by Jerry
Her voice echoed, seemed to be lost it vast distances. She was ans-pert and pretty as Coffin had remembered her, with auburn hair and a figure which would draw whistles and an inquisitive-looking face with a small turned up nose and large bold blue eyes. But her looks meant nothing to Coffin. He catalogued them as he might catalogue the terrain of Eros. He wanted only the treasure.
The small golden cube atop the pedestal?
It seemed almost anticlimactic. It was hardly bigger than a man’s head and even if it were solid gold it wouldn’t be worth more than a few score thousand dollars.
The man turned too. He was hardly more than a boy, Coffin saw, with a scrubbed handsome earnestness to match Helen’s own. He looked puzzled now as Helen said:
“I don’t understand this, Will. It’s an old friend of father’s. He must have followed us. . . .”
“I followed you,” Coffin said. “What do you want?” the man named Will asked.
“Exactly what you want,” Coffin told him. “Exactly what you want.”
“You were my father’s friend,” Helen said. “If he told you about the treasure before he died, why did you wait until now to claim it? Unless—” suddenly she smiled “—unless Dad wanted you to share it with us. Of course, that would be different. If it were Dad’s wish, I’ll abide by it.”
The thought was tempting, and Coffin played with it. Tempting—but not acceptable. Why settle for one third when you can have it all? he thought. Helen wouldn’t understand that. But Helen and I, Coffin thought, have led too very different lives.
“Helen,” Will said. “The man isn’t listening to you. It’s nothing like that at all. Don’t you see he’s holding a blaster on us?”
“The treasure,” Coffin said. “Is it here? Is it on the pedestal?” Slowly, Helen nodded. She stared at the blaster in Coffin’s hand and then—longer—at his face. Her eyes became watery and she said, “You’re going to kill us. Aren’t you?”
“The treasure,” Coffin repeated. “Yes, of course it’s here. The treasure.”
“Helen! Don’t tell him: at least make him find it for himself.”
“He couldn’t miss it now, Will.”
“But he—”
“Tell me, Mr. Coffin, did my father confide in you?”
COFFIN shook his head. “We were friends. We had been through a lot together, but I might have expected it. Blood, you know. Blood is thicker than water. So he told you, not me.”
“You’re a lonely man, Mr. Coffin, aren’t you? I actually feel sorry for you.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for yourselves. Because I’m going to get the treasure, while you—”
“All right,” Helen said. Suddenly she was quite calm and it surprised Coffin. “We’re not going to get the treasure, Will and I. In a way I’m almost glad. It might have been too grave a responsibility for us—and for mankind.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” Coffin almost shouted. “Do you think I’m going to share what I find with mankind? With anyone? Don’t make me laugh.”
“Oh yes,” Helen went on. “I feel sorry for you. You don’t even know what the treasure of Eros is. Do you?”
“I’ll find out. You won’t.”
“But I already know.”
Coffin looked at the gold globe atop the pedestral, then at the girl. “O.K. Now tell me.”
“The globe is merely a way of entrance. You twist it and a section of floor slides back—and there you are.”
“Where am I?”
“The people who lived on the planet of which Eros is but a tiny part,” Heler said as if she were reciting words her father had told her fifteen years ago, “must have been living on a dead or dying world which couldn’t supply them with foodstuffs or building materials. They put all their great science into one project, and you see it here before you.”
“But what?” Coffin cried. “What is it?”
“A matter reproducer. It will make anything, literally. Out of nothing, out of the energy latent in the void of space, it will produce matter. Food, steel, fuel—”
“Gold!” Coffin said. “Or jewels or anything. I see. I see—”
“No, you don’t see. It was never meant for anyone like you. Don’t you realize what an instrument for good such a device could be? No more starvation anywhere, for anyone. Wealth, for all the worlds. Plenty—for everyone. That’s what a dead civilization offers us, Mr. Coffin.”
“That’s not what it offers me. I’m sorry. Helen. I’m sorry we simply cannot understand one another, it’s why I’ll have to kill you, of course.”
Helen looked at her husband. “Will,” she said. She spoke his name softly and there were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Will. I’m not afraid to die, but I love you. I love you and I haven’t had time.”
Before Coffin could stop him. Will leaned suddenly against the golden globe. Coffin snarled a warning but before he finished there was a grinding sound and a square trap slid open almost at Coffin’s feet. Its sudden yawning made him giddy and he staggered slightly on the lip of the pit.
Shouting, he began to turn around with his blaster. But Will leaped at him and shoved with both hands.
For a moment which seemed to stretch into eternity Coffin hovered on the brink of the trap. Then slowly, reluctantly, he fell in.
“Quick!” Will cried. “There’s a flight of steps down there. We’ve got to get out of here before he climbs up. He’ll kill us if he can get his hands on us!”
COFFIN heard those words and heard their pounding footsteps. Slowly, groggily, he climbed the gleaming, polished stairs. They were dustless, ageless. They spoke of an alien culture which—if it produced the rectangular prism which only seemed visible at times and the entrance appeared without warning—could also conceivably produce what Helen had spoken of. A matter reproducer. To make—anything. Anything, Coffin thought.
And it’s mine.
He didn’t climb the entire staircase. Suddenly, all at once, he was smiling. Why go after them. Why bother? He had planned to kill them because he thought they wouldn’t give up the treasure. Now, though, things were different. They had seemed so undecided about the treasure anyway, as if their attitude was almost one of good riddance. Well then, good riddance!
And Coffin turned and went down the stairs again.
It was a small vault of a room, completely square. There was a narrow passageway at its farther end and Coffin, blaster in hand, made his way to this.
As he entered it, a voice spoke in his mind:
“Halt, you who are about to enter the crypt!”
Coffin stopped dead in his tracks, realized the voice—if voice it was—had spoken in the soundless syllables of his mind.
“Halt—unless you are ready for the treasure ahead of you, unless you are beyond greed, beyond evil. Only then go on.”
Shrugging, Coffin continued walking. They couldn’t scare him with a telepathic recording, although it was eerie. But such things were being developed on Earth, even now.
“If you hear this message,” the silent, age-old voice went on, “then ours is a dead world. We only hope that the science which couldn’t save us from a destruction we hope you never have to face will be able to aid you, whoever, whatever you are.
“But—a final warning. The matter reproducer is triggered now for only one response. You cannot change the mechanism. You can only accept its first gift—which, however, will prevent any further action on your part if you are unfit. “Are you sure—”
The voice droned on, but now Coffin was smiling. It was a bluff. He could picture Helen and her husband. They would have fled from the voice, as they had fled from Coffin. Weak people . . . Because if there was power behind the voice, it wouldn’t have bothered to warn Coffin—
The passageway opened suddenly on an enormous cavern of a room. Coffin could not even estimate its size but saw that it was completely empty except for a platform which seemed to be in its dead center.
Smiling, almost laughing out loud, Coffin ran tow
ard the platform.
A matter reproducer, which, once Coffin mastered it, would manufacture anything out of thin air. He savoured the word. Anything, anything, anything. . . .
He stopped at the base of the platform and studied it. There was a shuddering sensation, then, and Coffin fell. At first he thought it had come from the cavern, but then he realized it was only Helen’s spaceship blasting off.
Coffin scrambled to his feet and looked warily at the platform. It seemed harmless enough, but it could have been booby-trapped. You never knew.
Carefully, Coffin unfolded the deflated spacesuit which he had carried under his arm. He tossed it on the platform and held his breath, waiting.
When nothing happened, Coffin smiled triumphantly and mounted the platform himself.
The floor glowed. Somewhere an ancient engine whined. Coffin screamed in sudden fear, but no one heard him—yet.
Then, as if by magic, the walls spewed men. They came tumbling toward the platform from all directions, hundreds of them, it seemed, in the indistinct light.
The guardians of the place, Coffin thought with wild alarm. Sleeping, waiting. . . .
He climbed down from the platform and squinted toward the mobs approaching him, squinted because light glowed behind them but the light was indistinct, hazy, around them.
Coffin raised both hands. “I come in peace!” he cried.
There were shouts and pounding of feet. One of the indistinct men shouted: “He’s bluffing. I know his type.”
The man spoke English—in a deadly familiar voice.
All at once, the glow faded, the lighting around Coffin became brighter, clearer.
The chamber had filled with men, with thousands of them. Coffin looked at them—and screamed.
The first gift will prevent any further action on your part if you are unfit—
They would never trust Coffin. And he would never trust them. He would watch them as carefully as they would watch him—until they all died.
But Coffin wondered what the next explorer to reach Eros would do when he was confronted by—ten thousand Leonard Coffins.
THE MORALIST
Jack Taylor
Aye, ’tis a difficult thing to be a lady on a far world—but who needs them there?
THERE ARE exceptions to almost every rule and Xenon was one of them. The rule in this particular case was the old cataloguers’ adage that cataloguing duty was never pleasant, often dangerous and always hard. Xenon is the fourth planet of one of the stars investigated some seven or eight years ago by the battleship Terra on her swing around the edge of the Black Hole.
Unequipped for exploration, the Terra hadn’t bothered to land on the planet, but instead had taken only the usual gravitational and atmosphere readings and then had continued on her long mapping patrol. She had slowed just long enough to send back her report on tight beam to Venus Relay Station and propose the name of Xenon, “the unknown.” After all, a planet with point nine Earth gravity and almost twenty per cent oxygen in its atmosphere was well worth a name rather than a number.
About a year later, the preliminary exploration ship arrived and spent several weeks mapping and testing this, that and the other thing. Then she went home and wrote her report—and what a report it was! The thing read like a Chamber of Commerce bulletin that had been sponsored by a subdivider. All it needed was a couple of ads offering some choice business locations for sale and it would have been complete.
The planet was perfect, the climate was perfect, the soil fertile. There were no natives or hostile life to bother a man. The forests were wide, the plains were broad and the numerous rivers were not only full of fish but also emptied into blue seas that were just as full of fish as the rivers. That report was enough to make a man quit his job and go to Xenon to start a chicken ranch or grow oranges.
THE BUREAU of Colonization acted with its usual speed. Three years later, a cataloguing group landed from the supply ship Hunter. The duties of the groups are simple enough; they determine which of the food crops known to Man can best adapt themselves to the conditions found on the particular planet under examination. They list the native flora and fauna, minerals and resources. They chart the weather and its cycles and, in general, try to determine if Man can exist there and, if so, if the planet is worth the expense, trouble and danger of colonization.
Most planets are not worth it, but Xenon was.
And now the group had returned with its final report and its recommendations. The report? Xenon was perfect, just perfect. The recommendations? Immediate colonization, but be careful who is sent so that place isn’t spoiled by a bunch of land-grabbing exploiters who might not appreciate the place.
They had been back nearly a week before Lee Spencer had time to come to my place for the weekend. Due to a combination of my wife’s cooking and a sedentary desk job with the Bureau, I was beginning to have a bit of difficulty in bending over far enough to zip on my shoes in the mornings, but Lee was still as lean and fit as he was the day he blasted off for Xenon nearly four years before.
He had been given the full returned-hero treatment, complete with press conferences, testimonial dinner, audience with the Coordinator—everything. He hadn’t had a waking moment to himself since he landed, so I suppose that might have been one reason that he relaxed so completely in front of the library fire after dinner and talked more than he perhaps should have. Or the generous slug of the old brandy my grandfather left me may have had something to do with it.
At any rate, he was in an expansive mood that night after Martha had filled him with one of her always excellent dinners and I had nearly floated him in Grandfather’s brandy.
We had a lot of “do you remember” man talk to catch up on and after enduring nearly two hours of conversation about people and happenings of which she knew nothing, Martha gave up and headed for the stairs.
“You two can talk all night if you want,” she announced over her shoulder, “but I’m going to bed. Breakfast on the patio about nine or so, Lee.”
“I’ll be there, Marty. Sleep tight.”
“Not as tight as you will, I’ll bet,” she grinned. “There’s another jug in the kitchen if you think you may need it.
WE HEARD her bedroom door hiss as it slid closed and sat for a moment looking into the fire and listening to it whispering secrets to itself.
“She’s a pretty nice wife, Sam,” he told me.
“Thanks. I like her, too.”
“Not at all like Prunella.”
“Prunella?” I said. “I don’t think—”
“Well, that’s what the boys at the station began calling her a couple of days after she landed. Behind her back, of course.”
“I still don’t know who—”
“You know, the niece of that windbag in World Congress that you featherheads in the front office sent out to replace Pop Jensen when he fell out of that tree and had to be sent back to Earth for hospitalization.”
“Oh, that one. Look, Lee, I didn’t have anything to do with her selection. She was appointed by the Old Man himself. Understand there was some kind of pressure on him from the top.”
“I forgive you, Sam, but I rather doubt if some of the other people of the group will for a while.”
“How come she didn’t stay?” I asked. “Political pressure or not, I can’t imagine the supervisors sending out an incompetent replacement.”
“Incompetent?” he almost snorted. “Prunella was the most belligerently competent female that it has ever been my misfortune to run across. Prunella was efficiency personified, make no mistake about that. She was—or is—a top-flight botanist and had led several expeditions here on Earth, but she couldn’t realize that Xenon wasn’t Earth. She tried to live by the book as she had here, but in spite of the general excellence of the Spaceman’s Handbook, her methods didn’t work so well.”
I primed him with another two fingers out of the bottle and sat back to listen.
“Good brandy,” he said. “I made some
once on Xenon, but Prunella put a halt to that in a hurry, just as she did a lot of other things. The trouble with her was that she was always insufferably right. Every blasted time! And she was right again when she pointed out that if we were to come under attack, the products of the little distillery might impair our efforts to defend ourselves. My still went under the ax.”
HE SIGHED and then went on. “She neglected to say what might attack us or where this enemy might come from, since men are the only animals to achieve space flight thus far and there was nothing on Xenon that was hostile to us.
“But I’m getting ahead of my story,” he told his glass. “It probably all started when she arrived. We had been looking forward to the day, but none of us more than Joe, our cook. Joe was that rare find, a man who took pride in his work and worked with pride. Joe, I firmly believe, could barbecue a spaceman’s boot so that it would taste like steak. He considered Prunella and her arrival a fine opportunity to show what he could do when he really wanted to.
“For her first meal with us, Joe had prepared Prunella a feed from every edible native fruit, vegetable and meat that he could lay his hands on. It was the same stuff that we had been getting fat on for nearly two years, but did we eat any of his cooking that night? Not a bite,” he answered himself. “I thought she was going to toss a fit right there and then.
“ ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘you know as well as I that consumption of any native product of a strange planet is expressly forbidden by the Spaceman’s Handbook of Survival until these products have been thoroughly investigated and passed upon by the proper authorities. Therefore, we shall eat the synthetics that have been provided for us until these have been examined by the labs on Earth.’
“She was right, of course,” Lee went on. “Many poor devils have died in agony because they were foolish enough to eat some luscious-looking fruit before it had been checked. We tried to tell her that our lab monkeys and cats had eaten and liked everything on the table, as had we, but we still had to send samples to Earth. That was two years ago and they still haven’t handed back a report.”