The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  “Have I gotten you killed so far?”

  “You couldn’t start the rover.”

  “Could you?”

  “Okay.” Wolverton looked down. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Right or wrong, I outrank you. I didn’t interfere with your collection of mineral samples, and you don’t interfere with me while I’m doing my job.”

  “What is your job?”

  “Right now it’s keeping you alive so you can collect more rocks. Let’s get moving.”

  The first thing to do was find out if there was another way to the surface besides riding up in the ore collector, as Nozaki now thought of it. There could be some tunnels that led to the surface. If they failed to find one, then she would consider going back up in the collector.

  While they were underground, they could use the manufactured oxygen, saving what they had in their tanks for the long walk back through the bubble and on to base camp. Nozaki didn’t want to think about what they would do if base camp was not there.

  But as she walked around the perimeter of the vast cavern, she had to consider that possibility. If they passed into another temporal bubble, it was very likely that it would not be the one from which they came. And it was entirely possible that they would not be able to return to this one after they left it. In either case, they would soon be dead. She hated to admit it, but Wolverton had a point when he said that he would prefer to stay in the cavern.

  But she had signed an oath when she joined the service that she would not shirk her duty and that she would follow orders. Her orders were to take Wolverton out to get mineral samples and bring him back. She intended to do everything she could to carry out those orders.

  “Gather all the food and oxygen we can carry,” she said, after a brief rest, “while I look for a way out.”

  She discovered that the balloons turned a deeper orange when the oxygen began to get stale. She took all she could with her. Juggling oxygen balloons in one hand and carrying her helmet with the other, she examined every notch she could find on the walls, until she found an opening big enough to crawl into.

  “Let’s give it a shot,” she said. The opening was about four meters above her head. She jumped and her gloved hand caught the edge of it. She propelled herself inside with ease, and crouched in the dark for a moment, trying to acclimatize her vision, rather than wasting the batteries by turning on her head lamp.

  She soon saw that the tunnel angled upward, and that there were ridges every meter or so that she could use to plant her boots on. She just hoped that the blue gel would not flush down through this tunnel while she was inside it. While she climbed, it occurred to her that she and Wolverton might be able to make their way around LGC-1 by way of interior tunnnels such as this one. That way they could avoid the daylight and go out only in the dark to search for the camp.

  But how could they know they’d be in the right time bubble? Now that she was alone in the dark, climbing up the incline, Nozaki allowed herself to feel a little of the fear that Wolverton had displayed without shame when this whole mess had started.

  But there was no time for that. Something was coming down the incline toward her. Her breath caught in her throat and her heart pounded.

  She couldn’t avoid it.

  Spidery legs churned along the curved tunnel’s sides. Whatever it was, it was not alone. Nozaki counted three, no four, of them. They came at her so quickly that she could not avoid them.

  Their long, multi-jointed legs touched her pressure suit, but then they quickly moved past her and entered the cavern. Were these the miners, or more of their utilitarian creations? If they were the latter, she could not imagine what their function might be.

  “Wolverton,” she called, but it was no good. He would never be able to hear her from here. She thought of putting on her helmet and contacting him, but he wouldn’t be wearing his helmet. She had told him to cut off his recycling tank and breathe from the oxygen balloons, just as she was doing.

  Well, the things had not harmed her, so they probably would not harm Wolverton either. The movements she had noticed from a distance were probably these spidery things. Perhaps they were designed or programmed to stay out of the way.

  She realized she had stopped moving when she had first seen them coming, and so she forced herself to keep climbing upward. It soon became so dark that she wanted very badly to turn on the head lamp.

  At last she saw dim light reflected on the curvature ahead. It was not a red light, reflected from the hydrogen shell of Gamma Crucis, but a yellowish glow. She was in no danger of being broiled by such faint illumination.

  Now she realized that the light came from two side tunnels, intersecting with the passageway she was in. Her best guess was that it was powered by piezoelectricity, its current derived from pressure on a quartz deposit.

  “Now we’re getting some place,” she said.

  A minute or two later she was at the intersection. First she looked to her right, into a perpendicular tunnel leading off into the darkness. Then she turned to her left, seeing a mirror image. She could not tell where the light came from, but it suffused both corridors.

  “You’ve got three choices,” she said, breathing a bit heavily from the long climb. “Pick one.”

  She opted to keep going straight up the incline toward the asteroid’s surface. It had taken only a few minutes for the mining machine to bring her down, so she reasoned it should not take much longer to reach her destination. If she saw the red glow of the sun, she would know to duck back inside the tunnel. If not, she could go out and see what she could find in the dark.

  She came to another juncture, and there the tunnel ended. There was really nothing to do except follow one of the perpendicular tunnels and hope that it led to a surface opening. It was either that or climb back down to the cavern and look for another way.

  She decided to go for it, choosing the left tunnel.

  It was a little harder to make her way inside it, because she had to crawl on all fours. But after a few minutes the tunnel debouched into a larger space.

  As she emerged, Nozaki noticed dozens of stringy objects hanging from the walls of this chamber, which had a floor and a domed roof. Upon closer inspection, she realized that these were the same spidery things that she had encountered in the angled tunnel on the way up. Apparently this was a storage space for them.

  The room was about ten meters in diameter, and she saw another tunnel mouth on the far side of it. She took a good look at the inanimate spiders, and still was unsure if they were machine or animal. They could have just been hanging here to sleep, like bats in a cave, or they might have needed charging. She had no way of knowing which, or if they hung here for some other reason altogether.

  “Now what?” she said aloud. Should she continue on in through the next tunnel leg? It did not seem likely that she could get lost, so why not?

  Nozaki crawled inside the tunnel and went forward for a few minutes. The amber light became very dim, and she was thinking about backing up when she perceived a red glow. Was it an opening to the surface?

  There was only one way to find out.

  She crawled as far as she could without exposing herself to the sunlight, using the tunnel’s shadow for protection. She saw an astonishing sight.

  A cavern, almost as large as the one she had left Wolverton in, opened in front of her. It was festooned with the stringy spiders, and they basked in the red glow of Gamma Crucis. There was a large opening just above, letting in the crimson radiation. The spiders were everywhere---clinging to the walls, on the cavern floor, and crawling up the sides.

  She caught her breath as one suddenly came over the lip of the tunnel, its legs brushing against her as it made its way down the tunnel in the direction from which she had just come. She could not turn around in the narrow tunnel, so she waited until the side of the canyon was in shadow before venturing to the edge to turn around.

  That gave her some time to observe the spiders. She was pretty sure th
ey were built for some specific purpose, or genetically engineered. Their disinterest in her indicated that they were indeed designed to stay out of the way of living, organic beings.

  They certainly couldn’t have developed naturally on this asteroid.

  “What are they here for?” she asked herself.

  They did not appear to be able to dig or carry heavy weights, not with such spindly limbs. Were they simply here to make sure that everything was functioning properly?

  The shadow covered the near wall in a few minutes, and Nozaki crept to the tunnel mouth to take a closer look. As the vault’s near side was plunged into shadow, more and more of the spiders came to life. The largest of them climbed up the wall and stationed themselves much as those in the storage room, hanging from the bare rock. Others joined them and hung on their dangling legs, and still others joined them. Each wave was comprised of smaller spiders than the previous wave. They formed an arachnoidal daisy chain. Now others were doing the same thing all around the circular vault. Before long, thousands of them had gathered on the walls, dangling one from the other all the way to the floor. A blast of heat coming from below wafted them upward and those at the ends of the daisy chain locked legs, forming a vast net stretching from one side of the cavern to the other.

  What were they doing?

  And then she noticed the vents opening on the far side of the vault, about thirty meters below her tunnel. They ringed the vault. The blue gel washed through them, soaking the web and depositing lumps of ore. The interlocked spiders sagged on the impact, but then bounced back. Those anchoring the web jerked their limbs upward and the ore lumps were flung out through the crater mouth into space.

  “Wow!” So this was what they did with the ore. But what happened then? There must have been something set up to catch all those millions of flying rocks. Nozaki watched the spiders repeat the process over and over again, seeing the blue gel drain from the floor below, probably to be recycled for the next round of spiderweb slingshot.

  Between slings, she pulled herself out to the tunnel mouth and looked up. There was no pathway or steps, and she saw no tunnels higher than this one, located perhaps twenty meters below the opening.

  She was that close to the surface, and yet there was no way to get there. She carefully turned herself around, her legs dangling for a moment outside the tunnel, and then pulled herself back in. She would go back and tell Wolverton what she had seen and find out if he had any ideas.

  She met a few spiders coming through the tunnel, but they were going toward the vault instead of the cavern. She passed through the storage room and was soon back at the inclined tunnel.

  She was getting very hungry and wished she had brought some food with her. She had never expected to be gone this long, but at least she had seen something that could turn out be helpful to them. She was beginning to form a plan.

  When she dropped down from the tunnel mouth, she almost landed on a spider, but it scuttled out of the way and gave her room. Instead of following the cavern wall around, she walked straight across the floor and was dismayed that she did not see Wolverton near the food or oxygen globes.

  Then she saw him. He wasn’t near the globes. He was inside one.

  “Wolverton!” she shouted at his shadowy orange form. “Come on out of there. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  Wolverton didn’t seem to hear her at first. She moved closer to the oxygen balloon, reached in, and pulled him out by the arm. Smaller balloons clung to his arms and legs as he staggered onto the cavern floor.

  “What did you do that for?” he asked.

  “You were in there getting stoned, weren’t you?”

  “What if I was?” Wolverton stooped to pick the balloons off his legs and slapped them over his face.

  “Never mind that. I think I’ve found a way out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t sound so ecstatic.”

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Nozaki. I’d rather stay here.”

  “Well, you’re not going to.”

  “That’s fine for you to say. You talk to people easily, and you know how to get along. You don’t know what it’s like not to have any friends. I thought it would be different out here on the frontier, but it isn’t.”

  “We’ll work on that when we get back.”

  “You can’t make me go back.”

  “Want to bet?”

  That question seemed to sober him up a little. He was bigger than Nozaki, but she was trained to fight and he wasn’t. “How are we gonna get out?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. “Have you been packing as much food and air as you can?”

  Wolverton looked away.

  “Wolverton.…”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I don’t see this the way you do. We’re in another continuum than the one we came from. Even if we find our way back, base camp isn’t going to be there.”

  “We came through one bubble into another, so we can find our way back.”

  “You say that, but you don’t even know if the bubble’s still there.”

  “A little more optimism would be appreciated, Wolverton.”

  “Look around you,” Wolverton said. “We could be king and queen here.”

  “Yeah, for as long as this place lasts.”

  “I think it will outlast us.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “I don’t care. This is a safe haven, and there’s nobody here to tell me what to do.”

  “Wolverton, how old are you?”

  “Thirty-one. Why?”

  “Because you sound more like a thirteen-year-old. You’re not a king anymore than I’m a queen. Who would be our subjects? A bunch of mechanical spiders?”

  “Yeah, I saw them. Aren’t they cool?”

  “Not only are they cool, but they showed me how we’re going to get out of here.”

  “They did?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  That caught his interest, so she explained what she had seen and told him about the escape plan she had formulated on the way back. The more she told him, the more he gaped.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked him.

  “I think you’re crazy,” he said.

  “You want to stay here and suck pure oxygen and eat God-knows-what until you die of old age,” Nozaki said, losing her temper, “ruling over a bunch of synthetic spiders, and you call me crazy?”

  Wolverton got the message. He was soon gathering up all the food and water he could carry. The water was conveyed in balloons whose skins were a bit more solid than the oxygen balloons.

  By the time they had reached the storage room, Nozaki had long since told Wolverton everything. He was quite fascinated and stared at the hanging spiders as if they were goldfish in a bowl.

  “But I still don’t understand how you figure we can get out,” he said.

  “You will in a few minutes,” Nozaki said. “It’s time to put your helmet on and turn on your oxygen supply.”

  They crawled the last few meters until they emerged at the shadowy edge of the vault.

  “I can’t see anything,” Wolverton complained.

  “There’s nothing to see,” Nozaki told him. “We’re on the dark side of LGC-1 now.”

  She lay on her back to look up at the stars. After a few seconds she saw thousands of dark stones fly up against the stars and out of sight, like a hailstorm in reverse.

  “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do,” she said. “After a few minutes, I’ll shine my head lamp on the vents. As soon as the rocks are poured down in the gel and are thrown back up, we jump.”

  “Jump? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Maybe, but that’s what we’re going to do. My guess is the spiders will toss us out as if we were rocks. We’re not going to fall to our deaths in any case.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “If they can support all those rocks, they can support us. If they don’t throw us, we’ll climb down to the bottom and loo
k for a tunnel or vent to climb through.”

  “And if they do throw us?”

  “Then we’ll be tossed into space, and we’ll either be snatched by whatever’s catching the ore or we’ll be thrown free of this crater, and we’ll be well on our way around the dark side before we come down.”

  “What if it throws us into the sunlight?”

  “No, I’ve worked out the time. We’ll go into the dark. The only real danger is that we’ll be thrown so far from the surface that we’ll be exposed to the sunlight, but that might be for only a few seconds. I think we can make it.”

  “It seems too risky to me,” Wolverton said.

  “Maybe so, but it’s the only chance we’ve got. Now get ready. When I jump, you come right after me.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Wolverton, you’ll follow me, right?”

  “Right.”

  She turned on her head lamp and the beam lanced across the vault. She played the light down on the web, making sure that it was still intact. It looked the same, the spiderlegs tightly meshed as if waiting for another flush. Nozaki slowly turned her head to illuminate one of the vents.

  “Here it comes!”

  The blue gel began to spurt from the vent, and then it gushed out forcefully. A quick glance showed that the other vents were doing the same.

  “Are you ready, Wolverton?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Nozaki waited until the blue gel stopped cascading and the rocks were trapped in the web. As the web sagged and gathered force, she watched the rocks soar past her and then turned out the head lamp.

  “Let’s go!”

  She flung herself head first out into the void, somersaulting and descending so slowly she felt as if she were floating. Exhilarated, she went down and down. At last she hit the web and felt it give way beneath her weight. It sagged a few meters, and then shot her upward with terrific force.

  She flew up toward the starry sky.

  “Goodbye, Nozaki,” she heard Wolverton say over her radio.

  “Jump, Woverton!”

  “No, I’m staying here, just like I told you.”

  Nozaki sailed over the crater’s rim into space, alone. She tumbled head over heels, seeing the stars blacked out by LGC-1 again and again. A crimson corona surrounded the tiny world, and she was afraid that she had been thrown too far, that she would go all the way around LGC-1 and end up facing the sun’s fatal hydrogen shell.