Fantastic Vignettes

by Jerry

  The magnetic mine drifted astern, its velocity close to that of the rocket jet which had ejected, it. This was measured in a fantastic figure. Its magnetic field reached out and embraced the steel sliver looming up to meet it. The magnetic fingers touched; then in the mysterious fashion of electromagnetism, tautened and the mine deviated slightly in its course, deviated only so much as to assure its being in an exactly straight line when it struck.

  Jim and Frank, watching the screen nervously almost missed the action in the blink of an eye—it happened so fast. The two hundred pound mass of metal struck at a devastating velocity the grosser mass of the pursing space-ship. On the screen they saw a brilliant flash, a coruscant, pulsing flare of light that vanished as abruptly as it began.

  And all that was left in space was a few shattered droplets of still-cooling molten metal . . .

  Shanghaied . . .

  Lee Owen

  CO-OFFICER Fane Thurmond puffed slowly on a cigarette as he walked along the docking area. It was a calm peaceful night, even attractive here among the metallic cylinders, the squat powerhouses, the shabby housing. But then, he shrugged philosophically, weren’t all rocket launching areas the same?

  Tomorrow, he’d ship out for the Neptunian run. Good communications men were in demand. He could choose his berth. How they howled for skilled help down at the shipping offices. He had to laugh the way the employment agencies would badger technicians to join this rocket or that.

  Suddenly he had an uneasy feeling. It was the vaguest premonition of danger. Maybe that swishing sound—crash!—even as blackness descended on Communications Officer Thurmond, he thought of the grim sign hanging in the offices, “Danger—Shanghaiers—Avoid Dock Areas at Night!”

  Then all went black.

  Fane awoke with a groan. His head felt like a puffed balloon. He sat up and with eyeball-searing effort managed to open his lids. But it wasn’t necessary to look. He could feel where he was. A faint shudder and vibration went through him. The hum and purr of gynos keened through him. He was aboard ship and he knew he’d been taken for a ride.

  The door opened and a huge, heavyshouldered man stepped in. His cap bore the universal insignia of a space-captain—three stars.

  “Sorry, fellow,” the powerful visitor said casually, “but we had to have a C-Officer. I paid good credits to a shanghai-gang. Well, they got me the real McCoy. I examined your papers.” He grinned.

  Bitterly Fane faced him. He spoke in a low, intense tone.

  “You’ve got me. I know it. But I don’t have to work for you.”

  “You’ll work, friend,” the man said coldly, and a small pistol appeared in his hand. “All you’ve got to do. is to maintain equipment. We’ll do any broadcasting on the vidi-sereens or the radio. And there’ll be somebody at your back all the time. Don’t try anything funny and you’ll get paid just like the rest of the officers and crew. Act up and . . .” He left the implied threat unfinished.

  As good as his word, the captain set a watch-dog over Fane, and he spent his time going over the equipment, adjusting and maintaining the delicate, complicated electrical circuits. It was not difficult work and the primary reason he had been shanghaied, he knew, was because all System ships were required by law to retain a C-Officer.

  He had no chance to get near the input end of a transmitter. And always the guard was at his back with strict orders to conk him at the first suspicious move. The guard was somewhat of an amateur radioman himself and Fane did not find it easy to deceive him.

  Fane wracked his mind to think of some technique whereby he could slip a message through to the monitors of the frequencies. But no chance came.

  He was in for a good seven weeks trip because the vessel was Pluto bound with a cargo of expensive heavy machinery.

  Fane chafed under the forced restriction.

  Then it happened. Just outside the Jovian lanes, a Callistan patrol boarded them for a routine inspection. Fane spotted the vessel, a slim patrol needle, through the quartzite port of his cabin. Quickly he picked up a flashlight and sent a coded message through the port. He used the unfamiliar Morse hoping someone aboard the patrol vessel would by chance understand . . .

  The fuming captain watched the patrolmen take his shanghaied C-Officer off his vessel fifteen minutes later.

  “Are you going to prefer charges, Officer Thurmond?” the patrol captain asked as they went toward the airlock of the freighter, the angry ship’s captain following in the wake, unable to do any explaining.

  “I’ll just slap a judgment of fifteen thousand credits against the owners of the ship,” Fane answered, his anger dissipated by his quick and fortuitous rescue. “They’ll chew out the captain proper.”

  “Captain,” the patrol officer said to the ship’s captain, “You don’t realize how fortunate you are. If this man chose to prefer criminal charges against you, you could get twenty years. I think your owners will take care of you in other ways.” Fane walked aboard the patrol vessel, once more a free C-Officer. It felt good. Shanghai-ing in space wasn’t especially to his liking—not in deep space. . . .

  The Cookie-Tosser

  Lee Owen

  FORGIVE AN old man for reminiscing, but sometimes you can’t help it. I’ve spent a good portion of my life in deep space, “man and boy” as they used to say, for almost forty years, and there’s little I haven’t seen. I won’t be going aboard a “can” much longer, I know, but the fire of the rockets is in my blood. That’s why I was glad to hop the Martian run the other day.

  I made the trip aboard a passenger tub called the “Callypso”, and I had to laugh at the way they kid-gloved the passengers and even the crew! Would you believe it, but now they give everybody a shot of sodium diethylamilene! The doc said to me, “C’mon, old-timer. You won’t get space-nausea with a shot of this.” Well, I took it—I had to—but I could have laughed in the man’s face. I haven’t had “the cookie-toss” for the length of my life—and this young doc makes me take the anti-sickness drug.

  Anyhow—don’t be impatient, youngster, I’ll get to the point as I go along—the incident brought to mind my cadet days aboard the “Warrior”. I remember clearly, even today, how we young ones, new to space, made our virgin trip. I can still see us filing into the Warrior, that half-scared look masked by a bravado and toughness we damned well didn’t feel.

  But it wasn’t bad then. We started out with a full grav, and the result was that nobody was particularly affected by the nausea of weightlessness, which is something you either are immune to, you become accustomed to, or you never conquer.

  Well, we had a bad actor aboard, a punk by the name of Lesson. I’ll never forget him. He was a smart fellow, and consequently they gave him a sub-officer rank. But he took advantage of his position to make life miserable.

  Everybody aboard, except the officers, hated him, and we cadets would have liked to kill him—but he had rank. He drove us furiously, never for a moment taking it easy. The hatred he built up was so thick you could feel it. He was a novice, same as we, but from his actions, you’d have thought he’d been in space all his life. He was clever too—he never let the C.O. or for that matter, anyone but the junior officer of the watch—who was a rat too—see him pull this hazing stuff.

  But one day, we suddenly went “free”. The Captain cut the rockets—I guess we’d come up to velocity—and there we hung in space—gravity-less. For a newcomer—for most newcomers on any space-can, the sheer pa rah zing nausea of gravityless flight can’t be described.

  A hideous nausea racking seizes most—there are a few immune ones and I’m one of them—but you should have seen Lesson. Cadet Officer Lesson was giving me his particular brand of hell when the rocket went free. My stomach did a couple of flip-flops, but I felt all right even though the weird sensation of floating left me a little shaken.

  But Lesson!—his lower jaw dropped until it almost hit the floor—his eyes bulged, a strangled scream came from his throat, and I moved fast! I had to. The violent gre
en of his face was matched only by Terran grass. Cadet Officer Lesson, choked and spluttered, thrashing about in agony as the fierce wretchings of nausea seized him and wrenched him inside out.

  I think we loved the sight almost sadistically—those of us who were able to—and Lesson changed in that moment, from a little tyrant, to a man who thinks he’s going to die. Eventually the worst of the pangs passed, but the man was never cut out for deep space—the nausea gripped him too strongly.

  He was discharged on the return trip for his disability, but none of us were sorry. Deep space weeds out the men from the boys—remember that, even though they use the anti-nausea dope!

  The Uranian Emissary

  Milton Matthews

  FOR EVERY erg they sent me, I sent two back. For every erg they drained, I drained two. My pulse-beacon station was going to stay radiating on the untappable ultra-wave come hell—or Uranian warcraft.

  They hovered just beyond bolt-range, two long slim needles, packed to the jets with lethal apparatus and they tried their damnedest to knock out my little thorn. They shot every weapon in the book at me, but the engineers who put down these lonely outposts knew what they were doing. To dig me out of my little dome was going to take more than two Uranian patrol craft. If they’d use a class-T ship on me, well—. But they didn’t have ships to spare. The Martio-Terran fleet was doing nicely.

  My job was to keep that untappable beacon-beam radiating its lancing self into space, serving as a guide-post for far-roving naval craft. The fact that I was on the Jovian moon, IX and fairly close to Uranian operational bases annoyed them, but unless they made a major effort—or I made a foolish mistake—I was going to Sit this one out.

  My meters spun, the cathode-ray traces danced on the tubes, and my relays clicked Into action. To all outward intents, nothing was happening. In reality they were spraying me with plenty of kilowatts.

  The disultory negative warfare—if it could be called that—kept up—pointlessly. But I knew enough not to underestimate any of that lethal Uranian brood. They were hellions.

  About the seventh night after the initial attack, I’d just finished an ultra-contact with a Terran station—encouraging me and congratulating me, telling me that the war showed signs of ending with the blasting of eleven major Uranian bases—when I thought I caught a faint pulse of radiant energy as if something nearby was disturbing my shield.

  Were they going to try a physical attack? The thought was preposterous! But just to check, I examined the detectors—and bango!—I nearly jumped out of my suit.

  Crossing the ammonia-iced clearing toward my stahlo-aluminum, were three Uranians! They moved calmly and deliberately—they could afford to, thinking I’d be completely surprised. Silently I thanked the gods that I’d rigged the infra-red detector.

  The body temperature of a Uranian is eight hundred degrees, and he actually glows, his crystalline chemistry using up energy at a terrific rate. I watched the three semi-human figures, massive and squatty move slowly toward my post, clouds of vaporized gases rising with each step.

  I went to the Benton needle-gun, which throws a three hundred thousand kilowatt beam. Nonchalantly I sighted on them and then spoke into the phones.

  The translator took care of my English for them. I don’t know how the idioms went over, but they got the idea, pronto!

  “Too bad, boys,” I cracked, “But I’ve got you in my sights. Drop the projectors and stand still!”

  Over the phones I caught their gasps of surprise.

  “The Terran is aware!”

  “Run! Thankar, Run!”

  I touched the firing stud. The glowing figures, even as they started their clumsy run, vanished abruptly into a greater glow as the beam knifed through them. Vast clouds marked the spot briefly, where they’d made their abortive attempt.

  I reset the screens and went to sleep. War could be so boring. But it never really was, for a short three hundred thousand kilos away still circled the besiegers. . . .

  The Steam-Hammer

  Lee Owen

  CONSCIOUSNESS did not come to it at once. One moment it was an unthinking-mass of metal, dutifully performing its function. It had always been that and it would always be that . . . but . . .

  When the bolt of lightning struck the factory building it jumped to the ground through the nearest and highest and easiest point. That the steam-hammer happened to be that point was no fault of its own. The electric pulse coursed through it in a single burning surge of wild technology.

  The steam hammer looked the same the next day and the same the next and so on. But some subtle change had wrought a reaction on its molecules. Yes, it dutifully absorbed the glowing billets of metal and pounded them between its ugly jaws, squeezing them into shape between dies, placed there by the puny things of flesh which made it.

  First it experimented. At night when all the shop was dead and quiet, experimentally the mighty tool would flex its metal muscles and the hammer would come down on empty dies like a clap of thunder. The night watch man reported the strange event, but the foreman just chewed out the operator for leaving the steam lines open slightly. And in its unconscious way the hammer understood—and maybe it laughed to itself.

  “I tell you, Mike, that baby’s not workin’ right,” the operator complained, “she don’t feel right. There’s somethin’ wrong. That thing needs an overhaulin’.”

  But the foreman just laughed and said it was nerves and forgot about it.

  And the hammer waited quiescently, for it knew what it wanted. One day it would test the feel of other things besides hot metal in its jaws . . .

  Perhaps the complete conscious thought wasn’t there, but everyone knows machines have character, so it can be believed.

  And then one day the chance came. As the machine knew it must come.

  “We’re changing dies today,” Mike said. “Lock your valves and get goin’.”

  The operator stood well aside while a couple of laborers manipulated the vehicle crane which lifted out the dies. One laborer crawled between the jaws and went to work on the huge nuts which fastened the die to the anvil. The great black machine loomed up ominously—in Mike’s eyes at least.

  And then it happened. The steam-hammer sensed the soft mass of flesh and tissue between its jaws. And however it does such a thing, it laughed a little to itself.

  “Look out!” screamed Mike, but then it was too late and the hammer came down and the live little thing between the jaws was no more than a blob . . .

  That was a long time ago, and now the steam hammer is sitting outside in a junk yard, weathering and rusting slowly, but its rudimentary consciousness is still sustained by what happened then. It thinks gleefully on how the inquests showed that the accident couldn’t possibly happen . . . but it did happen . . . and the machine seems to move a little . . . just a little . . . but it seems to move . . .

  Negligence . . .

  June Lurie

  THE MARTIAN rocket Szor-II rested on its tail fins while the tentacled crewmen loaded their precious cargo of uranium aboard. The ruined sprawling shell of a Terran airfield—or what had once been one—contrasted horribly with the slim torpedo whose nose pointed skyward.

  “We will be doing this endlessly, Zan,” the rustling hiss of sound came softly in the control room of the rocket. The speaker, a heavily feathered Martian, like all his kind, wrinkled his leathery face in a grimace intended to be a grin.

  “Yes,” the captain answered, “the few Terrans left are dying out rapidly. How wise we were to strike so thoroughly. There is no end to Uranium on this planet, it seems.” He glanced at an instrument on the panel. “We take off in twenty minutes. Check with the loading crews, Caj.”

  “I will, sir,” the other trilled, “but I’d like to ask a question. What is that funny object there by the upended concrete?”

  “Where?—oh that?—that’s a Terran weapon—a gun of some kind. Don’t worry about it. Perfectly harmless. We haven’t time to destroy everything.” His vo
ice broke in a piping shrill of laughter . . .

  But . . .

  The figure crouched in the jumbled concrete ruins might have been human once. But now it was a parody of humanity. The radiation burns and the subsequent deviations had turned it into a ghastly hulk of cell tissue with barely recognizable distinctions like arms and legs. But the eyes burning in their sockets were brilliant and intense.

  And the mind that inhabited that repulsive body was clear. Johnny Lamont stared at the Martian rocket with fury and with hatred. And then his gaze shifted back to the rusted tube of the antiaircraft gun towering over him.

  “Baby,” he crooned audibly, “you’re going to work—you must.” It was a prayer. Painfully he shifted his seared body over the broken concrete, the twisted girders, and slid up behind the breech of the weapon. The skeleton manning it crumpled into shards of bone as he touched the gunner’s seat. Awkwardly he forced his warped body into the seat and started to play with the controls.

  Slowly, groaningly the rusted structure moved and the muzzle of the rusty weapon shifted slightly. Lamont’s breathing was fast now. He looked at the familiar breech and then began scraping away the dust and dirt vigorously, ignoring the wracking pains shooting through his body. There were corroded shell cases in a clip, five of them. Painfully he broke them free and tested them, fitting them one by one into the breech. The mechanism protested by finally cooperated.

  Cursing, breathing heavily and dribbling saliva in his concentrated anxiety, Johnny got the gun ready to fire. He had to hurry now. He could see the last of the Martians climbing aboard the vertical rocket and the faint whisp of smoke from the stern tubes told him the vessel was about ready to blast off.

  Praying and sobbing aloud, Johnny depressed the gun muzzle with the hand wheels. The heavy ninety millimeter barrel slowly came down and tilted into line with the rocket. Johnny centered the barrel—the sights were gone into jumbled junk—directly on the lower third of the rocket, the portion which contained the fuels and controls. He adjusted the azimuth with the handwheel. The gun was trained perfectly now.