by Carol
What was the shallowest dive he could get away with for the air scoops to work? When the ram ignited, he’d be heading toward Jupiter, with two and a half g to help him get there. Could he possibly pull out in time?
A large, heavy hand patted the balloon. The whole vessel bobbed up and down, like one of the yo-yos that had just become the craze back on Earth.
Of course, Brenner might be perfectly right. Perhaps it was just trying to be friendly. Maybe he should try to talk to it over the radio. Which should it be: “Pretty pussy”? “Down, Fido!”? or “Take me to your leader”?
The tritium-deuterium ratio was correct. He was ready to light the candle, with a hundred-million-degree match.
The thin tip of the tentacle came slithering round the edge of the balloon, only twenty meters away. It was about the size of an elephant’s trunk and by the delicate way it was moving, appeared to be almost as sensitive. There were little palps at its very end, like questing mouths. He was sure that Dr. Brenner would be fascinated.
This seemed about as good a time as any. He gave a swift scan of the entire control board, started the final four-second ignition count, broke the safety seal and pressed the jettison switch.
There was a sharp explosion and an instant loss of weight. Kon-Tiki was falling freely, nose down. Overhead, the discarded balloon was racing upward, dragging the inquisitive tentacle with it. Falcon had no time to see if the gasbag actually hit the medusa, because at that moment the ram jet fired and he had other matters to think about.
A roaring column of hot hydrohelium was pouring out of the reactor nozzles, swiftly building up thrust—but toward Jupiter, not away from it. He could not pull out yet, for vector control was too sluggish. Unless he could gain complete control and achieve horizontal flight within the next five seconds, the vehicle would dive too deeply into the atmosphere and would be destroyed.
With agonizing slowness—those five seconds seemed like fifty—he managed to flatten out, then pull the nose upward. He glanced back only once and caught a final glimpse of the medusa many kilometers away. Kon-Tiki’s discarded gasbag had apparently escaped from its grasp, for he could see no sign of it.
Now he was master once more—no longer drifting helplessly on the winds of Jupiter but riding his own column of atomic fire back to the stars. The ram jet would steadily give him velocity and altitude, until he had reached near orbital speed at the fringes of the atmosphere. Then, with a brief burst of pure rocket power, he would regain the freedom of space.
Halfway to orbit, he looked south and saw the tremendous enigma of the Great Red Spot—that floating island twice the size of Earth—coming up over the horizon. He stared into its mysterious beauty until the computer warned him that conversion to rocket thrust was only sixty seconds ahead, then tore his gaze reluctantly away.
“Some other time,” he murmured.
“What’s that?” said Mission Control. “What did you say?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
“You’re a hero now, Howard,” said Webster, “not just a celebrity. You’ve given them something to think about—injected some excitement into their lives. Not one in a million will actually travel to the Outer Giants—but the whole human race will go in imagination. And that’s what counts.”
“I’m glad to have made your job a little easier.”
Webster was too old a friend to take offense at the note of irony. Yet it surprised him; this was not the first change in Howard that he had noticed since the return from Jupiter.
The administrator pointed to the famous sign on his desk, borrowed from an impresario of an earlier age:
ASTONISH ME!
“I’m not ashamed of my job. New knowledge, new resources—they’re all very well. But men also need novelty and excitement. Space travel has become routine; you’ve made it a great adventure once more. It will be a long, long time before we get Jupiter pigeonholed. And maybe longer still before we understand those medusae. I still think that one knew where your blind spot was. Anyway, have you decided on your next move? Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—you name it.”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about Saturn, but I’m not really needed there. It’s only one gravity, not two and a half like Jupiter. So men can handle it.”
Men, thought Webster. He said men. He’s never done that before. And when did I last hear him use the word we? He’s changing—slipping away from us.
“Well,” he said aloud, rising from his chair to conceal his slight uneasiness. “Let’s get the conference started. The cameras are all set up and everyone’s waiting. You’ll meet a lot of old friends.”
He stressed the last word, but Howard showed no response; the leathery mask of his face was becoming more and more difficult to read. Instead, he rolled back from the administrator’s desk, unlocked his undercarriage so that it no longer formed a chair and rose on his hydraulics to his full seven feet of height. It had been good psychology on the part of the surgeons to give him that extra twelve inches as some compensation for all else that he had lost when the Queen had crashed.
He waited until Webster had opened the door, then pivoted neatly on his balloon tires and headed for it at a smooth and silent thirty kilometers an hour. The display of speed and precision was not flaunted arrogantly; already, it was quite unconscious.
Howard Falcon, who had once been a man and could still pass for one over a voice circuit, felt a calm sense of achievement—and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. Since his return from Jupiter, the nightmares had ceased. He had found his role at last.
He knew now why he had dreamed about that super-chimp aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds; and so was he.
He alone could travel unprotected on the lunar surface; the life-support system inside the metal cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or under water. Gravity fields ten times that of Earth were an inconvenience but nothing more. And no gravity was best of all.
The human race was becoming more remote from him, the ties of kinship more tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right beyond the atmosphere; they should stick to their natural homes—Earth, Moon, Mars.
Some day, the real masters of space would be machines, not men—and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took somber pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal, midway between two orders of creation.
He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new—between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them.
Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.
1971
SELECTIONS FROM THE
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THE CHRONICLES
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John Norman
TARNSMAN OF GOR
OUTLAW OF GOR
PRIEST-KINGS OF GOR
NOMADS OF GOR
ASSASSIN OF GOR
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CAPTIVE OF GOR
Here is the magnificent world of Gor, known also as Counter-Earth, a planet as strangely populated, as threatening, as beautiful as any you are likely to encounter in the great works of fiction. Here too is Tarl Cabot—the one picked out of millions to be trained and schooled and disciplined by the best teachers, swordsmen, bowmen on Gor…Toward what end, what mission, what purpose?
Only Gor holds the answer
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BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE
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