by Jerry
After that, his fear had no limit, and Jacky crawled instinctively toward the door, which he found shut; then to the dumb-waiter, where he heard the Foramen chimera, caged, mew pleasantly. “It won’t work, old lady,” he breathed at it. “They’ve locked us both up together.” He licked a little blood out of the comers of his mouth, and thought hard. He would have to be quick. To be sure, he could hammer on the door, but the street was deserted at night, the normals were all getting ready to watch their telesets, or some other kind of screen—and there was no use knocking on the walls; the shop was surrounded by empty cellars. And the telephone was dead.
Jacky then did what any imprisoned boy of his age would have done (but from him, it demanded a superhuman effort): he clambered up the curtains, managed to open the window with his hook, and jumped out. He was hurt, falling on the pavement.
. . . “That damn’ kid!” thought North as he opened the door of the garret. “Sirens!”
His hands were trembling. A wave of aromatics, already familiar, came into his night and surrounded him: he had breathed them on other worlds. He understood what was required of him, and he let himself go, abandoned himself to the furious maelstrom of sounds and smells, to the tide of singing and perfumes. His useless, mutilated body lay somewhere out of the way, on a shelf.
“Look at me,” said the music. “I am in you, and you are me. They tried in vain to keep you on Earth, with chains of falsehood. You are no longer of Earth, since we live one life together. Yesterday I showed you the abysses I know. Now you show me the stars you have visited: memory by memory, I shall take them. In that way, perhaps, shall we not find the world that calls us? Come. I shall choose a planet, like a pearl.”
He saw them again, all of them.
Alpha Spicae, in the constellation of the Virgin, is a frozen globe, whose atmosphere is so rich in water vapor that a rocket sticks in the ground like a needle of frost. Under a distant green sun, this world scintillates like a million-faceted diamond, and its icecap spreads toward the equator. On the ground, you are snared in a net of rainbows and green snow, a snow that smells like benzoin (all the pilots know that stellar illusion). On Alpha Spicae, in a few hours, a lost explorer goes mad.
North was irresistibly drawn away, and shortly recognized the magnetic planet of the Ditch in Cygnus. That one, too, he had learned to avoid on his voyages: it was followed in its orbit by the thousands of sidereal corpses it had captured. The bravest pilots followed it in their coffins of sparkling ice; for that sphere, no larger than the Moon, is composed of pure golden ore.
They passed like a waterspout across a lake of incandescent crystal—Altair. Another trap lay in wait for them in the constellation Orion, where the gigantic diamond of Betelgeuse flashed: a phantasmagoria of deceptive images, a spiderweb of lightnings. The orb which cowered behind these mirages had no name, only a nickname: Sundew. Space pilots avoided it like the Pit.
“Higher!” sang the voice, made up now of thousands of etheric currents, millions of astral vibrations. “Farther!”
But here, North struggled. He knew now where she was drawing him, and what incandescent hell he would meet on that path, because he had already experienced it. He knew of a peculiar planet with silvery-violet skies, out in the mysterious constellation of Cancer. It was the most beautiful he had ever glimpsed, the only one he had loved like a woman, because its oceans reminded him of a pair of eyes. Ten dancing moons crowned that Alpha Hydrae, which the ancient nomads called Al-Phard. It was a deep watery world, with frothing waves: an odor of sea-salt, of seaweed, of ambergris drifted over its surface. A perpetual ultrasonic music jumbled all attempts at communication, and baffled the starships. The oxygen content of Alpha Hydrae’s atmosphere was so high that it intoxicated living beings, and burned them up. The rockets which succeeded in escaping the attraction of Al-Phard carried back crews of the blissful dead.
It was in trying to escape its grip that an uncontrolled machine, with North aboard, had once headed toward the Pleiades and crashed on an asteroid.
Heavy blows shook the temples of the solitary navigator. The enormous sun of Pollux leaped out of space, exploded, fell to ruin in the darkness, with Procyon and the Goat; the whole Milky Way trembled and vibrated. The human soul lost in that torrent of energy, the soul that struggled, despaired, foundered, was only an infinitesimal atom, a sound—or the echo of a sound, in the harmony of the spheres.
“This is it,” said Jacky, wiping his bloody mouth.
“Honest, this is it, inspector. There’s the window I jumped out of . . .”
There it was, with its smashed glass, and Jacky did not mention how painful the fall had been. His forearms slashed, he had hung suspended by his hooks. On the pavement, he had lost consciousness. Coming to, later, under a fine drizzle of rain, he had, he said, “crawled and crawled.” Few of the passing autos had even slowed down for that crushed human caterpillar. “Oh, Marilyn, did you see that funny little round-bottom?”—“It must be one of those mutant cripples, don’t stop, Galla . . .”
“Space! Are they still contagious?” Jacky bit his lips.
Finally, a truck had stopped. Robots—a crew of robots from the highway commission—had picked him up. He began to cry, seeing himself already thrown onto the junk heap. By chance, the driver was human; he heard, and took him to the militia post.
“I don’t hear anything,” said the inspector after a moment of silence.
“The others in the block didn’t hear anything either!” breathed Jacky. “I think he must be very unhappy, or else drunk . . . Are there ultrasonics, maybe? Look, the dogs are restless.”
Certainly, the handsome Great Danes of the Special Service were acting strangely: they were padding around in circles and whining.
“A quarrel between monsters,” thought Inspector Morel. “Just my luck: a mutant stump of a kid, a space pilot with the D.T.’s, and a siren! They’ll laugh in my face down at headquarters!”
But, as Jacky cried and beat on the door, he gave the order to break it in. The boy crawled toward the dumbwaiter; one of the militiamen almost fired on the chimera, which leaped from its cabinet, purring.
“That’s nothing, it’s only a big cat from Foramen!” Jacky wailed. “Come on, please come on, I’m going up the shaft.”
“I was never in such a madhouse before,” thought the inspector. There were things in every comer—robots or idols, with three heads or seven hands. There were talking shells. One of the men shouted, feeling a mobile creeper twine itself in his hair. They ought to forbid the import of these parlor tricks into an honest Terrestrial port. Not surprising that the lad upstairs should have gone off his nut, the inspector told himself.
When the militia reached the topmost landing of the building, Jacky was stretched out in front of the closed door, banging it desperately with his fists. Whether on account of ultrasonics or not, the men were pale. The enormous harmony which filled the garret was here perceptible, palpable.
Morel called, but no one answered.
“He’s dead?” asked Jacky. “Isn’t he?”
They sensed a living, evil presence inside.
Morel disposed his men in pairs, one on either side of the door. A ferret-faced little locksmith slipped up and began to work on the bolt. When he was finished, the militiamen were supposed to break the door down quickly and rush inside, while Morel covered them, with heat gun in hand. But it was black inside the garret; someone would have to carry a powerful flashlight and play it back and forth.
Me,” said Jacky. He was white as a sheet, trembling all over. “If my brother’s dead, Inspector, you should let me go in. Anyhow, what risk would I take? You’ll be right behind me. And I promise not to let go of the flashlight, no matter what.”
The inspector looked at the legless child. “You might get yourself shot,” he said. “You never know what weapons these extra-terrestrials are going to use. Or what they’re thinking, or what they want. That thing . . . maybe it sings the way we breathe.”
&
nbsp; I know,” said Jacky. He neglected to add, “That’s why I asked to carry the flashlight. So as to get to it first.”
The inspector handed him the flashlight. He seized it firmly with one of his hooks. And the first sharp ray, like a sword, cut through the keyhole into the attic.
They all felt the crushing tension let go. Released, with frothing tongues, the dogs lay down on the floor. It was as if a tight cord had suddenly snapped. And abruptly, behind the closed door, something broke with a stunning crash. Something fell with a dull sound to the floor.
At the same instant, there was a great crash, and the landing was flooded with an intolerable smell of burned flesh. Down in the street, passers-by screamed and ran like ants. The building was burning. Aja object falling in flames had buried itself in the roof.
The militiamen broke down the door, and Morel stumbled over a horrible mass of flesh, calcined, crushed, which no longer bore any resemblance to North. A man who had fallen from a starship, across the stellar void, might have looked like that. A man who had leaped into vacuum without a spacesuit . . . a half-disintegrated manikin. North Ellis, the blind pilot, had suffered his last shipwreck.
Overcome by nausea, the militiamen backed away. Jacky himself had not moved from the landing. He clung to the flashlight, and the powerful beam of light implacably searched, swept the dark cave. The symphony which only his ears had heard plainly grew fainter, then lost itself in a tempest of discordant sounds. The invisible being gave one last sharp wail (in the street, all the windows broke and the lights went out).
Then there was silence.
Jacky sat and licked his bloody lips. Inside, in the garret, the militiamen were pulling down the black drapes breaking furniture. One of them shouted, “There’s nothing here!”
Jacky dropped the flashlight, raised himself on his stumps. “Look in the chest! In the strong room, to the side—”
“Nothing in here. Nothing in the chest.”
“Wait a minute,” said the youngest of the militiamen, “there it is—on the floor.”
When they dragged her out, her round head bobbed, and Jacky recognized the thick glossy skin and the flippers. She had died, probably at the first touch of the light, but her corpse was still pulsing in a heavy rhythm. An ultrasonic machine? No. Two red slits wept bloody tears . . . The sirens of Alpha Hydrae cannot bear the light.
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD
J. Harvey Haggard
The boy was tall and handsome and . . . red . . . This boy, whom he had always thought of as his son.
STEPHAN Wentworth had not had such a good laugh for as long as he could remember. He had spent twenty arduous, triumphant years on Nereid, fifteenth planet of the star Alpha Centauri. Some star-maps actually listed the little world as Wentworth’s Planet because of huge land grants given him by the natives. The people of Nereid, though extremely generous in their traits, were naturally slothful. Stephan Wentworth had driven them to their tasks. He had hounded the migrant earthmen, equally lazy. Men hated him for accumulating such wealth and prestige on another planet—but this! Doc Lezen was a card all right. It was the tallest tale he’d heard in many a Nereidan moon.
Coming naked from the germicidal mist-shower that ended the medical examination, Stephan Wentworth stood in a jet of warm drying air. He was a large man, bigboned and heavy, but even at fifty-two this red-haired giant did not display the usual flabbiness of that age. He reached in the locker for his clothing, consisting of the silvery metaline tunic, breeches of planetary white, soft gravity slippers with cushion soles. Then the humor of it overcame him. He staggered around laughing, one foot in the breeches, the other out. An incredulous look transformed the usual severity of his strong face, making him appear younger than he actually was. Exertion in this thin rarefied air sent pain stabbing into his pleural regions, made him gasp. Remembering his oxy-tank, the one he usually wore at all times, he saw it on a table.
After a puzzled moment, Dr. Frank Lezen joined in the merriment. Old Frank was not huge like Stephan Wentworth. He was sixty-four. There would be a time, not long hence, when he would hang up his stethoscope forever and retire to one of the pleasure planets. Laughter racked and threatened to injure his frail body in its loose garb of sanitary white plasti-cloth. His thin face was crowned by tufts of white hair like quotation marks, underlined by a short but imposing beard. Now the face became a writhing morass of wrinkles as his mouth gaped open and his laughter emerged as a dry cackling.
“Sent a fleet of fifty ships to space yesterday!” Stephan Wentworth had bragged. “Every one loaded to the hilt with cargo. We loaded them in three days and two nights and four hours and five minutes. That’s a record, let me tell you, even for Stephan Wentworth.” No doubt of his physical fitness bothered him. He could hardly remember the day he’d been sick.
Dr. Lezen was a company doctor, working for Wentworth Enterprises Of Space, Inc. In a way, Wentworth owned him, like everything else on the planet. The only trouble with old Dr. Lezen was his insistence, like other earthmen, for piddling around and taking his own good time. He loitered at everything he did, despite the fact that he was an excellent physician and surgeon and had attended to all of Wentworth’s medical needs since first stepping foot on this world.
Few people had a passion for hard work like Stephan Wentworth. Since the atmosphere on Nereid was more tenuous than that of earth, he invariably wore the oxy-tank strapped to his left shoulder. Its weight was slight, its assistance enormous. With this extra source of air, Stephan Wentworth could do twice as much work as others and work twice as hard. He always worked rapidly, looking for short cuts, as though he sought to make the efforts of others seem puny by comparison. Or as though—Dr. Lezen had said it—the devil were on his tail.
Panting, he staggered across the floor. Dr. Lezen, seeing his dilemma, secured the oxy-tank and extended it.
Fastening it quickly to his shoulder harness, Wentworth adjusted the thin tubing to his nostrils and inhaled deeply. Dr. Lezen stepped back relievedly as the palor of Stephan’s face was replaced by a normal ruddy hue. This was more like them.
“Steve, you’re a living wonder. Twenty years in high blast.” Dr. Lezen spoke with wonder rather than admiration. “The old engine never breaks down. Strong heart. Pressure normal. Your pace would kill an elephant. But money isn’t everything. Why don’t you slow down for a while?”
Stephan Wentworth had sucked with greedy impatience on his oxygen inhalator. Feeling much better, he shuffled around, shadow boxing. A red-haired behemoth, he looked tough and destructive. And he could be just that. Dr. Lezen moved away, almost instinctively.
“Man, I was born in a hurry,” Wentworth bantered, now fully recovered. “Someone has to be a pusher. Take a look at the ticker tape some time. You should see how high we’re rating on Interspace Interchange.”
The other’s indirect criticism had penetrated a chink in his secret armor. Devotion to his work was a deep unswerving passion with him.
“You can die in a hurry too. One opponent you can’t beat is time. Let’s see. Now that you own Nereid almost entirely there’ll be a day for you to be stepping down. Who’s to replace the king of this little planet? You do have a son?”
At times the physician’s ideas were like probes, gouging into the inner conscience. But Wentworth let his impatience die and beamed proudly at the memory.
“Five kids. Four of them girls, of course—but Donelly’s the oldest. Proud of him, Doc. Big, strapping, handsome. Takes more after his Nereidan mother than me though. He’s half earthman, Doc. I’ll account for that, and for him it’s going to make a lot of difference.”
It was then that Dr. Lezen offered him a cigarette, which he refused, and proceeded to tell him the prize winner. Matter-of-factly, without beating around the bush. No fancy trimmings. Just a short fantastic yarn with no superficial details. Straight from the shoulder. For a moment Stephan Wentworth believed it. He’d been about to dress when the full humor of it hit him like a battering ram. He�
��d come near falling, tangled up in the metalmesh cloth of his breeches.
Now, oxy-tank back in place, he jabbed his elbow into Dr. Lezen’s ribs. That set them off again. They continued laughing until exhausted.
“Well, that’s the way it is,” gasped Dr. Lezen finally.
“Yes. That’s the way it is,” said Stephan Wentworth, winking broadly. He was now sobered somewhat.
“If you want I’ll run one more check,” said Dr. Lezen. “Not that I doubt the indications. It’s been on your chart all the time. Steve, if you can stay for a while, come over to the lanai. I’ve a bottle of sherry, brought all the way from earth. Priceless stuff. But what’s a vintage without sharing between friends? There’s no actual hurry—”
He was speaking to thin air. Stephan Wentworth had stalked swiftly away, lifting a hand to denote farewell. His gravity racer was perched on the second floor landing platform. Almost before his foot hit the accumulator the vehicle went soaring up over Wentworth City. His city. His planet. Dr. Lezen watched him go at a window, patting a handkerchief to his forehead to absorb the dampness.
“Whew!” he said. “And I thought the old goat was going to take it hard.”
The “old goat” had his hands clutched tightly to the throttle control of the grav-car. Blue veins crawled and grew, knotting on his neck and forehead. His hand writhed snakelike toward a glove compartment, withdrew an object.
The object was an electron gat, slender, mounted on a blue-and-gold plasticene hilt, not much larger than a hypodermic needle. Yet deadly. His eyes mere slits, Stephan Wentworth stared down at the tiny instrument of annihilation. It was as though he had never seen it before, not actually. In his horror-struck eyes was reflected the untenable thought that had begun growing in the back of his mind. He was thinking of killing his own son!