A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Do you mean that you think we still have a chance?” I said.

  “Certainly. A most excellent chance. That is, providing you have enough courage and confidence in me to do what I tell you to do,” said the Professor.

  “After some of the things that have happened I don’t feel like bragging about my courage, but as far as confidence in you is concerned, I don’t think I need to tell you that I shall always be for you as I always have been. If it’s just a case of taking a chance, I’d much rather be making a try at escaping rather than sitting still waiting to die.”

  “That’s the way to talk.”

  “All right. What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “The first thing to do is get into your space suit.”

  “Would you mind telling me just what you expect of me?” I asked.

  “Of course I don’t mind telling you. I want you to go outside and repair that rocket tube,” was his calm reply.

  “But how am I going to do that? We haven’t any spare tube and we haven’t the material or the tools to make a new one. As for the possibility of fastening the broken parts together, I don’t see how that can be done either. In the first place we can’t get hold of the broken part and in the second place it wouldn’t do us any good anyway, because we haven’t any welding apparatus or any other way to fasten the broken parts together.”

  “But how about the other four dimensional rocket tube?”

  “You mean the one we employed to shoot us into hyperspace with?”

  “Yes. We don’t need that any more, do we?”

  “I suppose not. All that can do is get us further into hyperspace. What we need is something to get us away from hyperspace.”

  “Exactly. Except that they pointed in opposite directions, the two four-dimensional rocket tubes were identical in shape and structure, were they not?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then all we have to do is remove the good rocket tube and bolt it on the place where the broken tube was; then we’ll be able to navigate back into three dimensional space.”

  “The way you describe it, the job is as simple as changing a tire on an automobile,” I remarked as I began getting into the space suit.

  “You may find it even easier than that,” was the Professor’s reply.

  “Oh well, I suppose somebody has to do it. So here goes.”

  “You won’t require all those tools,” said Banning, pointing to the trowel and pickaxe which hung at my belt. “You may need the hammer, though, and of course the monkey wrench will be the most useful of all. Let me suggest, though, that you fill those empty pockets with chunks of this material that we blasted from the great ray on the moon.”

  “What’s the idea? Am I supposed to play a cosmic game of duck on the rock, or something like that?”

  “Never mind the wisecracks. The lumps of rock will make you heavier and they may come in handy for another purpose.” With that he opened the door of the airlock and started to screw on my helmet.

  “Just a minute!” I shouted. “You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you?”

  “Of course not. We may need you to do some more stunts before we get back home. Why did you ask such a question?” he asked.

  “How fast are we going now?”

  “About 66,000 miles per hour.”

  “Whew! How do you expect me to hang on to the ship when it’s going at such a speed? I’ll be blown to smithereens the minute I stick my nose outside!” I cried.

  “Nothing of the sort. Don’t you realize that your body is moving with the same velocity as the flyer and in the same direction? Relatively speaking, the Amundsen will be standing still so far as you are concerned. You must remember that out here there is no air or other gas to offer any resistance or to form a draft.”

  “But suppose I should slip and fall off the flyer?”

  “There’s no danger of that, either. You can’t fall away from the flyer unless something pushes you or pulls you. We are in hyperspace now and neither the moon, the earth, nor any other body is exerting any appreciable attraction for the flyer or for your body. On the other hand, there is a small but none the less potent gravitational attraction between your body and the space ship, so the only way you are likely to fall is toward the Amundsen

  Satisfied at last, I entered the airlock, sealed the inner door and turned on the valve to remove the air from the small chamber. But despite Banning’s optimistic assurances, there was a feeling of trepidation in my heart when I opened the outer door.

  In my earphones I heard Banning’s voice say, “Can you hear me?”

  “Sure!” I radioed back to him. “Your program is coming in fine. Suppose you put on the record and play ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’.”

  “Perhaps it will be more appropriate if I play ‘Get Out and Get Under the Moon!’ ” was his come-back.

  “Well, here goes nothing!” I shouted as I eased my inflated form through the narrow opening.

  Much as I depended on the correctness of Professor Banning’s statements, I was astonished to discover that the flyer did seem to be floating motionless in space. With my mechanical hand I kept a tight grip on the handle of the door. There seemed to be no strain on my arm. By way of experiment I released my hold, but kept on the alert so I could make a quick grab for the handle in case I needed to. Instead of dropping or being blown away, my body swayed gently toward the flyer.

  With the instinctive idea of getting on the part of the ship which we called the top, I started to pull myself up the side of the flyer. I found to my surprise that it was just as easy to stay on the bottom as on any other part of the craft. I tried crawling completely around the ship and had the peculiar sensation that I was on top all the time, while the Amundsen seemed to spin beneath me, as a barrel turns when a circus performer balances himself on it.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Man Overboard!

  I WORKED my way around to the broken rocket. It took me but a few minutes to unscrew the six nuts which held the stump in place. Placing the nuts in a pocket which I had kept empty for that purpose I removed the damaged tube and let go of it. I expected it to drop out of sight, but instead it clung to the side of the flyer.

  In a similar manner I removed the good four dimensional tube, but took good care not to let go of it. The only difficulty I encountered in fastening the tube in place at the other opening was that the broken fragment which I had just removed kept bumping against my helmet.

  Working as I was under a severe nervous strain, it was exasperating to have this lump of metal banging against me, but I didn’t do anything about it until I had screwed the last nut home. Then I grabbed the offending object in my mechanical fist and heaved it away from me with all my might.

  To say that what happened next surprised me would be putting it mildly. Before I realized it, I found myself shooting away from the Amundsen at an alarming rate of speed. By the time I recovered myself enough to yell for help, I was probably at least a mile away from the space flyer, with the gap between us widening constantly.

  If you can imagine how it would feel to fall off an ocean liner in mid-ocean, you will have a faint idea of how I felt as I drifted out there in that awful void and watched the space ship grow smaller and smaller in the distance.

  The worst of it was that neither Banning nor Berglin seemed to have noticed my departure, since I had been working near the tail of the flyer where they could not see me through the windows.

  Finally, I gained command of my vocal chords and yelled, “Help! Help! Man overboard!”

  Instantly, the welcome voice of the Professor came to me through the earphones: “How in the world did you get way out there?”

  “Search me. It happened right after I threw away the broken rocket tube.”

  “You threw it way? That accounts for it. The reaction from the force of the tube as it left your hand pushed you in the opposite direction.”

  “I suppose you are going to tell me that I’m suffering from the effect
s of one of Newton’s laws of motion. But right now I’m more interested in getting back to the ship. Can’t you swing around here and pick me up before I get any further away?”

  “That would be a dangerous thing to attempt, I’m afraid. If we should turn on any of the rocket tubes at the speed we are traveling, it is likely to alter our momentum so much that you’d never be able to hang on, even if we could come close enough for you to reach us.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that there is no hope for me—that I’m doomed to hang out here forever?”

  “Of course there’s hope for you. If you’ll just keep your head and do as I say, you’ll be back here in a few minutes. It would be risky for us to try to come to you, but that doesn’t prevent you from coming back to us.”

  “What do you want me to do, swim back? When it comes to swimming in this stuff, I’m afraid my training has been sadly neglected. I’ll do my best, though,” and I started kicking with my legs and waving my arms.

  “That won’t do you any good,” the Professor told me. “Better save your strength. The best way to get back here is to use the same principle that sent you out there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The force of reaction. Your pockets are full of rocks. Suppose you get one of them in your mechanical hand, then take careful sight toward the flyer and throw the missile in exactly the opposite direction. This will make you move toward us.”

  I followed his instructions and sure enough I began to move slowly in the general direction of the Amundsen. To accelerate my speed, I hurled two more rocks. My aim was fair but far from perfect. I was still at least a hundred feet away from the ship as I swept past it and beyond it.

  This got me excited and I started heaving my missiles with all my might in rapid succession. In this manner I succeeded in projecting myself directly at the space ship, but when I reached it, my speed was so great that I had no time to grab hold of anything. Like a huge rubber ball, my inflated space suit bumped into the side of the flyer and bounced briskly away again.

  “Keep your head!” the Professor warned me. “Take time to aim carefully and try to judge your speed more accurately.”

  “What do you think this is,” I retorted, “a cosmic golf game? If I slice my shots I get in the rough, and if I hit ’em too hard I bounce off the green. I’m afraid I’ll never make par on this hole, but here goes for another try.”

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have made this feeble attempt to be funny if I had realized that my ammunition was running short. I was still several feet away from the Amundsen when I discovered to my horror that my last chunk of lunar rock was gone. I was about to give up in despair when I happened to think of the six extra nuts which I had taken from the broken rocket tube.

  “Thank Heaven I saved them,” I said to myself.

  After that there was no more fooling—no more prodigal waste of my precious missiles. With all the care of an expert playing in a championship match, I tossed the first of the nuts. It brought me closer, but a trifle to one side of my target. This I corrected by carefully throwing the second nut. I still had one of the metal objects left when I finally nudged gently against the side of the space ship and caught hold of a strut. Naturally I lost no time in getting inside the airlock and closing the door behind me.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Back to Earth

  THE remainder of our journey was uneventful. When the proper moment arrived, Professor Banning instructed me to direct a blast through the four dimensional rocket tube. It worked perfectly, bringing us back into the influence of the earth’s gravitational attraction.

  In returning, we duplicated the same maneuver we had used in landing on the moon; that is we made a hairpin turn around the earth, so that we were traveling in the same direction and at about the same speed as our planet was moving in its orbit. Then, with the aid of our rocket motors, we sped through the upper regions of the earth’s atmosphere until we could make out the topographical features of the land beneath us.

  Under the skillful guidance of Berglin, we navigated our craft until we were hovering over our home field at San Diego. Here a most alarming sight met our gaze. As far as the eye could perceive, the roads in all directions were jammed solid with automobiles, motorcycles, and other conveyances. Out in San Diego Harbor there was an inconceivable jumble of boats of all kinds and sizes, from canoes to battleships. So close were they packed that a person could have walked from San Diego, to Coronado, on the opposite shore, merely by climbing from one boat to another.

  The air was so thick with airplanes that we had difficulty in keeping out of their way. Worst of all, the field on which we were expected to land was packed full with a surging, milling mass of humanity.

  It looked as if all California with additional representatives from Arizona and Old Mexico, had gathered in that one spot to greet us. To attempt a landing under such circumstances was out of the question.

  “Let’s go to Clover Field,” Berglin suggested, and Banning agreed.

  The enormous swarm of airplanes attempted to follow us, but so swiftly did our rocket motors carry us that we soon left them far behind. We found the field at Santa Monica absolutely deserted. Not an airplane, not a human being was in evidence. Apparently they had all gone to meet us at San Diego.

  “In a way this is very fortunate for us,” Professor Banning said. “It will give us a chance to unload our cargo without having a lot of curious reporters snooping around. There are very strong reasons why I don’t want anybody to know what we brought back with us from the moon.”

  “Would you mind letting Berglin and me know what this stuff is?” I asked. “You know of course that you can depend on us to keep it under our hats.”

  “Why of course you are entitled to know. It is platinum—pure, unadulterated platinum.”

  “And how much is it worth?”

  “About one hundred and ten dollars per ounce.”

  “One hundred and ten dollars per what?”

  “One hundred and ten dollars per ounce. But the monetary worth of platinum is not so important as its value in science and industry. As you probably know, there are a number of cases where platinum has to be used in spite of its high cost. In some chemical operations, for instance, platinum receptacles must be used. Another illustration is in dentistry. One reason why porcelain jacketed crowns are so expensive is that they are made over a platinum shell. In many ways a dependable supply of cheap platinum would be of great advantage to humanity.”

  “Well, now that we have all this platinum here, what are we going to do with it?” I asked.

  “That looks like an ideal hiding place,” the Professor replied as he pointed to a ramshackle building just across the road from the airport. It had formerly been used as a real estate office. With the selling out of the subdivision, the building had apparently been abandoned by had been left standing. Its ruinous appearance made it only the safer for our purpose.

  “We’d better hurry,” Banning admonished us. “It won’t be long before that flock of airplanes will arrive from San Diego.”

  Between the three of us, we carried the chunks of metal to the building, piling the material in such a way that it could not be seen through the windows.

  “Some dark night, we’ll come out here with a truck and remove the platinum,” Banning observed, as he closed the door of the building.

  Just then something struck my funny bone and I started to laugh.

  “What’s the matter with our facetious friend now?” the Professor inquired.

  “I just had a mental picture of myself out there in space, heaving away lumps of platinum worth a thousand dollars apiece, as if they were mere pebbles.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Professor Banning. “There’s plenty more where that platinum came from—thousands of tons of it!”

  THE END.

  EXTRA-GALACTIC INVADERS

  J. Schlossel

  EXCEPT that we have finally hearkened to the clamorous demands for an all-inte
rplanetary quarterly, it would have been impossible for us to include this classic novelette by the author of “The Second Swarm” We predict that, popular as that first story was, it will be as nothing compared to the amount of enthusiasm which will be voiced, in the form of letters to us, after “Extra-Galactic Invaders” is read.

  We think, in fact, that this story will be reread many times.

  IN the black depths of space between island universes, eyes, sharp and unblinking, kept watch. There in the midst of that intense blackness, relieved only by distant patches of hazy light emanating from far-off galaxies, some brighter and nearer than others, sentient beings strained their vision toward two nebulous patches that were brighter than all except a huge spiral nebula that lay sprawling over a vast area behind them.

  To those watchers, the two brighter patches, tiny island universes, nearer than any of the myriad galaxies which faintly spotted the surrounding blackness with their nebulous light, spelled danger.

  Between the watchers and the nearer of those two tiny island universes were numerous jagged fragments of what had once been a mighty star, long grown cold and disrupted by some terrific cataclysm. Those fragments, following curious and complicated orbits around a common center of gravity, moved steadily toward that hazy patch of light.

  At the tip of the smaller and nearer of those two island universes was a small stationary black spot, a dense, globular cluster of dead and burnt-out stars, that was visible only because it blotted out the light from living stars behind it. Powerful though their space-penetrating instruments were, they were not powerful enough to dissolve even the outermost fringe of that blackened cluster.

  The eyes of the watchers in the path of that light grew chilled with dread as they tried to withdraw. They recognized the light as a form of disintegration vibrations; could produce it themselves. Disrupting molecular equilibrium, no known form of matter could withstand those destructive vibrations. Everything they touched, their power of penetration in the denser elements was on an average of some five thousand feet per second, was broken down to its original atoms.