Fantastic Vignettes

by Jerry

  He fought the number two boat through like a racer. It is impossible to conceive of the almost living enmity of Saturnian depths. The boat was tossed and battered like a chip on a fogged ocean. Its immense power was nothing before the tremendous blasts of four-hundred-mile-an-hour winds carrying solids chunks of carbon dioxide.

  Tiny Tim fought it though. He played the control console like a master organist and his fingers and. feet were in motion constantly correcting here, blasting there. His eyes remained glued to the screens, his ears tuned to the speaker.

  For eleven hours, without respite, without pause, he struggled in that Saturnian ice-hell, with power beyond human endurance it seemed, and then he caught it. Theoretically he’d had the coordinates of the downed ship, but dispersion and diffraction had so warped the radio waves that the ship actually was two hundred kilometer’s from the supposed position. Tiny Tim found it and locked to it.

  Cooly he brought the terrified passengers and crew aboard, jammed them literally like sardines in the tiny number two boat and started to bring the craft out.

  It was another four-hour fight to rise above the incredible ferocity of the blasting gusts of liquid air and methane, the reverberating blows of solidified gasses. Tiny Tim did it.

  He’s still Com officer aboard the Meander, and it isn’t surprising that he’s the most popular man aboard!

  Voyage into Danger

  Martin Dean

  IF YOU’D believe the Sunday supplements or the video flashes, you’d think space travel was the most dangerous thing conceivable. Every now and then—as now—the editors will drag out some hoary old chestnut, polish it off, and present it as “the danger of the year”. Lately, since the Martian-colonies run has been put on a regular basis with the building of the Tellus, the sob-sisters have been moaning about the inherent dangers of meteors “which are certain to hole the ship at some time or another”.

  Balony!

  My name is Charles Jackson and, in addition to being Exec on the Tellus (I was with her from-the day they laid her first plate on the Satellite Station), I’m so-called “damage control officer”. Going to Phobos or Deimos, the Martian satellites which serve as space stations for the Red Planet, is as simple and non-dangerous a trip as going to the corner grocery store. Take a look at our last trip and you’ll see what. I mean.

  So far the Tellus has made seven round trips—and in all that time no real danger has been encountered, either when in flight or when landing. As for meteors—well, we were holed, and we’re still alive to tell about it. We’ll be holed again, I’m sure, and we’ll-live through that, too!

  The Tellus is really not much to look at. in terms of “sleek, stream-lined, glistening rockets” but, looked at through the eye of a technician it’s an engineering miracle. And of course every nut and bolt, every sheet of metal and every instrument, was brought up from Earth on the shuttle rockets and assembled near the Space Station.

  The Tellus is a cylinder four hundred feet long. The last one hundred feet of this ship have not been seen by men since it was built save through the video. eyes, internally, for of course it’s here that the atomic pile is located. Any repairs—if they ever must be made—must be effected by remote robotic control. The rear end of the Tellus is forever forbidden to human beings. However, the atomic pile is basically so simple, and was constructed with such a large safety factor, that it is anticipated that the engines will never need repair. Feed anything to them arid they vaporize and eject the stuff in a gas which provides the thrust. The thrust exhaust, however, is virulently radioactive and that, of course, is another reason—besides the huge bulk of the ship—for the Tellus’ never landing either on Earth or on Mars.

  The Terran shuttle rockets bring the stuff up to the space station from which it’s loaded aboard the Tellus. We bring it to Deimos usually, although we can unload at Phobos, which has a small station besides the radio beacon, where shuttle rockets bring it down to the Martian surface. And, since the colonies are flourishing, lots of stuff goes Marsward.

  It’s a fifty-day trip to Deimos and after you’ve made it a few times even the most starry-eyed idealist begins to think of it as boring. There are only eight of us aboard, but that’s more than enough to handle the routines. of computing, operation, control, etc. Most of the time we spend either reading, watching the canned entertainment, sitting in on the perpetual poker game that exists in the messroom, or studying. That last is good too. If space travel always requires such great amounts of time, study will be the main occupation of spacemen and, at the rate they’re going, most crew members will be Ph.D.’s before they’re much older! Ever since Jack Leonard took his Master’s in radio engineering for which most of the studying had-been done aboard the Tellus, it’s been a standing gag that the ship is really a flying university.

  I was In Control with Barry (C.O.). He was making a routine navigational “compute” and taking radio bearings on the pulse transmitter. He made the minor corrections necessary and we were on course.

  “Air all right?” he asked.

  I glanced toward the differential pressure indicator.

  “Hey, Skipper, look!” I said loudly. The needle on the gauge was dropping quickly, then abruptly it stopped and slowly started to rise. The drop was small enough not to cause any physical discomfort, but it was sort of eerie to watch the needle, since you knew it meant air was going too!

  Barry grinned. “We’ve been holed, Charlie,” he said. “Evidently be a big one this time. You better get to work.” He glanced at the compartment panel. “Number Four bulkhead’s sealed,” he said indicating the red light. “At least you know where it is.”

  I went midships and got on a space suit. Through a connection to the sealed chamber I ran a Helium line which let a little gas leak into. the room whose, air had vanished through the hole caused by the meteor. No one was in Number Four, of course. The leaking Helium would pass through the hole, wherever it was, and I’d go out and find it with an ionic leak detector.

  I went through the lock and circled the hull, keeping my eyes on the gauge of the leak detector. It took a little while—there’s lots of air to even one bulkhead section of the Tellus—but eventually I found it.

  The leak was no bigger than a pencil in diameter. Plugging it was simple, of course. I selected a plastic plug and cement, filled it in and marked it with red paint. Back at the Lunar, space station they’d weld it shut, though to all intents and purposes this patch was good enough forever.

  Back in the ship, they opened the bulkhead door and put up the pressured. The ship was as good as new.

  “Charlie,” Barry said, “I wonder if you realize what a rarity this is? This is the first time we’ve ever been holed by anything that big—if you want to call a pea-sized meteor big.”

  “I know,” I said, “we’re pitted with enough, dust, but this is big by meteoric standards. All we have to worry about is something the size of a football or a bushel basket, smashing into us.”

  “We won’t worry about that,” Barry acknowledged, “because we won’t have time. With the kinetic energy, that a meteor that size would have, I’m afraid the Tellus would be vaporized—or at least pretty badly smashed. The probability of its happening is so ridiculously low that we don’t even have to think about it.” And “that’s all there was to it. As meteors go, the pea-sized baby which had us actually was quite large and it was a rare event to be struck by such a thing. Most of the debris that the Tellus sweeps up in flight is incredibly small, of the order of dust-sized particles which expend their energy against the ship’s hull, and which leave it with a sort of slightly pitted appearance. But they constitute no danger at all.

  The chances of a ship’s being struck by a meteor are astronomically small—that is, by a meteor capable of damaging the vessel. But of course some day it will probably happen and there’ll be shrieks and cries of “danger” down on Earth that’ll echo all the way to Mars. Naturally spacemen will ignore the cries. After all it doesn’t take much n
erve to learn, to live with a danger whose, chances are measured in terms of hundreds of millions!

  Tycoon of the Future

  Wayne Delano

  NOBODY could accuse J.B. of not being modern. In an age when the first Lunar rocket had been sent, J.B. had contributed a million and a half dollars to its construction. He’d backed a half dozen sun-power plants in Arizona, he was already getting interested in private atomics; if it was new and automatic, J.B. was for it. He was dynamic and ruthless, a gigantic industrial tycoon whose, activities fitted beautifully into an age which worshipped the machine.

  J.B. directed activities of his sprawling empire from a huge glass and steel pile on the Hudson. In this large building were concentrated the office facilities so necessary to handle the mountains of paperwork entailed by industrial holdings as big as some foreign governments in their operations.

  Consequently, when Computers, Ltd., offered to survey his clerical set-up and to. cut its staffing to one-one hundredth of the present force by using automatic computing machines and digital memory banks, J.B. snatched at the opportunity. He let the experts come in, a hundred of them, examine his clerical lay-out, and then go out and build the machines.

  J.B. would drop into his office occasionally.

  “Well, boy,” he’d boom in his clever, poor-boy-who-made-good-mariner, “Imperial Chemicals aim to duplicate the Texas plant. Think we oughtta give ‘em the go ahead, Wesley?”

  Or: “Just got priority on a Mark-XII filer. They’ll put it in tomorrow . . . no more o’ that damned record-loser, eh, boy?”

  J.B. was happy and Wesley Johnson became less happy in proportion to the increasing mechanization. Once he ventured to speak to J.B. about the “soullessness”.

  —he called it that with an embarrassed grin—of the whole organization. J.B. didn’t understand what he was talking about and Wesley didn’t pursue it further.

  Matters went on for a few months perfectly normally. Wesley’s work had by now degenerated into little more than acting as an office boy. He sat in his office, read reports, submitted them to J.B., occasionally watched the computer technicians do their maintainence —“replace 6JL8’s in memory bank K-48 every hundred hours of operation as indicated on recorder F-42”—and he was unhappy.

  Carl Olson of maintainence saw it finally happen.

  He was on duty, watching the time-meters of the input unit, a panelled, mazed confusion of tubes and wiring, essentially the directive brain of the first-floor computers, when Wesley Johnson came in. It was about ten o’clock at night.

  As Carl Olson told it, Johnson came in without speaking. This struck Olson as a bit odd because normally Johnson was quite friendly. Johnson stood in front of the director unit for almost an hour and a half. Several times Olson tried to strike up a conversation, even going so far as to ask if Johnson were sick. The executive said nothing, merely continued to stare at the input director.

  Olson didn’t see Wesley actually throw the grenade—it must have been that—but while his back was turned, he heard a tremendous explosion. He whirled—and found himself staring at a completely mangled, hopelessly battered input director. Johnson was still standing, observing the now-wrecked machine, and there was a little smile on his face. It was a miracle that he had not been hit by a flying piece of metal or glass.

  Johnson was well taken care of and J.B. pressed no charges. Johnson is in a “rest Home” and appears to be doing quite well. Very often he launches into impromptu, intelligent lectures on computing mechanisms, but invariably he finishes his remarks with one special one: “Computers have no souls”. When asked to amplify this thesis, Johnson just shakes his head and smiles as if to say, “You won’t understand anyway.”

  Meanwhile J.B. is going in for bigger and better mechanization, and there’s a standard gag at the Union League Club to the effect that he’ll eventually get a computer to replace himself!

  Arctic Assignment

  Lee Owen

  BARRY RANDALL squirmed into a little more comfortable position in the instrument-packed cockpit of the jet interceptor. Some interceptor, he thought to himself. This thing handles more like a balloon. I’d be a sitting duck for a surprise. They shouldn’t have put such big wing tanks on her.”

  He glanced over his wing tip and, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but Arctic desolation and waste, a blinding white world of ice and snow. He knew that was deceptive, though, since there was lots of pine here below him, but heavily blanketed by weighty, recent snowfalls.

  Barry lit a cigarette and settled back, enjoying the high-pitched whine of the engine. This wasn’t the worst possible life, he thought. When he’d drawn the Arctic assignment, he’d pictured things a lot more primitive than they were, but Air Force Field Lookout had all the comforts of home: The chain of bases extending across Northern Canada and even into the Arctic circle would soon be impregnable, and Joe’s boys would never stand a chance of striking across the Pole.

  These routine flights were boring. Ordinarily he would have had a wing man to keep him company, since it was standard practice to send out patrols in pairs. That way, if one was forced down, the other could pinpoint him and call for help. But Johnson was out with the flu and the Colonel insisted that Barry do it alone. Men were short. Well, Barry thought, I don’t anticipate trouble, but I’d feel more comfortable with Johnson a few hundred yards to my left.

  He swung the jet toward the left and dropped to two thousand feet. The terrain was still flat and snow-covered and Barry knew there was plenty of forest beneath him. Was he seeing things? He’d have sworn there was something moving down there.

  By God, there was! Sure enough, he could clearly see snow tracks, lots of them, leading into a dead end which of course must be woods. What the devil, did the Army have a patrol maneuver out here? Barry hastily examined his “orders of the day” but there was no mention of military activity at this point.

  He flicked his transmitter switch. Better call Base Lookout and take no chances. They’d straighten him out as to what was going on down there.

  He opened his mouth to speak, into the throat mike . . . . The jet suddenly shuddered like a stricken animal—and Barry saw his left wing all but vanish. At the same time, white puffs arose round him, and he knew that anti-aircraft had spotted and nailed him perfectly. The transmitter was dead, and the jet already was hurling Earthward. Barry loosed his disconnects and pressed the ejector stud.

  Cockpit and seat puffed out with a bang as the explosive charge threw him free. One moment he was seated comfortably in a warm jet plane, the next he was catapulted into the icy air outside.

  The wind carried him quite a bit South of the point at which he’d been hit. The parachute seemed to drop him ever so slowly. Barry cursed. At this rate they’d spot his landing point and pick him up. That could mean only one thing. The Soviets had put down a base and were secretly supplying it. He’d stumbled on it by accident and they’d carefully. ranged him. If he’d let out the slightest bleat of radio pulses before, they wouldn’t have dared to shoot. But with his long silence they’d knocked him down in time. They’d pick up his plane or snow-cover it, nab him, and it would be just “one more pilot missing”.

  He hit lightly and rolled in the powdered snow. It was a moment’s work to slip out of the parachute shrouds and make himself free. The forest was heavy pine, snow-buried, and he floundered toward it, knowing that he’d have to hide. For how long, he could only guess. The Soviets right now were going to pick him up and he knew he didn’t stand too much of a chance. He was warmly dressed but only his strapped-on emergency kit provided him with any security. He couldn’t survive long without shelter and the Soviets would see that he didn’t get that!

  Fortunately there was enough of. a wind to obliterate his tracks “as fast as they formed, so that the patrols would really have to hunt. Given time, he could have found the plane, made a makeshift transmitter of some sort and slugged out a warning signal. But the Soviets would be on the plane, perhaps
by now.

  Suddenly Barry got an idea. Why not head straight into the Soviet camp? He was fairly clearly oriented and they’d never expect him to head for their base. It was getting dark and he’d stand a good chance of making it.

  And he did.

  It was only an hour later; he was exhausted from the floundering and plowing through the drifted snow, but he came upon the lights. Carefully he eased himself closer. The huts were crude and simple but perfectly adequate for the base. Most important, he spotted the-radio shack instantly. He was surprised at the number of vehicles. Snow scooters, tracked cars, helicopters, stood around in profusion. The hangars for jets, however, he couldn’t see. They must be. perfectly camouflaged.

  The radio shack was guarded by a single sentry. Tired and weak as he was, it was a moment’s work for Barry to sneak up on him and knock him loose from his marbles with a blow of the forty-five. The sentry dropped and Barry sprinted for the hut.

  He glanced through a window, saw a lone operator. Without hesitating he went through the door and with another blow dropped the surprised Russian from his seat.

  Radio equipment is universally clear. Barry picked out a frequency he knew was constantly monitored and within seconds he was in contact with Base Lookout. As fast as he could talk he poured out the details of his discovery and his position.

  “. . . I’m heading back into the woods,” he concluded, “pick me up after you’ve done the job. . . .”

  The whole affair had taken no more than five minutes. He got out of the shack after taking an overcoat and donning it. He took the unconscious guard’s rifle, actually an automatic job, and some sort of knapsack which must hold some iron rations of one kind or another, and in a minute he was back in the woods from which he’d come.