by Jerry
At eleven fifteen Fred Holland walked in holding a card. “Here it is. We’ve got it down to a twenty-mile circle in southwestern France. Impact time is 1618.” He dropped the card on the desk. “Look, Phil, there’s nothing you can do that you haven’t done.”
“One more thing.” Phil took the card without looking at it and sent it to the main Safety office. “Now I can resign.”
“This is Jim, Phil. The North America was hit by an unscheduled ship that took off from Alaska somewhere. What’s the dope on the meteor? I heard it’s bad.”
“Yeah. Southwestern France, somewhere.” Phil wondered vaguely about the identity of the other ship. For some reason, the feeling of guilt grew stronger. “Any survivors?” he asked.
And his heart did not change its pace when Jim said, “No.”
Thirteen hundred, and the hourly news. Phil listened dully as the reports came in from the reopened space lanes. A private yacht had been sighted cruising illegally in the lane. Some scandal or other impended. Planetoid 17321 left the lane and the gap caused by its presence closed. Collision near Mars in the rush to take advantage of approaching conjunction. Stag Head Station operative again. On and on.
The meteor was between Earth and the Moon, now, its pace quickening. In two more hours and some minutes it would rocket into Earth’s atmosphere; incandescent and thundering it would smash into France with a towering splash of earth, rock and living things. Ten million refugees streamed along the roads leading out of that imaginary circle, quiet and terrified, peering into the luminous afternoon sky. Police were thick in the mobs, suppressing panic.
Phil quit listening to the news at 1500. He busied himself around the office, collecting papers accumulated over the past eight years.
Maybe I can afford to retire. That would be nice. Get away, at any rate. Maybe Claire would like Venus.
He came on the computations he had made, those about the mass of the meteor. A strange hope kindled, but the figures were right. He began to fill his briefcase. As he started to leave, he looked long at the clock. Twelve minutes. As the door shut, a card in its capsule bumped against the end of the pneumatic tube. The punchings on it indicated that a distress signal had been picked up from somewhere near the trade route.
Eight years ago, a meteor had got by the warning net—another big one. That one had smashed into a loaded passenger liner, and the disaster had broken Phil’s predecessor. Now Phil had to watch an even worse disaster—had watched it from its first remote beginnings.
He sat in a subway train, holding a newspaper and looking at his watch. Not many people were in the car—most of them were sitting by television screens, watching France with morbid anticipation. The car whistled past a few deserted stops and began to brake. The minute hand on Phil’s watch crept over the ten, past it, while Phil read the billboards.
Two minutes. The train started smoothly, went quickly to maximum velocity, then slowed for Phil’s stop.
“Phil—is that you? Hey, Phil?”
He looked up blindly, then glanced out the window. The end of the line. Must have missed my stop. Claire will be worried—
“Hey, Phil—” Fred stopped by the hunched figure. “Come on, Phil, I’ll take you home in my car.”
It was pleasant to lie in bed and only half-think. The sun shone warmly in the window and the sky was blue. Phil smiled and stretched. Then his head swung to the window—the sun was too high! It must be noon! He started to get up, and felt an overpowering lassitude cloud his mind. He lay back and thought, They’ll call me if they need me. The dusk swirled around him and he relaxed in it again.
The second time he woke he felt his mind gradually coming to life. Bit by bit, his senses returned. The covers were too warm—it was dark again—someone was in the room.
“Claire?” A sense of panic stirred him.
“Quiet, darling. How do you feel?”
“All right, I guess. What time is it?” He relaxed.
“Nineteen thirty. Are you—all right?” Her voice showed strain.
“Sure, honey. Turn on the video, will you?” Claire turned, tears of relief in her eyes.
“All right. Fred wants to see you.” She stopped at the door and smiled at him. “We were worried about you, darling.”
Phil got up as soon as she had left and went to her dressing table. In the mirror his face was puffed with sleep and lined by long fatigue. He heard Fred coming and got back into bed.
Fred came over to the bed and grinned down at Phil. “Boy, you look like hell.”
Phil found himself grinning back, feeling better. “I sure blew myself to a tantrum.”
“The doctor said human beings still have to sleep now and then.”
“What about the meteor?”
Fred sat back and looked quizzically at Phil. “Still think it must have been your fault?”
“No . . . I guess not. No.”
“Well, then, you’ll blow your cork when you hear.” Phil’s heart started pounding violently.
“It came in, all right, right where we planted it,” Fred said. “Only it burned up before it got through fifty miles of atmosphere. What a show!”
“Did they blast it?” Phil sat up in bed.
“Nope. Same meteor Luna spotted. Only those kids on Luna never thought to check on the mass. It weighed just a little over half a ton, and blew up halfway down.”
“But where’s 842? Are the lanes still cleared?”
“Eight forty-two? Nobody knows. T. V. McPherson says he found some big gouges out of Deimos that look recent. Your baby is probably way, way south by now, according to him.”
Phil began to laugh.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just struck me funny. I’ve been losing sleep over a ghost of a meteor for a whole month. Nine hundred and ninety-nine chances, and I had to take the one left over. Look . . . I’ll see you tomorrow . . . come over for dinner. Right now, I’m going back to sleep. Excuse me.” He rolled onto his side and began to drift off. As Fred reached out to turn off the video, the announcer was saying something about a prospector; something about a prospector who might have been lost if a patrol craft hadn’t chased a yacht into his failing distress beam. But before Phil could get it straight, he fell asleep.
THE LONG FLIGHT
Sam Merwin, Jr.
A misogynist wakes up after an 800-year jaunt through space to find himself trapped on Dryadaeum—a planet of females!
IT was shortly after one o’clock in the morning when Leeds Markham strode across the glossy surface of the takeoff field to the base of the launching platform. Dr. Thomas Prentiss—Tom to Leeds Markham and his legion of friends—trotted along at his elbow, taking three steps to the taller man’s two.
A heavy night rain beat down upon the transparent nylon ponchos of the two men, as it did upon the similar garments of the small army of technicians who clustered upon the various levels of the “platform,” tending to their infinity of last-minute chores and checkups. In the yellow glare of the sodium lamps they looked like figures wrapped in cellophane—alien, a trifle unreal.
“All set?” Leeds Markham asked of the launching foreman, a burly middle-aged man who was waiting for them by the elevator.
“We’ll get you away all right,” said the foreman, nodding to the lift operator to take them up to entrance level. He hesitated as if he wished to say something more, then thought better of it and kept silent Markham seemed to regard his reticence with favor.
“Rotten night for your takeoff, Leeds,” said Dr. Prentiss as the elevator came to a stop opposite the upright rectangle that was the door in the hundred-fifty-foot rocket Its alloy gleamed in the shifting lights like some vast archaic phonograph needle.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Leeds Markham. He spoke with a tight-lipped brevity which suggested inner tension. He was a long lean reed of a man whose slender grace suggested tough pliability. He was, Dr. Prentiss thought going to need pliability if he were to continue to live.
&nb
sp; “Are you still sure you want to go through with this, Leeds?” the doctor asked softly. “There’s still time for you to back out.”
“I made up my mind months ago, Tom,” said Markham wearily. He shook hands with the foreman, then stopped to enter the ship. Just above the upper doorway the letters STAR CHARIOT were inlaid of contrasting metal flush with the hull.
DR. PRENTISS, who did not have to stoop, followed him inside. He climbed a wall ladder, awkwardly clutching his satchel, until he reached the control room, well forward—or up—in which Leeds Markham was calmly preparing himself for what was to come.
“I still think you’re crazier than seven thousand lunatics,” said Dr. Prentiss, setting forth his instruments and preparing the proper test-tools and injection needles. “With all you have to live for, a lot of people are going to agree with me when they find out.”
“A lot of idiots,” said Leeds Markham, stripping off the last of his garments and flinging his long body down on a special couch. Made to float in glycerine, it was gyroscopically fitted to hold the position which would align its user’s head with the visipanel just above the instrument board.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said the doctor, applying a special cardometer which he had designed himself for the purpose. “Most of us would like to have twenty million women in love with us.”
“It’s unscientific,” said Markham. “They’ve made my life a hell on Earth. Hiding under my beds in hotel rooms, trying to tear the clothes off me when I spoke in New Washington, sneaking into the lab—but I don’t have to tell you. A man can’t think his own thoughts without having a lot of twittering females try to crowd them out of his head. How does it read, Tom?”
“You’re hitting about fifty-four and dropping,” Dr. Prentiss told him, rechecking the cardometer. “An hour from now you’ll be in a state of suspended animation. Stop jiggling around so. I’m going to fit the straps before I give you the final injection.”
“Sorry—you’ve had to put up with a lot from me, Tom,” the taller man told him. “I’ve tried to make it up to you. You’ll find the funds you need for that project of yours on your desk tomorrow morning. You’re a nice looking man, Tom. Why do the girls have to pick ®n me? I used to like them before it started.”
“Shut up, Leeds, till I get you strapped down,” said Dr. Prentiss, tugging at one of the composition straps which buckled Markham to the gyroscopic couch as if he were part of it. Markham grunted a little but said no more while his friend finished the job of preparing him for appalling acceleration pressure to come.
Leeds Markham could feel himself slowing down. It had been more of an effort than he had wished to show merely to walk from the hut to the launching platform. He felt a sudden sense of misgiving seconds later as Dr. Prentiss plunged a hypodermic needle deftly and painlessly into his left deltoid.
It was because of women that he was voluntarily allowing himself to be used as a guinea pig on man’s first flight to the stars—the first which, with luck, might prove a success. He supposed he shouldn’t have let his idolization by the females of the world and its adjacent planets—though few women as yet lived on Venus or Mars or Ganymede—prove so disturbing a factor.
It was the result of the glamorization of scientists which had followed the rapid world recovery from World War III. Looking back—although this was before he was born, Leeds Markham could see that it had begun toward the end of the Second Great War.
Then the importance of science had first begun to be realized by the populace as a whole. News of atomic developments began to displace the news of hatchet killers and even the marital escapades of movie stars on the front pages of the daily newspapers.
But scientists were still regarded by the bulk of their fellow humans with an awe previously reserved for witch doctors and successful Bluebeards. While Leeds Markham had always been something of a target for co-eds in school and college and during his years of postgraduate study, he had been able to devote as much of his time as he Wished to his experiments.
It was in 1977, when things had looked most desperate during the early days of World War III, that the horror of fame had first smitten him. The Western Countries, harassed and apprehensive, were starved for crumbs of good news. So, when Leeds Markham’s six years of effort to develop the caloric ray came to successful fruition, the full floodlights of publicity had been turned on him.
SINCE he had been convinced that the purpose of morale was a worthy one, even though why he should have been selected as a focal point in the campaign puzzled him, he had not objected. The fact that his caloric ray had been primarily designed as a weed killer was all but lost in its success as a metal dissolvent at long ranges. It had been the turning point of the war.
Now, in 1983, Leeds Markham was leaving Earth for good. Even if he arrived successfully at his destination on the fourth planet of Proxima Centauri and found it able to support life, he would never be able to return. For his scheduled arrival would not take place until 793 years, 21 days, if everything went as planned.
He was going to take a long long sleep.
“I guess that’s all there is, Leeds,” said Dr. Prentiss, putting his instruments back in his bag. He placed a hand on the thick binding that now covered the taller man’s shoulder. “You’ll be cold herring in six minutes. Good luck, Leeds. Say a prayer for me too. Some anguished female may assassinate me when she finds out I’ve helped you get away from Earth.”
“Thanks, Tom,” Leeds Markham said simply. He was feeling a sort of cool lassitude that removed any irksomeness from the tight heavy bindings that held him strapped to the couch. The keys that were to release him were there—four of them, one under each hand and under each foot. Until he pressed them simultaneously none of his bindings would become unfastened.
He sensed rather than heard Tom take his departure and let the artificial catalepsy have its way with him. He wondered what it was going to feel like to wake up after a near-800-year sleep. At any rate he would be alone when next he regained consciousness.
But Earth was impossible for a would-be constant thinker like himself. By some jest of fate he had become a reverse Casanova, a Paderewski, a Lindbergh, a Rudy Vallee, a—what was the other fellow’s name—Sinatra? He tried to recall a few others but the drowsiness swept up and over him and he slept.
* * * * *
Leeds Markham shook the fog of sleep from his head and sat up. He rubbed his eyes, which seemed interminably stuck together. Someone said, “Here—let me help,” and applied some solution that quickly and soothingly cleared his lashes.
As realization swept over him he did not dare to open them for a moment. The voice that had spoken to him was definitely feminine. It had an alien cadence he could not place but even in his semi-hibernation he knew it was all wrong.
And the fact that he was sitting up. He moved his arms and there were no encumbering straps or other gear. At this point he recalled that he must be totally uncovered and let out a yip of alarm as his lids flew open.
He had a confused impression of a scantily-clad red-head bending over him, of other scantily clad females peering in through the doorway of the control room. He made a grab for one of the garments he had discarded, reaching for it by instinct, grasped a mere pile of dust. He felt naked—which he was.
“For the love of Pete don’t stand there gawking at me!” he roared. “Get me a robe—a towel—anything.”
“Really!” said the red-head. She appeared to be both puzzled and amused. But she beckoned to one of the women in the doorway. Seconds later Leeds Markham was draping a pitifully inadequate gray cape over his long lean limbs.
His first thought was that something had gone wrong—that he had through some error returned to Earth too soon and landed automatically in an Amazon kingdom of some future date. It provided answers to his first superficial observations.
Then he caught a glimpse of the visiscreen and knew he was wrong. Whatever world he had landed upon was definitely not Terra. While the sky was b
lue, lighter than that of Earth, the hills which rimmed the large landing field on which the Star Chariot now stood were of utterly alien formation and the vegetation was pink.
HE frowned and shook his head in disbelief and regarded the redhead with rising incredulity. She didn’t look like a delusion. He suddenly became aware of the fact that he had the grand-daddy of all hangovers. His stomach felt cramped and empty and his thirst was thick on the base of his tongue.
“Where am I?” he asked weakly. “And who in hades are you?”
He had, he thought grimly, foreseen every eventuality but the one of being roused from his cataleptic state by a bevy of women. Although his eyes were not focussing clearly he saw that the redhead was tall and willowy and incredibly clear of skin and eye. Even to his jaundiced gaze she was an extremely comely creature.
“This is Helios City,” she said in her odd accents. “Who are you and where have you come from?”
Tm Leeds Markham,” he told her. “From New Washington. Where is Helios City? I—I’ve been unconscious for quite awhile.”
“I noticed—induced catalophesia,” said the red-head. She frowned, added, “You must need aliments.”
“I do,” he told her, “but I’ve got my own stuff and I’d better stick to it for now.” He directed her to the supply room, told her what to have the other women bring him. She regarded with a combination of repulsion and fascination the steak which he radar-cooked in a matter of seconds, the orange juice he produced from powder and a sealed bottle of ice-water.
But as he ate he questioned her and began to understand what had happened. During his 800-odd years of sleep in space, men had developed drives far superior to that of the Star Chariot. They had managed to bypass dimensional barriers and were threatening the barrier of the speed of light.
“Our planet once was known as Proxima Centauri Four,” said the woman. “But we have called it Dryadaeum for more than two centuries now.” Her face grew shadowed as she spoke.