Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Andy moved slowly, trying thus to hide the driving need for haste in his blood. He edged toward the door of the hospital room.

  “Jane,” he said, facing his wife briefly. “There's something I've got to look after. It's very important. I'll be back in an hour."

  She looked at him with weary contempt for his desertion—now. She didn't know anything about the real depth of the situation. Nor could he try to explain.

  He drove like blazes back to the farm. All the way he kept muttering: “Dynamite! Those flasks are full of dynamite! Look out!"

  Getting out of the truck, Andy slammed through the garden gate by the garage. At the farther end of the garden he stopped, staring.

  The peach box apparatus he had left active there had ceased to function. No green flame coursed along its wires, though its switch remained closed.

  There was no use now to shift the blade of that double-throw switch to its opposite pole to reverse the action of the machine, as he had intended. Andy bent down, touching the radial filaments. They were still a little warm. The power must have ended just a moment ago, its far-off source broken off.

  There wasn't anything to do but go back to town and the hospital, now. Andy reasoned that there must have been corresponding developments there, too. Flushed with a confused excitement, he arrived, and hurried to Jack's room.

  Jane was alone there with the boy, who looked just as before—asleep and breathing evenly. But Jane was smiling.

  "What happened?” Andy snapped. “Something happened. I know it!"

  Jane looked at him oddly. “You must be the psychic one,” she said. “I was frightened at first. Jack had a kind of sudden convulsion. I called the doctor in. But he said nothing was wrong, except maybe a nightmare. He said he thought Jack was sure to recover now, and that he wouldn't be crippled.... That it was just the shock of the emergency operation that was so dangerous. Oh. Andy—I—hardly believe it; but I—I'm so glad—"

  Andy Matthews took her in his arms then—briefly. He could surely not have denied his own happiness at that moment. But he was looking deep into the texture of a mystery, and feeling an odd ache of regret over something that could have driven his wife to hysteria, had she known...

  Half an hour later, Andy took Jane out to a restaurant. A radio was going there, giving news-flashes; and Andy particularly wanted to listen.

  "Take it or leave it, friends,” the announcer was saying. “The moon's dead old volcanoes have still got a few kicks left in them, that make Vesuvius and Aetna look sick! A half-dozen observatories, in Australia and Asia, where of course it's still night, and where the moon is still above the horizon, have just reported some very interesting phenomena. Two small puffs of dust were observed in a lunar crater called Plato. These puffs were followed by a tremendous blast that demolished nearly a quarter of the old volcano...."

  The End

  **********************************

  The Achilles Heel,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Amazing Stories Nov. 1940

  Short Story - 3093 words

  Southern wasn't going to take any chances

  on getting caught—not he! So he forced

  the meek little astronomer to walk ahead

  of him into inferno

  Vince Southern looped his waspish little space boat around in a wide arc, to get behind the pursuing ship of the Interplanetary Police. He had the advantage of superior maneuverability. Squinting expertly through the sights of his atomic blast weapon, he pressed the lanyard. Flame lanced out dazzlingly in the void.

  In a magnificent blaze of exploding atoms, the Space Patrol Ship was torn apart. This was the latest of Vince Southern’s misdeeds.

  “That’s that,” he chuckled wickedly. “Nobody else will be trying to catch me for a while at least. All I need now is enough fuel to escape to some hideout among the moons of Saturn. And I think I know where I can get it! The job will be easy as taking candy from a kid!”

  Again his space boat executed a wide arc, heading toward the dazzling bulk of the sun. Vince Southern was leaving the neighborhood of Venus, where he’d stolen a huge quantity of rich radioactive salts. Within five hours he was descending toward the eternally sunward face of Mercury, whose almost airless wastes of mountains and plains and extinct volcanoes were heated by the terrific solar rays to a temperature that would have melted lead.

  Vince Southern had never visited the planet that was nearest to the sun before, but he had maps to go by and navigation pamphlets to guide him to the exact place which he sought. Checking speed with his forward rockets, he slanted down for a landing. Ahead, in the awful glare of the desert, he saw a low building, lost in that lifeless wilderness. It was the building he sought—the small Solar Observatory of Mercury.

  “They’ll have a supply of rocket fuel here some place,” Southern thought. “The observatory also serves as a space-traffic emergency station. And the best part of it is, I’ll get the fuel without having any tough customers to worry about. Just some crazy old hermit astronomer. Joshua Briggs is his name, according to the personnel listing in the pamphlets.”

  Vince Southern’s handsome features twisted into a sneer of contempt. He didn’t land at once in the clearly marked area beside the building. Instead he guided his craft low over the observatory, sweeping the latter with a wide beam of powerful waves from a paralyzer gun. Anyone inside the structure would be temporarily rendered senseless.

  Having completed this safety measure, Southern glided his ship back on its gravity plates, and brought it to rest on the landing stage. Clad in space armor, he emerged from the cabin a moment later. His helmet faceplate of darkened glass protected his eyes from the awful glare of the sun. A few seconds of exposure to the hellish Mercurian conditions forced no damaging heat through his vacuum-insulated space suit.

  He ran to the observatory airlock, worked the knobs to open it. He passed through the double doors to the cool, refrigerated interior of the structure, whose metal walls were heavily shielded against heat by vacuum compartments. Here, Southern explored for several minutes.

  * * *

  He found the man whom he judged to be Joshua Briggs, the lone attendant of the observatory, lying unconscious beside a worktable littered with solar spectrographs. The scientist was a wispy little man with a peculiar mottled scar on his cheek.

  Ruthlessly Southern started shaking Briggs, to bring him to his senses. The stunning effects of the paralyzer gun, which disorganized the functions of brain and nervous centers, was always brief. Presently the little man opened his eyes.

  Vince Southern had removed his own oxygen helmet, for there was plenty of cool, conditioned air here to breathe. He looked down at his captive with a good-natured but sinister smile.

  “I guess maybe you know who I am, Grandpa,” he boasted. “I guess maybe you’ve seen plenty of my pictures, scattered around by my good friends, the police. You know I’m a tough guy, don’t you? I suppose you realize that there’s nothing for you to do but obey my orders, huh?”

  Southern twisted the astronomer’s wrist torturingly, just to emphasize his question.

  The little scientist winced with pain, but there was a strange, detached dignity in his gaze, as he studied the renegade’s thin, sharp-cut features and reddish, wavy hair that streamed with careless charm down over one side of his forehead.

  “Yes, I recognize you,” Joshua Briggs said at last, speaking quietly from the prone position in which the outlaw held him. “You’re Vincent Southern, wanted for a dozen crimes, including wholesale murder, on Venus, Earth and Mars.”

  “Right!” Southern snapped, glorying in his exploits. “But don’t ever try to high-hat me, Grandpa! Treat me with respect. Do you understand?” The outlaw jerked the astronomer’s arm viciously, just to show that he meant what he said.

  For a second something vengeful and steely showed in Joshua Briggs’ eyes. But pain made his lips go white. Almost losing consciousness again, he wilted, panting.

  “T
hat’s better,” Southern sneered. “I came here to get rocket fuel, so I can make a real getaway to Saturn’s moons. I’m going to leave the Space Patrol ships so far behind that they’ll think they’re chasing a devil’s phantom. Now, where is the emergency fuel supply kept, Grandpa?”

  Briggs seemed to hesitate. But after a moment he must have recognized his helplessness.

  “It isn’t stored here at the observatory itself,” he said at last. “Rocket fuel, being atomically unstable, gives off certain radioactive radiations. The instruments I use here, to test and measure the magnetic emanations of the sun, are very sensitive. It wouldn’t do to have their readings influenced by other radiations. So the rocket fuel is kept in an insulated underground vault, about two miles from here.”

  Vince Southern knew enough about science to realize that the astronomer probably stated facts. But the outlaw had long ago learned caution, too.

  “Okay, Grandpa,” he said. “But now listen carefully, and don’t tell me any stories. Could I land my space boat any nearer to the vault than this, so that it would be easier to load the fuel? I’ve been told that there’s a lot of fine ash from ancient volcanoes on Mercury—swell stuff for a space ship to sink out of sight in—if somebody happened to land it in the wrong place.”

  * * *

  Again Joshua Briggs hesitated, as Vince Southern studied him keenly. “No—you couldn’t land near the vault,” the scientist finally replied, forced once more to tell the truth.

  Southern nodded easily. “Yeah, I thought so, Grandpa,” he said. “You would have liked to lie, and maybe trick me into getting my space boat bogged down in a lot of that ash! But you knew better than to lie to me. You knew I’d guess that the fuel would be kept in the most protected place possible to avoid having folks like me take it away from you. But—how do you bring the fuel drums back here to the landing stage?”

  Joshua Briggs’ withered face worked.

  “I—I’ll show you,” he stammered. “If you’ll let me up—”

  Southern released his prisoner, but kept him covered with a small atomic blast pistol. The old astronomer rose to his feet, and walking with a peculiar rolling gait led the way to a window, fitted with double panes of darkened glass, with a vacuum in between.

  Briggs pointed beyond the window, without saying anything further.

  Southern peered out across the heat-blasted plain—a skeletal waste of ash and scoria ejected from volcanoes that had been extinct for millions of years. Above the plain, in a dark, almost airless sky, blazed that monster sun of Mercury.

  But it was not any of these things that Briggs meant to draw Southern’s attention to. The astronomer was pointing at a path, which wound its lonely way out across that inconceivable desert of superheated ash and rock. The path was made up of countless foot tracks—the marks of space boots.

  Seeing those tracks, Southern frowned in puzzlement.

  “Oh,” he growled after a moment. “I get it. You carry the fuel drums yourself—on foot—whenever it’s necessary. You go out in a space suit.”

  Briggs nodded.

  “Then,” the renegade observed guardedly, “I could send you out to bring the drums back here to my space boat, eh, Uncle Dudley?”

  “You might,” Briggs responded.

  Southern chuckled deep in his throat.

  “I couldn’t do anything more stupid than that, could I, Grandpa?” he questioned. “I wouldn’t want to leave you all alone and unguarded. You’d probably think up some kind of dirty trick to spring on me. So I guess maybe I’ll have to go along with you, just to be sure you don’t get any ideas!”

  Vince Southern paused, thinking warily, wondering if this little old astronomer was trying to lead him into a trap of some kind.

  “Listen!” he said at last, angrily. “You know it’s death to lie to me, Uncle Dudley! I know things about space suits, and that they can screen an awful lot of heat away from a man’s body. But I’ve always heard that, even so, it’s dangerous to wander around on the sunward side of Mercury—if a fellow happens to wander too far. Let me see that space armor you use!”

  Joshua Briggs obeyed promptly, opening a supply cabinet in the wall. Southern took out the vacuum armor hanging there beside several curious umbrella-like sunshades of asbestos fabric. He examined the armor carefully, especially the heavy, insulated boots. It was all standard equipment, exactly like his own space suit.

  * * *

  Southern gave his captive one final, searching look. But the evidence was plain and convincing. First, there were those tracks out there in the desert, proving that Joshua Briggs often ventured out there into that eternal, blasting sunshine. Second, his own standard make of armor. With a sunshade added to his own gear, to screen off the direct solar rays, Southern would be equipped just as was the astronomer.

  “All right,” said the outlaw. “Get into your rig, Uncle Dudley, and we’ll get that space fuel. With an equal chance, I guess I’m tough enough to go anywhere you can go—even if you do know a lot more about Mercury than I do! But remember—I’ll keep right behind you with my blaster, and if you try the least little thing that looks funny, it’s your finish!”

  Presently, scientist and outlaw were plodding across the desert toward the fuel vault two miles away. In addition to their asbestos sunshades, they carried slings of metal webwork at their belts, with which to transport the small drums of compact but fearfully powerful atomic fuel, which they were going to bring back for Southern’s space ship.

  Vince Southern kept his captive, who led the way, covered with his blaster. To the renegade, the going didn’t seem at all difficult. True, his boots sank deep into the superheated ash of the path at almost every step; but two miles wasn’t a great distance, and he didn’t mind a little exertion. Carefully he dogged every step old Joshua Briggs took, keeping close to him. That way there seemed no chance for error.

  Vince Southern felt cool and comfortable in his space suit, shaded as it was by the asbestos shield he held over his helmet. This much was all logical and in accord with science. The direct rays of the sun were screened away from him, and the Mercurian air, being extremely thin, could not transmit much heat to his armor.

  It wasn’t till they were a good mile from the observatory that an unpleasant warmth began to seep at last through Southern’s insulated boots. Even then he wasn’t worried much, however. His captive was still plugging on, the same as ever, just ahead. Evidently a fellow just had to be rugged….

  Southern thought optimistically of the future. As soon as he got the fuel, he’d be flying out there toward the moons of Saturn. Wanted men who had enough wealth could live in luxury in certain prepared underground caverns in the little-known Saturnian satellites. They could have their features so changed by plastic surgery that they could come back to civilization, and remain forever unrecognized. Southern had wealth enough, what with all those canisters of rich radioactive salts he’d stolen on Venus, loaded in his space boat.

  He even smiled sardonically at the thought of killing Joshua Briggs when the old man ceased to be useful to him. Maybe Briggs thought he was going to be spared. Well, let him keep his illusions! Southern always had believed in playing safe, and dead men told no tales, particularly dead men whose corpses were dissolved to powder by an atomic blaster!

  But now the outlaw’s sadistic reveries were broken off by real alarm. That heat in his boots was increasing with every step! Scorching pain in his feet grew rapidly—becoming real torture! A dizziness of agony swirled in his brain.

  * * *

  In dumb, uncomprehending confusion he stared at Joshua Briggs’ back, just ahead. The aged astronomer was still plodding on unruffled, betraying not the slightest hint of discomfort. How could this be when they had identically the same kind of space armor and sun shades—the same identical protection? Southern had been careful; the old fool could never have played a trick on him! There was no way for him to do so!

  But there must be a trick—there had to be—even though h
e couldn’t possibly guess what it was! Those foot tracks in the path, showing that Briggs had come this way hundreds of times before, just as he was doing now, were certainly bona fide. And yet the first time he, Vince Southern, who was as tough as anybody, tried it, he was tortured to the verge of fainting. In a minute he’d collapse in that hot dust, helpless!

  Filled with hate and lust for vengeance, Southern began to squeeze the trigger of his blast pistol. But terror conquered his urge to kill Joshua Briggs. He’d be left alone then, to die slowly, hideously!

  For he could grasp the facts now, relative to his own position. Space suits were a very effective protection against heat; but they had a weak spot—an Achilles heel. Shaded from the direct rays of the sun here, they could scarcely be penetrated by the weaker, reflected heat waves of the surrounding desert. But when any part of them—the boots, for instance—came into actual contact with something hot enough, heat conduction started working, slowly penetrating insulation.

  Southern’s space boots were in contact with the sun-blasted ash of Mercury, heated to a temperature that would have fused many of the less refractory metals.

  That was why Vince Southern’s feet seemed afire. He could understand why it was so now. What he could not understand was the thing he had banked his judgment on, before he had ventured out here on this path of space-boot tracks.

  Those tracks had proved that Joshua Briggs was immune to the danger, and Southern had expected the same immunity for himself. Joshua Briggs’ immunity was completely evident now, as he continued to plod on, unruffled and undisturbed, toward the low ridge of rocks, still almost a mile ahead, beneath which the fuel vault was located.