcopters were closing down upon the spot they’d just left.

  It did not bother Gloria Hanford that her driver hadn’t waited to inquire as to her destination. She was just happy that he hadn’t. Her destination consisted of swift flight along any vector in a solid sphere; hers was a reverse destination properly identified by the word “elsewhere.”

  * * * *

  Behind them the city erupted with a criss-crossing of radio-directed searchbeams, catching and identifying skycar after skycar. Up from the city’s traffic levels came jetcopters and squad hoppers and some raid-gun carriers; personnel boats; even a sprinkling of mobile communications bases. To one side and almost behind them a flight of star shells burst in a fire-fall of gorgeous color. To their other side a stream of warning tracer streaked.

  Howard poured on the coal.

  Gloria made no protest; it was a most satisfactory agreement.

  They buzzed across the Jersey Flats. He brought the skycab down on a flat slant landing that arrowed directly in and touched ground and skidded to a stop with all landing-gear brakes locked. They slid to within a few yards of the spacecraft.

  Only then did the junior spaceman pause to speak to his passenger: “Sorry, but I’m in a jam. So long!”

  He leaped out of the skycab, raced along the ground, went up the ladder on a dead run, flipped into the spacelock, snapped the “Close” switch as he passed the inner portal—and then, without waiting for any pre-flight checkout, Junior Spaceman Howard Reed resigned from the Space Force by slamming his controls into an emergency and unauthorized flight program that took him up and out of Earth’s atmosphere in barely more than nothing flat.

  When he was free and clear, he relaxed in his pilot’s seat, swiveled it around…and boggled, bug-eyed, at his passenger.

  Gloria Hanford, still trim and shipshape in her white sharkskin suit, still carrying the overnight bag in her formal-for-travelling, white-gloved hand, sat in the spare seat.

  She said: “I’m sorry about this, too, but it so happens that I’m also in a jam. Where do we go from here, Spaceman?”

  He eyed her. “Where do you want to go?”

  Gloria chuckled in a throaty voice. “Away,” she said.

  “Can you cook?” he demanded abruptly.

  “Yes—why?”

  “Then go rustle up some grub from the galley,” he directed. “I’ll have to keep an eye on this crate until we’re free and clear. We can decide what to do next after we have time to think.”

  She looked at him strangely. Her own attitude puzzled her. It was the first time she’d been given an order that she hadn’t resented, but then of course his direction made very good sense.

  He looked upon her as she rose—and he found her fair.

  She was. Gloria Hanford was an extremely attractive dish in her own right. Amplified a few millionfold by the spaceman’s enforced isolation on Eden, Tau Ceti, and later upon Flatbush, Lalande 25372, she was a dream. Either locale would have the result of making Medusa the Gorgon look like Miss Universe of All Time, but Gloria Hanford didn’t need any handicaps.

  By some strange chemistry of non-material radiation that required no catalyst, there was no question between them.

  Oh, they had a lot to find out about one another, but they had plenty of time for that.

  That and other things.…

  XII

  In the Officers’ Club on Earth, someone said, “What’s the latest report?”

  Commander Breckenridge of Operations said, “Last detected by the station at Last Gasp, Ross 780, and going like hell wouldn’t have them.”

  Commander Hughes of the Bureau of Justice said, “They’re going at it rather early, aren’t they?”

  Scholar Ross of the Department of Domestic Tranquility waved at his comparison microscope and its data cards. “It would be hard to find two people better suited to one another.” He looked at his watch and s
miled. “I’d say that by now they’ve both forgotten completely that they were ever strangers.”

  Commander Briggs of the Bureau of Research refilled the glasses with the finest nonsynthetic vintage champagne that the cellar of the Officers’ Club could provide. He held his glass high and said, “I toast the bride and groom and the ultimate colonization of the Galaxy—by subterfuge!”

  But Scholar Ross pulled the hand down. With a shake of his head, he held his own glass high. “Sorry, Briggs. But this time we toast the reactionaries, the die-hards and the rule-ridden old guard who have to work like the very devil to pair off a deserving young couple, and then force them into finding a home of their own—on some other planet.

  “Gentlemen. To the Troublemakers!

  “Ourselves!”

  The End

  *******************************

  Amateur in Chancery,

  by George O. Smith

  Galaxy Oct. 1961

  Short Story - 4897 words

  Paul Wallach came into my office. He looked distraught. By some trick of selection, Paul Wallach, the director of Project Tunnel, was one of the two men in the place who did not have a string of doctor’s and scholar’s degrees to tack behind their names. The other was I.

  “Trouble, Paul?” I asked.

  He nodded, saying, “The tunnel car is working.”

  “It should. It’s been tested enough.”

  “Holly Carter drew the short straw.”

  “Er—” I started and then stopped short as the implication became clear. “She’s—she’s—not—?”

  “Holly made it to Venus all right,” he said. “Trouble is we can’t get her back.”

  “Can’t get her back?”

  He nodded again. “You know, we’ve never really known very much about the atmosphere of Venus.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, from what little came through just before Holly blacked out, it seems that there must be one of the cyanogens in the atmosphere in a concentration high enough to effect nervous paralysis.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” said Paul Wallach in a flat tone, “that Holly Carter stopped breathing shortly after she cracked the airlock. And her heart stopped beating a minute or so later.”

  “Holly—dead?”

  “Not yet, Tom,” he said. “If we can get her back in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, modern medicine can bring her back.”

  “But there’ll be brain damage!”

  “Oh, there may be some temporary impairment. Nothing that retraining can’t restore. The big problem is to bring her back.”

  “We should have built two tunnel cars.”

  “We should have done all sorts of things. But when the terminal rocket landed on Venus, everybody in the place was too anxious to try it out. Lord knows, I tried to proceed at a less headlong pace. But issuing orders to you people is a waste of time and paper.”

  I looked at him. “Doc,” I asked, giving him the honorary title out of habit, “Venus is umpty-million miles from here. We haven’t another tunnel car, and no rocket could make it in time to do any good. So how can we hope to rescue Holly?”

  “That’s the point,” said Wallach. “Venus, it appears, is inhabited.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s what got Holly caught in the first place. She landed, then saw this creature approaching. Believing that no life could exist in an atmosphere dangerous to life, she opened the airlock and discovered otherwise.”

  “So?”

  “So now all we have to do is to devise some way of explaining to a Venusian the difference between left and right. I thought you might help.”

  “But I’m just a computer programmer.”

  “That’s the point. We all figured that you have developed a form of communication to that machine of yours. The rest of the crew, as you know, have a bit of difficulty in communicating among themselves in their own jargon, let alone getting through to normal civilians. When it comes to a Venusian, they’re licked.”

  I said, “I’ll try.”

  * * * *

  Project Tunnel is the hardware phase of a program started a number of years ago when somebody took a joke seriously.

  In a discussion of how the tunnel diode works, one of the scientists pointed out that if an electron could be brought to absolute rest, its position according to Heisenberg Uncertainty would be completely ambiguous. Hence it had as high a possibility of being found on Venus as it had of being found on Earth or anywhere else. Now, the tunnel diode makes use of this effect by a voltage bias across the diode junction. Between narrow limits, the voltage bias is correct to upset the ambiguity of Mr. Heisenberg, making the electron nominally found on one side of the junction more likely to be found on the other.

  Nobody could deny the operability of the tunnel diode. Project Tunnel was a serious attempt to employ the tunnel effect in gross matter.

  The terminal rocket mentioned by Paul Wallach carried the equipment needed to establish the voltage bias between Venus and the Earth. Once established, Project Tunnel was in a state that caused it to maroon the most wonderful girl in the world.

  Since the latter statement is my own personal opinion, my pace from the office to the laboratory was almost a dead run.

  The laboratory was a madhouse. People stood in little knots, arguing. Those who weren’t talking were shaking their heads in violent negation.

  The only one who appeared un-upset was Teresa Dwight, our psi-girl. And here I must confess an error. When I said that Paul Wallach and I were the only ones without a string of professorial degrees, I missed Teresa Dwight. I must be forgiven. Teresa had a completely bland personality, zero drive, and a completely unstartling appearance. Teresa was only fourteen. But she’d discovered that her psi-power could get her anything she really wanted. Being human, therefore, she did not want much. So forgive me for passing her by.

  But now I had to notice her. As I came in, she looked up and said, “Harla wants to know why can’t he just try.”

  Wallach went white. “Tell that Venusian thing ‘NO!’ as loud as you can.”

  Teresa concentrated, then asked, “But why?”

  “Does this Harla understand the Heisenberg Effect?”

  She said after a moment, “Harla says he has heard of it as a theory. But he is not quite prepared to believe that it does indeed exist as anything but an abstract physical concept.”

  “Tell Harla that Doctor Carter’s awkward position is a direct result of our ability to reduce the tunnel effect to operate on gross matter.”

  “He realizes that. But now he wants to know why you didn’t fire one of the lower animals as a test.”

  “Tell him that using animals for laboratory experiments is only possible in a police state where the anti-vivisection league can be exiled to Siberia. Mink coats and all. And let his Venusian mind make what it can of that. Now, Teresa—”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell Harla, very carefully, that pressing the left-hand button will flash the tunnel car back here as soon as he closes the airlock. But tell him that pushing the right-hand button will create another bias voltage—whereupon another mass of matter will cross the junction. In effect, it will rip a hole out of this laboratory near the terminal, over there, and try to make it occupy the same space as the tunnel car on Venus. None of us can predict what might happen when two masses attempt to occupy the same space. But the chances are that some of the holocaust will backfire across the gap and be as violent at this end, too.”

  “Harla says that he will touch nothing until he has been assured that it is safe.”

  “Good. Now, Tom,” he said, addressing me, “how can we tell right from left?”

  “Didn’t you label ’em?”

  “They’re colored red on the right and green on the left.”

  “Is Harla color-blind?”

  “No, but from what I gather Harla sees with a different spectrum than we do. So far as he is concerned both buttons look alike.”r />
  “You could have engraved ‘em ‘COME’ and ‘GO’.”

  Frank Crandall snorted. “Maybe you can deliver an ‘English, Self-Taught’ course through Teresa to the Venusian?”

  I looked at Crandall. I didn’t much care for him. It seemed that every time Holly Carter came down out of her fog of theoretical physics long enough to notice a simpleton who had to have a machine to perform routine calculations, we were joined by Frank Crandall who carted her off and away from me. If this be rank jealousy, make the most of it. I’m human.

  “Crandall,” I said, “even to a Hottentot I could point out that the engraved legend ‘GO’ contains two squiggly symbols, whereas the legend ‘RETURN’ contains ‘many’.”

  Wallach stepped into the tension by saying, “So we didn’t anticipate alien life. But now we’ve got the problem of communicating with it.”

  Crandall didn’t appear to notice my stiff reply. He said, “Confound it, what’s missing?”

  “What’s missing,” I told him, “is some common point of reference.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that I could define left from right to any semi-intelligent human being who was aware of the environment in which we live.”

  “For example?”

  I groped for an example and said, lamely, “Well, there’s the weather rule, valid for the northern hemisphere. When the wind is blowing on your back, the left hand points to the low pressure center.”

  “Okay. But how about Venus? Astronomical information, I mean.”

  I shook my head.