by Carol
It almost woke me up, so to speak—showed me how things were. And I was scared enough to use every bit of will I had, to go the rest of the way…”
Well, what were we to do now? Starvation and death in that pit was staring us in the face, if we couldn’t climb out of that hole. We tried doing just this, using that crude ladder of chinks. But we could do only a few steps before dizziness and the weakness in our muscles overcame us, and we had to drop back. Then, impelled by a forlorn idea, we staggered around, half-awake, searching for some sign of that Ionian reverie machine. We blasted into the walls with our excavators, but we found nothing tangible to smash—to fight. But in the dust under our booted feet, we stumbled on more mummified Ionian corpses, each elfin face smiling a happy smile which we understood now. Maybe we’d be like that soon—mummies. The tools of those Ionians were beside them—complicated, sharp-ended rods, which may have employed some powerful principle. But they were useless now.
And as we plied the disintegrating flame of our excavators, our wills grew tired.
The strain of hanging on to cold, uninviting facts was too strong.
“T’hell with it!” Russ croaked at last. And then he muttered a name—“Rhoda.” His young wife, of long ago.
“No, Russ!” I grated. “Don’t slip! Try not to—think—”
But my voice trailed off—and I was somewhere else—reminiscing. I was a kid again, reading a book. There was sunshine on the piano keys in the living room.
And my brain was saying: “What’s the difference? The Ionian scientist who made the dreams possible, was a great guy. His invention can give a beautiful, quiet death. Better than feeling starvation creeping on you, anyway. Better than seeing this hole, and that circle of stars, way up there…”
Like that. I guess anyone can understand how it was with Russ and me, all right. We were exhausted physically from the strain of constant work. And Russ had been chasing an ambition in the void for more than forty years, seeking the funds to set up that lab he wanted. No one could criticize that tough old bird for lack of nerve because he had crumpled. The trail had been too long and too hard. Besides, there was Rhoda, whom he could reach only in fancy.
But suddenly I wanted things real, myself. The real Earth, and not these empty phantoms. 1 wanted the real people I had known. It would be the same with Russ, if he had the chance. And he was my pal.
So, after a little while I gained some strength back. I didn’t know whether it would accomplish any good, but I brought my will into play again, for all I was worth. The well materialized around me, with its grey, volcanic stone. I felt as ill as before. And I thought desperately: “What’ll I do? What’ll I do?”
There was adrenalin in the emergency pack of my space suit. I’d of course remembered all the time that it was there, but I hadn’t thought that injecting some of this powerful gland extract into my blood would do much good. Nor did I think so now. I just hoped.
Everything was swaying and blurred around me. But I got out the emergency pack. Filling a hypodermic syringe with that powerful, treacherous fluid, was no snap, since my fingers were trembling like castanets. And always I had to keep those visions out of my eyes, and those softening dream-sounds of music and wind and water, out of my ears. It was like balancing on a tightrope, when you’re a novice.
Grimly I unfastened the wristband of my space suit sleeve, exposing part of my arm to the cold half-vacuum. Quivering, 1 jabbed the needle home, and pressed the plunger. Then I fumbled to refasten the wristband.
Russ was lying there, half imbedded in the dust, like a drunken sot. I kicked him in the ribs to try to bring him around, but it was no good. So I had to doctor him without his assistance. Never before had I had to fight so hard to concentrate on a purpose. But after some minutes 1 got an adrenalin shot into him too.
By the time I was finished with him, the gland extract was beginning to take effect on me. My heart was pounding until 1 thought it would burst itself wide open. But otherwise I felt a little more competent. Maybe that was an illusion produced by the adrenalin. My arms waved crazily, as if to push back, by physical action, the mental phantasms of Ionian mind magic, still hammering in my imagination. They seemed to cling around me like smoke, trying to develop solidity again.
Suddenly, though, I was more sure than ever that all my efforts were going to fail. I was certain that the adrenalin wouldn’t do any good—that I couldn’t have taken enough to have the needed effect of combating the weakness in my body, and that, still, I had injected too much into my veins—enough to kill me.
Then I heard Russ in my helmet phones. I looked around. He had staggered to his feet, braced to that extent by the adrenalin.
“What—?” he stammered thickly.
“I gave you a shot in the arm,” I told him. “Now come on—quick! Let’s try again to climb out of this hole!”
“How?” he questioned. “Don’t be dumb, Milt! Don’t be crazy!”
But he came forward anyway. 1 put his foot in the first step of the chink-ladder, and boosted him—one step up. Oh, it looked like a futile business, all right! He slipped on that first chink, and whacked his shin. He cursed with the pain of the jolt. I was nearly thrown off my feet, as his body came down upon me.
Then, however, all at once, his face took on a furious, mad brightness. “That’s it, Milt!” he growled weakly, coughing a little. “That’s our one chance! Get angry—think of things to make us angry. Concentrate on hating! It’s wonderful what emotions like that can do to strengthen an enfeebled carcass! Come on, boy! Hate! Hate Io! Hate the cold of it, and the loneliness! Hate the circumstances that are killing us! Hate those damned dreams! Hate the sun-plant, working up there! We’ve got to smash it! Let your blood boil with just that one idea! Don’t think about life or death. Think of the fun we’re going to have, blasting that ugly contraption to bits! Come on Milt! If it’s the last thing we do…”
Like half-starved cats we clawed our way over the lip of the well. Madness was in us, filming dreams tried to enfold us again. We were exhausted there on the cold plain among the hills. But our job wasn’t finished yet. We couldn’t delay, because if we did we’d slip back into the clutch of that Ionian mind magic that had enslaved us, making us work beyond our limits. And if we did slip, there never would be another chance. We had to hang on—somehow.
We hardly knew where we were. We didn’t remember being in this spot before. Getting oriented properly took more time, there in the confusing labyrinth of passes between the hills and mountains. But our tracks in the dust, made when we were like sleepwalking robots, finally offered a solution. Following them, we found our way to the sun machine, a quarter-mile distant.
The thing’s flywheel still spun steadily. Peering at it with blurred, wobbly vision, I saw the secret grin on the face of the boiler image. Then Russ and I raised our pistols. As twin dynamium capsules struck the machine, there was a thin, distant-sounding, though mighty, explosion. Iron, reflector fragments, and bits of the generator, boiler, steam condenser and turbine flew in every direction. And there was a white puff of steam that expanded quickly into rainbow frost crystals there in the weak sunshine.
It wasn’t quite over even yet—for there was that unknown thing underground, and still active, for it stored electricity. Without speaking, we fired more dynamium capsules, until we had a hole fifty feet deep blasted in the crust of Io. In it there were just a few pieces of metal and other materials that could tell little about the miracle that had been concealed there, throwing off strange radiations. Bits of wire, there were. Some pitchy, insulating substance, and glass. The latter may have been part of a storage battery.
Russ gave one look down into the hole. Then he sagged to his knees and rolled over on the rocky ground. When I tried to rouse him, he grumbled sleepily: “All over, Milt. Beat it. Nuts!” In the next instant the plucky old devil was snoring, and I had to drag him back to the ship as best I could. I was sleepy as hell. Maybe we’d slept on our feet before, but it couldn’t ha
ve been quite natural sleep.
I guess that’s about all. Our trade in Ionian relics was a financial success. We’re back on Earth. Russ has the lab he wanted all these years—testing new space craft principles. And I’m negotiating to buy some ships for my interplanetary tourist line…
1940
CALL ME JOE
Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson, with his writer wife Karen, Is the heart and soul of the West Coast division of the Society- for Creative Anachronism. Their greatest Joy is organizing medieval fetes and tourneys, where the men flail away at each other with (wooden) broadswords and (foam plastic) morningstars, while the women languorously recreate the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. But if Poul Anderson’s heart is in the past, his head is in the future. There are few like him in matching the hardware of science and the implications of theory to the color and excitement of interplanetary adventure.
The wind came whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.
He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down and groped for his little smelter. The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull. Something whipped across his back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles. Lightning cracked, immensely far overhead where clouds boiled with night As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley. The earth shivered.
Sodium explosion, thought Anglesey in the drumbeat noise. The fire and the lightning gave him enough illumination to find his apparatus. He picked up tools in muscular hands, his tail gripped the trough, and he battered his way to the tunnel and thus to his dugout.
It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun-remoteness and compressed by tons of atmosphere jammed on to every square inch. Ventilated by a tiny smokehole, a lamp of tree oil burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room.
Anglesey sprawled his slate-blue form on the floor, panting. It was no use to swear at the storm. These ammonia gales often came at sunset, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. He was tired anyway.
It would be morning in five hours or so. He had hoped to cast an axehead, his first, this evening, but maybe it was better to do the job by daylight.
He pulled a dekapod body off a shelf and ate the meat raw, pausing for long gulps of liquid methane from a jug. Things would improve once he had proper tools; so far, everything had been painfully grubbed and hacked to shape with teeth, claws, chance icicles, and what detestably weak and crumbling fragments remained of the spaceship. Give him a few years and he’d be living as a man should.
He sighed, stretched, and lay down to sleep.
Somewhat more than one hundred and twelve thousand miles away, Edward Anglesey took off his helmet.
He looked around, blinking. After the Jovian surface, it was always a little unreal to find himself here again, in the clean quiet orderliness of the control room.
His muscles ached. They shouldn’t. He had not really been fighting a gale of several hundred miles an hour, under three gravities and a temperature of 140 Absolute. He had been here, in the almost non-existent pull of Jupiter V, breathing oxynitrogen. It was Joe who lived down there and filled his lungs with hydrogen and helium at a pressure which could still only be estimated because it broke aneroids and deranged piezoelectrics.
Nevertheless, his body felt worn and beaten. Tension, no doubt—psychosomatics; after all, for a good many hours now he had, in a sense, been Joe, and Joe had been working hard.
With the helmet off, Anglesey held only a thread of identification. The esprojector was still tuned to Joe’s brain but no longer focused on his own. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew an indescribable feeling of sleep. Now and then, vague forms or colors drifted in the soft black—dreams? Not impossible, that Joe’s brain should dream a little when Anglesey’s mind wasn’t using it.
A light flickered red on the esprojector panel, and a bell whined electronic fear. Anglesey cursed. Thin fingers danced over the controls of his chair, he slewed around and shot across to the bank of dials. Yes—there—K-tube oscillating again! The circuit blew out He wrenched the faceplate off with one hand and fumbled in a drawer with the other.
Inside his mind he could feel the contact with Joe fading. If he once lost it entirely, he wasn’t sure he could regain it. And Joe was an investment of several million dollars and quite a few highly skilled man-years.
Anglesey pulled the offending K-tube from its socket and threw it on the floor. Glass exploded. It eased his temper a bit, just enough so he could find a replacement, plug it in, switch on the current again—as the machine warmed up, once again amplifying, the Joe-ness in the back alleys of his brain strengthened.
Slowly, then, the man in the electric wheel chair rolled out of the room, into the hall. Let somebody else sweep up the broken tube. To hell with it. To hell with everybody.
Jan Cornelius had never been farther from Earth than some comfortable Lunar resort. He felt much put upon that the Psionics Corporation should tap him for a thirteen-months exile. The fact that he knew as much about esprojectors and their cranky innards as any other man alive, was no excuse. Why send anyone at all? Who cared?
Obviously the Federation Science Authority did. It had seemingly given those bearded hermits a blank check on the taxpayer’s account.
Thus did Cornelius grumble to himself, all the long hyperbolic path to Jupiter. Then the shifting accelerations of approach to its tiny inner satellite left him too wretched for further complaint.
And when he finally, just prior to disembarkation, went up to the greenhouse for a look at Jupiter, he said not a word. Nobody does, the first time.
Arne Viken waited patiently while Cornelius stared. It still gets me, too, he remembered. By the throat. Sometimes I’m afraid to look.
At length Cornelius turned around. He had a faintly Jovian appearance himself, being a large man with an imposing girth. “I had no idea,” he whispered. “I never thought…I had seen pictures, but—”
Viken nodded. “Sure, Dr. Cornelius. Pictures don’t convey it.”
Where they stood, they could see the dark broken rock of the satellite, jumbled for a short way beyond the landing slip and then chopped off sheer. This moon was scarcely even a platform, it seemed, and cold constellations went streaming past it, around it. Jupiter lay across a fifth of that sky, softly ambrous, banded with colors, spotted with the shadows of planet-sized moons and with whirlwinds as broad as Earth. If there had been any gravity to speak of, Cornelius would have thought, instinctively, that the great planet was falling on him. As it was, he felt as if sucked upward, his hands were still sore where he had grabbed a rail to hold on.
“You live here…all alone…with this?” He spoke feebly.
“Oh, well, there are some fifty of us all told, pretty congenial,” said Viken. “It’s not so bad. You sign up for four-cycle hitches—four ship arrivals—and believe it or not, Dr. Cornelius, this is my third enlistment.”
The newcomer forbore to inquire more deeply. There was something not quite understandable about the men on Jupiter V. They were mostly bearded, though otherwise careful to remain neat; their low-gravity movements were somehow dreamlike to watch; they hoarded their conversation, as if to stretch it through the year and month between ships. Their monkish existence had changed them—or did they take what amounted to vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, because they had never felt quite at home on green Earth?
Thirteen months! Cornelius shuddered. It was going to be a long cold wait, and the pay and bonuses accumulating for him were scant comfort now, four hundred and eighty million miles from the sun.
“Wonderful place to do research,” continued Viken. “All the facilities, hand-picked colleagues, no distractions…and of course—” He jerked his thumb at the planet and turned to leave.
Cornelius followed, wallowing awkwardly. �
��It is very interesting, no doubt,” he puffed. “Fascinating. But really, Dr. Viken, to drag me way out here and make me spend a year-plus waiting for the next ship…to do a job which may take me a few weeks—”
“Are you sure it’s that simple?” asked Viken gently. His face swivelled around, and there was something in his eyes that silenced Cornelius. “After all my time here, I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more complicated.”
They went through the ship’s air lock and the tube joining it to the station entrance. Nearly everything was underground. Rooms, laboratories, even halls had a degree of luxuriousness—why, there was a fireplace with a real fire in the common room! God alone knew what that cost!
Thinking of the huge drill emptiness where the king planet laired, and of his own year’s sentence, Cornelius decided that such luxuries were, in truth, biological necessities.
Viken showed him to a pleasantly furnished chamber which would be his own. “We’ll fetch your luggage soon, and unload your psionic stuff. Right now, everybody’s either talking to the ship’s crew or reading his mail.”
Cornelius nodded absently and sat down. The chair, like all low-gee furniture, was a mere spidery skeleton, but it held his bulk comfortably enough. He felt in his tunic hoping to bribe the other man into keeping him company for a while. “Cigar? I brought some from Amsterdam.”
“Thanks.” Viken accepted with disappointing casualness, crossed long thin legs and blew greyish clouds.
“Ah…are you in charge here?”
“Not exactly. No one is. We do have one administrator, the cook, to handle what little work of that type may come up. Don’t forget, this is a research station, first, last, and always.”