The Science Fiction Megapack

by Bova, Ben; Brown, Frederic

  Radio and television also carried the thousands of news releases that poured in an unending flow from the Pentagon Building. Cards, letters, telegrams and packages descended on Washington in an overwhelming torrent. The Navy Department was the unhappy recipient of deprecatory letters and a vast quantity of little cardboard battleships.

  The people spoke and their representatives listened closely. This was an election year. There didn’t seem to be much doubt as to the decision, particularly when the reduction in the budget was considered.

  It took Congress only two months to make up its collective mind. The people were all pro-Army. The novelty of the idea had fired their imaginations.

  They were about to take the final vote in the lower house. If the amendment passed it would go to the states for ratification, and their votes were certain to follow that of Congress. The Navy had fought a last-ditch battle to no avail. The balloting was going to be pretty much of a sure thing—the wet water Navy would soon become ancient history.

  For some reason the admirals didn’t look as unhappy as they should.

  * * *

  The Naval Department had requested one last opportunity to address the Congress. Congress had patronizingly granted permission, for even the doomed man is allowed one last speech. Admiral Fitzjames, who had recovered from his choleric attack, was the appointed speaker.

  “Gentlemen of the Congress of the United States. We in the Navy have a fighting tradition. We ‘damn the torpedoes’ and sail straight ahead into the enemy’s fire if that is necessary. We have been stabbed in the back—we have suffered a second Pearl Harbor sneak attack! The Army relinquished its rights to fair treatment with this attack. Therefore we are counter-attacking!” Worn out by his attacking and mixed metaphors, the Admiral mopped his brow.

  “Our laboratories have been working night and day on the perfection of a device we hoped we would never be forced to use. It is now in operation, having passed the final trials a few days ago.

  “The significance of this device cannot be underestimated. We are so positive of its importance that—we are demanding that the Army be abolished!”

  He waved his hand toward the window and bellowed one word.

  “LOOK!”

  Everyone looked. They blinked and looked again. They rubbed their eyes and kept looking.

  Sailing majestically up the middle of Constitution Avenue was the battleship Missouri.

  The Admiral’s voice rang through the room like a trumpet of victory.

  “The Mark-1 Debinder, as you see, temporarily lessens the binding energies that hold molecules of solid matter together. Solids become liquids, and a ship equipped with this device can sail anywhere in the world—on sea or land. Take your vote, gentlemen; the world awaits your decision.”

  THE JUDAS VALLEY, by Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett

  Peter Wayne took the letter out of the machine, broke the seal, and examined it curiously. It was an official communication from the Interstellar Exploration Service. It read:

  FROM: Lieutenant General Martin Scarborough, I.E.S.

  TO: Captain Peter Wayne, Preliminary Survey Corps

  Report immediately to this office for assignment to I.E.S. Lord Nelson. Full briefing will be held at 2200 hours, 14 April 2103.

  By order of the Fleet Commandant.

  It was short, brief, and to the point. And it gave no information whatsoever. Peter Wayne shrugged resignedly, put the letter down on his bed, walked over to the phone, and dialed a number.

  A moment later, a girl’s face appeared—blonde-haired, with high cheekbones, deep blue-green eyes, and an expression of the lips that intriguingly combined desirability and crisp military bearing.

  “Lieutenant James speaking,” she said formally. Then, as Wayne’s image appeared on her screen, she grinned. “Hi, Pete. What’s up?”

  “Listen, Sherri,” Wayne said quickly. “I’m going to have to cancel that date we had for tomorrow night. I just got my orders.”

  The girl laughed. “I was just going to call you, I got a fac-sheet too. Looks as though we won’t see each other for a while, Pete.”

  “What ship are you getting?”

  “The Lord Nelson.”

  It was Wayne’s turn to laugh. “It looks as though we will be seeing each other. That’s my ship too. We can keep our date in the briefing room.”

  Her face brightened. “Good! I’ll see you there, then,” she said. “I’ve got to get my gear packed.”

  “Okay,” Wayne said. “Let’s be on time, you know how General Scarborough is.”

  She smiled. “Don’t worry, Peter. I’ll be there. So long for now.”

  “Bye, Sherri.” He cut the connection, watched the girl’s face melt away into a rainbow-colored diamond of light, and turned away. There were a lot of things to do before he would be ready to leave Earth for an interstellar tour of duty.

  He wondered briefly as he started to pack just what was going on. There was usually much more notice on any big jump of this order. Something special was up, he thought, as he dragged his duffle-bag out of the closet.

  * * *

  He was at the briefing room at 2158 on the nose. The Interstellar Exploration Service didn’t much go for tardiness, but they didn’t pay extra if you got there a half-hour early. Captain Peter Wayne made it a point of being at any appointment two minutes early—no more, no less.

  The room was starting to fill up, with men and women Wayne knew well, had worked with on other expeditions, had lived with since he’d joined the IES. They looked just as puzzled as he probably did, he saw; they knew they were being called in on something big, and in the IES big meant big.

  At precisely 2200, Lieutenant General Scarborough emerged from the inner office, strode briskly up the aisle of the briefing room, and took his customary stance on the platform in front. His face looked stern, and he held his hands clasped behind his back. His royal blue uniform was neat and trim. Over his head, the second hand of the big clock whirled endlessly. In the silence of the briefing room, it seemed to be ticking much too loudly.

  The general nodded curtly and said, “Some of you are probably wondering why the order to report here wasn’t more specific. There are two reasons for that. In the first place, we have reason to believe that we have found a substantial deposit of double-nucleus beryllium.”

  There was a murmur of sound in the briefing room. Wayne felt his heart starting to pound; D-N beryllium was big. So big that a whole fleet of IES ships did nothing but search the galaxy for it, full time.

  “Naturally,” the general continued, “we don’t want any of this information to leak out, just in case it should prove false. The prospect of enough D-N beryllium to make fusion power really cheap could cause a panic if we didn’t handle it properly. The Economics Board has warned us that we’ll have to proceed carefully if there actually is a big deposit on this planet.”

  Captain Wayne stared uneasily at Sherri James, who frowned and chewed her lip. To his left, a short, stubby private named Manetti murmured worriedly, “That means trouble. D-N beryllium always means trouble. There’s a catch somewhere.”

  General Scarborough, on the platform, said, “There’s a second reason for secrecy. I think it can better be explained by a man who has the evidence first-hand.”

  He paused and looked around the room. “Four weeks ago, the Scout Ship Mavis came back from Fomalhaut V.” There was a dead silence in the briefing room.

  “Lieutenant Jervis, will you tell the crew exactly what happened on Fomalhaut V?”

  * * *

  Lieutenant Jervis stepped forward and took his place on the platform. He was small and wiry, with a hawk nose and piercingly intense eyes. He cleared his throat and smiled a little sheepishly.

  “I’ve told this story so many times that it doesn’t even sound real to me any more. I’ve told it to the Supreme Senate Space Committee, to half the top brass in the IES, and to a Board of Physicians from the Medical Department.

  “As well
as I can remember it, it goes something like this.”

  Laughter rippled through the room.

  “We orbited around Fomalhaut V for a Scouting Survey,” Jervis said. “The planet is hot and rocky, but it has a breathable atmosphere. The detectors showed various kinds of metals in the crust, some of them in commercially feasible concentration. But the crust is so mountainous and rocky that there aren’t very many places to land a ship.

  “Then we picked up the double-nucleus beryllium deposit on our detectors. Nearby, there was a small, fairly level valley, so we brought the ship down for a closer check. We wanted to make absolutely positive that it was double-nucleus beryllium before we made our report.”

  He paused, as if arranging the story he wanted to tell in his mind, and went on. “The D-N beryllium deposit lies at the top of a fairly low mountain about five miles from the valley. We triangulated it first, and then we decided we ought to send up a party to get samples of the ore if it were at all possible.

  “I was chosen to go, along with another member of the crew, a man named Lee Bellows. We left the ship at about five in the morning, and spent most of the day climbing up to the spot where we had detected the beryllium. We couldn’t get a sample; the main deposit is located several feet beneath the surface of the mountaintop, and the mountain is too rough and rocky to climb without special equipment. We got less than halfway before we had to stop.”

  Wayne felt Sherri nudge him, and turned to nod. He knew what she was thinking. This was where he came in; it was a job that called for a specialist, a trained mountaineer—such as Captain Peter Wayne. He frowned and turned his attention back to the man on the platform.

  * * *

  “We made all the readings we could,” Jervis continued. “Then we headed back to our temporary base.”

  His face looked troubled. “When we got back, every man at the base was dead.”

  Silence in the room. Complete, utter, deafening silence.

  “There were only nine of us in the ship,” Jervis said. He was obviously still greatly affected by whatever had taken place on Fomalhaut V. “With seven of us dead, that left only Bellows and myself. We couldn’t find out what had killed them. They were lying scattered over the valley floor for several yards around the ship. They looked as though they had suddenly dropped dead at whatever they were doing.”

  Peter Wayne made use of his extra few inches of height to glance around the briefing room. He saw row on row of tense faces—faces that reflected the same emotions he was feeling. Space exploration was something still new and mostly unknown, and even the experienced men of IES still knew fear occasionally. The galaxy was a big place; unknown terrors lurked on planets unimaginably distant. Every now and then, something like this would come up—something to give you pause, before you ventured into space again.

  “We couldn’t find out what had killed them,” Jervis said again. “They were lying scattered every which way, with no clues at all.” The small man’s fingers were trembling from relived fright. “Bellows and I were pretty scared, I’ll have to admit. We couldn’t find a sign of what had killed the men—they’d just—just died.”

  There was a quiver in his voice. It was obvious he could never take the story lightly, no matter how many times he had to tell it.

  Wayne heard Private Manetti mutter, “There’s always a price for D-N beryllium.”

  “The Scout Ship hadn’t been molested,” Jervis went on. “I went inside and checked it over. It was untouched, undisturbed in every way. I checked the control panel, the cabins, everything. All unbothered. The ship was empty and dead. And—outside—

  “When I came out, Bellows was dead too.” He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I panicked then. I locked myself inside the ship, set the autocontrols, and headed back to Earth at top velocity. I set the ship in an orbit around the moon and notified headquarters. I was quarantined immediately, of course, to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything. The medics checked me over carefully. I wasn’t and am not now carrying any virus or bacteria unknown to Terrestrial medicine.

  “Since I’m the only one who knows exactly where this valley is, the general has asked me to guide the Lord Nelson to the exact spot. Actually, it could be found eventually with the D-N beryllium as a guide. But the Mavis was in orbit around Fomalhaut V for two weeks before we found the D-N beryllium deposit, and the Service feels that we shouldn’t waste any time.”

  The lieutenant sat down, and General Scarborough resumed his place on the platform.

  * * *

  “That’s the situation,” Scarborough said bluntly. “You know the setup, now—and I think some of you see how your specialities are going to fit into the operation. As Lieutenant Jervis pointed out, we don’t know what killed the crew of the Mavis; therefore, we are going to take every possible precaution. As far as we know, there are no inimical life forms on Fomalhaut V—but it’s possible that there are things we don’t know about, such as airborne viruses that kill in a very short time. If so, then Lieutenant Jervis is immune to the virus and is not a transmitter or carrier of it.

  “However, to guard against such a possibility, no one will leave the Lord Nelson, once it has landed, without wearing a spacesuit. The air is breathable, but we’re taking no chances. Also, no one will go out alone; scouting parties will always be in pairs, with wide open communication with the ship. And at no time will more than ten percent of the ship’s company be outside at any one time.”

  Wayne made a rough mental computation. The Lord Nelson holds sixty. That means no more than six out at any single time. They really must be worried.

  “Aside from those orders, which were decided on by the Service Command, you’ll be under the direct orders of Colonel Nels Petersen. Colonel Petersen.”

  Petersen was a tall, hard-faced man with a touch of gray at his temples. He stepped forward and stared intently at the assembled crew.

  * * *

  “Our job is to make the preliminary preparations for getting D-N beryllium out of the crust of Fomalhaut V. We’re supposed to stay alive while we do it. Therefore, our secondary job is to find out what it was that killed the scouting expedition of the Mavis. There are sixty of us going aboard the Lord Nelson tomorrow, and I’d like to have sixty aboard when we come back. Got that?”

  He leaned forward, stretched upward on his toes, and smiled mechanically. “Fine. Now, you all know your jobs, but we’re going to have to work together as a team. We’re going to have to correlate our work so that we’ll know what we’re doing. So don’t think we won’t have anything to do during the two weeks it will take us to get to Fomalhaut V. We’re going to work it as though it were a shakedown cruise. If anyone doesn’t work out, he’ll be replaced, even if we have to turn around and come back to Earth. On a planet which has wiped out a whole scouting expedition, we can’t afford to have any slip-ups. And that means we can’t afford to have anyone aboard who doesn’t know what he’s doing or doesn’t care. Is that clear?”

  It was.

  “All right,” said the colonel. “Let’s go out and get acquainted with the Lord Nelson.”

  * * *

  The briefing session broke up well past midnight, and the group that shortly would become the crew of the Lord Nelson filtered out of the building and into the cool spring air. Each man had a fairly good idea of his job and each man knew the dangers involved. No one had backed out.

  “What d’ye think of it, Pete?” Sherri James asked, as they left together. “Sounds pretty mean.”

  “I wish we knew what the answers were beforehand,” Wayne said. He glanced down at Sherri. The moon was full, and its rays glinted brightly off her golden hair. “It’s a risky deal, as Petersen said. Nine men go out, and eight die—of what? Just dead, that’s all.”

  “It’s the way the game goes,” Sherri said. “You knew that when you joined the corps.” They turned down the main road of the IES compound and headed for the snack bar.

  Wayne nodded. “I know, kid. It’s a job, and it h
as to be done. But nobody likes to walk into an empty planet like that knowing that eight of the last nine guys who did didn’t come back.”

  He put his arm around her and they entered the snack bar that way. Most of the other crew-members were there already; Wayne sensed the heightening tenseness on their faces.

  “Two nuclear fizzes,” he said to the pfc at the bar. “With all the trimmings.”

  “What’s the matter, Captain?” said a balding, potbellied major a few stools down, who was nursing a beer. “How come the soft drinks tonight, Wayne?”

  Peter grinned. “I’m in training, Major Osborne. Gotta kill the evil green horde from Rigel Seven, and I don’t dare drink anything stronger than sarsaparilla.”

  “How about the amazon, then?” Osborne said, gesturing at Sherri. “Her too?”

  “Me too,” Sherri said.

  Osborne stared at his beer. “You two must be in Scarborough’s new project, then.” He squinted at Peter, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “You’ll need luck,” Osborne said.

  “No we won’t,” Wayne said. “Not luck. We’ll need more than just luck to pull us through.”

  The nuclear fizzes arrived. He began to sip it quietly. A few more members of the crew entered the snack bar. Their faces were drawn tensely.

  He guzzled the drink and looked up at Sherri, who was sucking down the last of the soda. “Let’s get going, Lieutenant James. The noncoms are coming, and we don’t want them to make nasty remarks about us.”

  * * *

  The Lord Nelson blasted off the next evening, after a frenzied day of hurried preparations. The crew of sixty filed solemnly aboard, Colonel Petersen last, and the great hatch swung closed.

  There was the usual routine loudspeaker-business while everyone quickly and efficiently strapped into his acceleration cradle, and then the ship leaped skyward. It climbed rapidly, broke free of Earth’s grasp, and, out past the moon, abruptly winked out of normal space into overdrive. It would spend the next two weeks in hyperspace, short-cutting across the galaxy to Fomalhaut V.

  It was a busy two weeks for everyone involved. Captain Peter Wayne, as a central part of the team, spent much of his time planning his attack. His job would be the actual climbing of the mountain where the double-nucleus beryllium was located. It wasn’t going to be an easy job; the terrain was rough, the wind, according to Jervis, whipped ragingly through the hills, and the jagged peaks thrust into the air like the teeth of some mythical dragon.