by Jerry
The man almost was gibbering. The Ambassador slapped his shoulder heavily and stopped him. The Ambassador wanted a slap himself and his hand missed the first time as he reached for the loud-speaker stud.
The voice came instantly, so mechanical and uninflected that it occurred to him that a machine had spoken into a recording machine. The Venusians must be so unearthly as to be unable to manage Earth sounds, if they made sounds at all.
“. . . authority will advise him on the question of trade with Earth. He will be freed one hour thereafter. Your ship must remain in the same position meanwhile. The ambassador from Earth will leave your ship in precisely eighteen minutes proceeding directly downward. He will be picked up by our ship within the clouds. In this ship a representative of fifth authority will advise him on the question of trade with Earth. He will be freed one hour thereafter. Your ship must remain in the same position meanwhile. The ambassador from Earth will leave your ship in precisely eighteen minutes proceeding directly—” The Ambassador snapped the stud, his teeth gritted hard against a trembling. He was not even to land upon the alien planet, then. Not even to talk to the head of government but with “a representative of fifth authority.” It was so condescending, so contemptuous—and so deserved, of course, he thought, staring at the captain who stared wild-eyed. You wanted to run. You wanted to hide. Already you felt them inside your mind ruthlessly peering, destroying. As crazy as an ambassador.
Contemptuous time limit of eighteen minutes! They’d been told that it took a minimum of sixteen minutes to get into a space suit.
“My suit! The dressers!” shouted the Ambassador. Remembering the Ten-year men who waited to reassure him, and badly needing one last contact—“Bring everything to the Earth screen!”
As he fled the room he saw, in the screen which showed Venus, a vast silvery ovoid lift momentarily to the surface of the vapor, then sink slightly and remain in a suggestion of menace neither in sight nor out of sight, waiting to engulf him.
WHEN he faced the Earth screen two expert dressers flung themselves upon him with the pneumatic pads whose donning before the space suit took care and time. In Center Room, all the perfectly sane, shielded men attempted to convey by smiles their confidence in the shuddering creature being lapped in weirdness. The Ambassador strove with all his considerable mental power to hold the impression of those reassuring smiles.
And that doddering fool, Hoag, with his one arm waving unwanted friendliness, said, “Ahoy Ambassador! Now we can get to the point of that story.”
A story about superior merciless beings, calculated to break the last weak thread of a man’s confidence! “Shut up!” the Ambassador wanted to scream across space. And would have, had not the dressers jammed his mouth closed, at that moment, as they adjusted a throat pad.
On Earth, too, they tried to shut up Hoag but they couldn’t. “I’m not the old fool you think I am,” he said. “Listen! Ambassador—gentlemen, High Privilege!—Ambassador,” he said urgently, “I told you I’ve been saving this story to tell an Ambassador at the last minute when he’s in the spot you’re in. I’ve been waiting fifty years. Listen!
“The vermi forms made this little solar system and we didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. We got our liners replaced finally and no more than half of us were capable of standing a watch when we blasted off. Ambassador, we blasted the hell out of there!
“The vermi forms stayed where they were for a few seconds. Then they began to follow. We were streaming a good train, of course, the old fission train, a couple of miles of very fancy destruction and waste. So the worms came along. They overtook us easy. And they began to dance in and out of our train.
“Yes sir, Ambassador, they weaved and they circled in and out of that awful atom blast. And I knew that the atom blast will kill anything, chop through any armor. But not those worms! Now they showed us how superior they were! Now they made fun of our power!
“And I wanted to run and hide where my officer was hiding down among the mattresses we rigged for him among the girders along the keel. My mind was scarred by space and by everything that Earthmen were not born to—
“And then it happened.”
Adjustments now had been made and the Ambassador could speak while the dressers almost threw him into the inner suit. His hand clawed his face and he said hoarsely, “For God’s sake man, spare me!”
“And then it happened!” old Hoag shouted, thrusting away from those in the Center Room who were now trying physically to shut him up. “The worms died! They died in the atom blast!”
The Ambassador stared, and around the ivory table they stared at the last of the pioneers.
“Died! The vermiforms’ natural armor was proof against all the rays of space and it held out against the atom blast for a quarter of minute. But then it went. One after the other they went limp and the blast spewed them backward and we could see the spreading holes in them. And then they were out of sight, dead, killed because they hadn’t known any better, by George!
“And we went on to Phoebe and got along better than anyone else with the things that sit inside their crystals, thinking. Got the platinum nobody else could take. Because we knew that the universe can breed morons, incompetents! The crystal people are smarter than Earthmen, sure. But at least we knew we were smarter than somebody else!
“Don’t you see, Ambassador,” the old man said earnestly, “that only the inferiority complex kept us from knowing right away that those worms were no better than children? They hadn’t been trying to send us any message with radiations. No, it had been only the natural radiations of their bodies, changing as they changed their formations around us—as they played. One of them picked up poor Kroner. Why not? The thing was curious. Took him apart, later, the way a child will take apart a toy. My business with the square on the hypotenuse? Hell, how could they understand when they’d never learned any mathematics?”
“How could they?” the Ambassador echoed, and he was smiling.
“And that little trick of theirs, making a solar system. Well, don’t you see that they had to show off? One of their natural functions is simply gathering and stacking together the scattered atoms of space. I’ll bet they can’t make anything but black balls of amorphous matter. It’s possible they build themselves a little world here and there to lay their eggs on, or something. So, there they were feeling kind of abashed because they had no space ship or anything, so they just had to show us what they could do, and that they actually had gone and counted the planets of this system—on their tentacles, I’ll bet, since they had more than nine tentacles. And wasn’t it childish, getting together in the middle to show us a nice, glowing sun?”
THEY were locking the thorax section on the Ambassador. He stood straight and silent. Very straight.
“Ambassador,” the old man pleaded over thirty million miles, “you don’t know what you’re going to meet on Venus. You don’t know that they’re particularly smart. And they don’t know about you. Maybe they’re a little afraid of you. Maybe they’re a lot afraid of you. We don’t know one way. But we don’t know the other.
“But you know now, the best way and the best minute I can tell you, that some pretty dumb creatures live beyond Earth. Now, the way my grandfather’s grandfather used to say, you wouldn’t start selling your horse to a stranger by telling him that your horse is no good?”
Silence, then, on the beam from Earth to Venus.
The dressers began to lower the helmet over the Ambassador’s head. He stopped them. “Wait a minute.”
Still that nakedness in his mind, and the fear ready to pounce again. But that was only an effect of space, not Venusians. Or was it simply Lampell’s heritage. A conditioning?
And that contemptuous message, with its almost-impossible time limit and its pointed refusal to allow him to set foot upon Venus and its “representative of the fifth authority.” He didn’t know one way and he didn’t know the other, but it could be a defense mechanism on the Venusians’ part.
“Gentlemen,” said the Ambassador formally, but he spoke to the one adventurer, “I thought I was in a hurry but I’ve decided I’ve plenty of time. I think it will be a very good idea to open these negotiations by keeping the other party waiting.”
1948
FLIGHT OF THE STARLING
Chester S. Geier
I was going into space only to test the Starling: I could not dream of the terror awaiting me in the valley of machines
CHAPTER I
The Hour Before Dawn
A TOUCH on my shoulder wakened me. I’d been sleeping lightly, troubled by uneasy dreams, and at the touch I was instantly alert.
The light in my room had been turned on. I found myself staring into the gaunt, angular features of Professor Alward, who was bending over my bed. A vague, instinctive fear, inspired by my dreams, vanished at the instant of recognition. Alward said:
“Time to get up, Charles. It’ll be dawn soon.” His eyes were dark-rimmed, his face pale and drawn. He had, apparently, sat up the entire night.
I nodded, swung aside the covers, and rose. Alward went to the door. He paused a moment, watching me somewhat anxiously. He still wore the oil-stained coverall in which I remembered seeing him, the day before, when we’d made the last delicate adjustments on the warp generators of the Starling, and his graying brown hair hung in disheveled locks over his forehead.
“You feel all right?” he asked.
“I feel fine,” I said.
Alward smiled slightly, a little tiredly. “You and Dan are taking a considerable risk, you know. I have a terrible feeling of responsibility. I wouldn’t like to have any further dangers added. The principle of the Starling looks all right on paper—but under actual operations, who knows what we may have overlooked?”
“I understand,” I said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I weren’t willing to accept the risks.”
“It would help if I were able to go along . . .” Alward shrugged in leaden acceptance of the impossible. “I’ve already wakened Dan,” he said. “You’ll find breakfast waiting in the dining room.” He nodded at me, and went out.
I began to dress. It was a more detailed process than usual, since I was not to wear ordinary clothes. My garments made up a typical spaceman’s outfit. There was a long undersuit, a one-piece, zippered coverall of slate-gray plastolex, with a broad, flaring collar, fitting tightly at wrists and ankles, a pair of short boots with magnetic soles, a short, collarless jacket over which the coverall collar was to be folded, and a soft cap.
Splashing noises and snatches of discordant song came to me from Dan Burdeen’s room next door. The blonde giant didn’t seem at all concerned at what was to take place at dawn. As for myself, I was excited—and, I shall have to admit, not a little afraid. Our test flight in the Starling would be made under conditions which had never before been attempted by Man. And no one as yet knew fully the dangers attending space travel at speeds approaching that of light. The atomic engines of ordinary space vessels attained only a small fraction of the inconceivable velocity which Alward claimed for the warp-drive of the Starling.
I WONDERED, with-a sudden ache of anxiety, if Suzanne had anything to do with Burdeen’s carefree mood. He’d spent most of the previous afternoon with her, while Alward and I finished our work on the ship. I’d caught a glimpse of them once, at the edge of the lake, talking earnestly. Had some decision, favorable to Burdeen, been made by Suzanne? I thought of this with a wrenching sensation almost like sickness.
I finished dressing, and went out into the hall. I caught sight of Burdeen at the head of the stairs, interrupted by my approach on his way down. He looked me over slowly, and grinned in the superior, taunting way I’d grown to know so well.
“Morning, runt,” he said, pretending a great surprise. “So you didn’t run away in the night after all, eh?”
Burdeen was six feet and some five inches tall, as handsome and perfectly proportioned as an ancient Greek statue. Considering the fact that I was just an ordinary six-footer, he felt that his advantage in height gave him the privilege to call me a runt.
I said, “Sorry to have disappointed you.”
“You’ll probably get cold feet and back out yet,” Burdeen said.
“Not before you do.”
Burdeen eyed me levelly, almost grimly, “I never back out,” he said, “of anything.” And there was a quality in his voice and in his expression which told me as clearly as words that he was referring not only to our coming flight but also to Suzanne.
I think Burdeen misunderstood my intentions regarding Alward’s lovely niece, judging them on the basis of his own. I had known Suzanne for almost two years, since coming to work for Alward as his assistant. I hadn’t, however, seen as much of her during that time as might have been expected. My work with Alward on the Starling had kept me busy the greater part of each day. Driven by the all-consuming fires of his great idea, Alward had permitted few interruptions.
Still, what I had seen of Suzanne convinced me that she was the only girl who would ever matter. Our occasional meetings and conversations were like fragments of a mosaic, meaningless in their individual selves, but making, when joined together, a complete and harmonious pattern. She drew me with the compelling attraction of one who has mutual interests, mutual understandings.
How much of my emotions for the grave, quiet girl were colored by compassion, I do not know. She had been orphaned as a child by the death of her parents in an air accident. And Alward, buried body and mind in his work, had proved a poor substitute. Existence for her had so far meant only a number of different schools and a parade of temporary companions. What she called home was a comfortless place, a sort of beehive of work and speculation over abstract things which she could never quite grasp.
I had never spoken to Suzanne of my feelings. It had never occurred to me that she might even remotely care. I don’t think I’d have known how to talk to her if I’d tried. My background was one of constant work and study. I’d never had a chance to develop any ingratiating social graces. In my relations with others, I felt a shyness and reserve which I’d never been able to overcome.
Burdeen, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be under any such handicap. Alward had hired him some two months before, to pilot the Starling on its test flight. Burdeen had promptly fallen in love with Suzanne—or at least developed an interest in her which he interpreted as love. Such of his time as was not taken up by study of the operating principle of the ship and the handling of its controls, he spent in her company. I didn’t know if Suzanne welcomed his attentions, though I wondered apprehensively at times.
BURDEEN was a typical spaceman, raw and hard, the product of a stern competitive world. He went after what he wanted with a contemptuous disregard for everyone else concerned. According to his code, the winner took all in a fight in which no holds were barred. My role was purely a passive one, but Burdeen chose to see in me a rival for the favor of Suzanne.
Burdeen sensed in my attitude that I’d caught his implied meaning. A derisive grin twisted his lips for an instant before he turned to continue on down the stairs. I followed slowly, conscious of a dull, listless anger.
Alward and Suzanne were seated at the table in the dining room, while Mrs. Svendt, the buxom housekeeper, bustled about with plates of steaming food. Burdeen and I took our places, amid a subdued exchange of greetings, and began to eat.
It was a tense and silent meal. Professor Alward, I noticed, did little more than play meaningless games with his food, his thin features drawn in a brooding frown. This was for him a crucial point in twelve years of almost constant work. I could understand his emotions. His life-long dream of building an interstellar vessel had, in the Starling, taken on material form; but whether or not the ship would prove a success remained yet to be se
en. Failure, entailing the loss of twelve years and a sizeable fortune as well, couldn’t have been easy for him to contemplate.
I glanced cautiously at Suzanne. Her dark head was bent over her plate, and what I could see of her small face looked troubled and withdrawn. She made an appealing picture of pensive loveliness. She wore a simple dress of dark green synthe-wool, and her hair was done up in the way I liked so well: parted in the center, swept back from the temples, and gathered in a mass of thick, tumbled curls at the nape of her neck. I knew, if she were to return my gaze, that her lashes and brows would be startlingly dark against the pale oval of her face, and that her eyes would be a very clear and disturbing hazel. But she didn’t look in my direction.
I found myself wondering if her quietness indicated an anxiety for Burdeen, and possibly—just possibly—for myself. She could have no fears where Professor Alward was concerned, since he was not to accompany us on the test flight. His weak heart wouldn’t have been able to bear the strains of acceleration.
An abrupt surge of hopelessness pulled my eyes from Suzanne. I felt a fool for thinking that she might be even slightly worried about me. If she were worried at all, it couldn’t be over anyone but Burdeen. Seen through a woman’s eyes, the tanned blonde giant, with his laughing blue eyes and carefree grin, was undoubtedly attractive. The very nature of his profession surrounded him with an aura of adventure and romance. Beside Burdeen, how could I have been noticed? I was just a glamorless physicist, scholarly, serious, and physically quite unimpressive.
Somehow or other, we got through the meal. I ate—but what I ate might have been just so much ashes for all the notice I paid it.
Alward sat back in his chair, and without any perceptible break in his musing, lighted his pipe. Suzanne glanced suddenly around the table, a little confused, as though she had forgotten where she was. She murmured an excuse, rose, and strode into the living room. With a grin of delight, Burdeen rose hastily to follow her.