Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  But what was the secret of the astronomer’s freedom from doom here? Southern could not think of the ghost of an answer.

  Agony increased second by second. Southern’s mind was getting dim. Blood seemed to hiss and roar in his head. He staggered, trying to balance his weight on one foot and then the other, as he executed a grotesque torture dance. All around, the devilish glaring wastes of Mercury seemed to wait inscrutably for their prey.

  Vince Southern raised his blast pistol again toward Joshua Briggs. But the effort at revenge was lost in the half-crazed confusion and terror of his thoughts. Instead of squeezing the trigger, he lunged furiously at the little astronomer.

  Briggs, who must have long anticipated some such move, dodged aside easily. He faced the renegade and his menacing weapon.

  “Damn you!” Southern roared into his helmet radiophones. “What have you done to me, you devil? What have you led me into? You’re going to die for this doublecross, Briggs . . .”

  * * *

  Southern’s voice was a whining shriek at the end. He could smell his own flesh burning now. It was horrible, horrible.

  But Briggs remained calm. His features were faintly outlined behind the dark glass of his faceplate. Maybe his steadiness made him seem a little like a superman—a creature who was no longer quite human after having spent so much time in the hot furnace of Mercury’s sunward hemisphere.

  “No, Southern,” he said, speaking through his phones. “You won’t kill me now. You see, I’m the only person who can save you from slowly roasting alive. Without me, you couldn’t take ten more steps. You’ve destroyed many lives, Southern. You’re a condemned man. But the euthanasia chamber provides an easy death. Now will you hand over your blaster?”

  Tremblingly, and without another word, Vince Southern obeyed. Yes, the euthanasia chamber seemed a boon now—a relief from hellish torture. He was barely conscious as Briggs tied his wrists behind his back with a metal cord taken from his own equipment, and began to carry him back toward the observatory.

  In the building’s cool interior, Southern submitted to first-aid measures. His feet were masses of ugly, charred blisters. But Briggs, who had tied the outlaw securely to a refrigeration pipe, doctored the injuries expertly.

  Vince Southern was the first to speak.

  “How did you do it, Grandpa?” he asked dazedly. “How come you didn’t get the same hotfoot I did? I can’t understand it. What’s the password?”

  Joshua Briggs smiled apologetically at the confused and truculent badman.

  “Password?” he repeated. “Well, I got acclimated to Mercury. A long time ago I spent an hour out there on the desert. I didn’t know any better then. I walked too far, and the heat soaked through my boots. I couldn’t walk back; but I managed to stay alive by leaning against some rocks, and by keeping in the shade as much as possible.

  “Bixby, my boss then, picked me up in a small space boat. I spent a long time in the hospital.”

  Briggs had gotten out of his space suit. He pulled up his trousers leg.

  “The doctors had to amputate above the ankles,” he said simply.

  Vince Southern, a captured renegade extraordinary, stared dumbly at a pair of neat artificial limbs, made of asbestos fiber, which not even the searing dust of Mercury could damage.

  The End

  ********************************

  Ten to the Stars,

  by Raymond Z. Gallun

  Science Fiction Adventures March 1953

  Novella - 22030 words

  They promised to meet again in ten years,

  after they'd explored all of space. It was

  sentimentality, of course, such as kids

  have always gone in for. Only, out in

  space, kids turn into men. . . .

  The official name of man’s pathway to the planets was the Harmon Jet Engine Number Three, but that lasted only long enough for someone to name it the Pusher. It was appropriate—it pushed men right up from the Earth, and out into space in droves. It opened the planets to every young fool who had stars in his eyes and the ability to dig up the small sum needed to put the Pusher into a hunk of tin that could be called a ship. Like the ten who stood in the rain outside the science museum at Hume Hall, waiting to get a sneak preview of the gadget.

  There was Lenz, shabby as usual. Beside him was Gannet, always laughing, with the white marks in his hair and the radiation burns he’d got in the recent war. There was Glodosky, the accident-prone medical student, flexing the fingers of a wonderful mechanical hand which had replaced the one he lost to a freak prewar infection. Beside him, Dopy Devlin, who always got high marks in science, was talking to himself as usual. Tobias was trying to sound as brash as usual, but the look in his eyes said that his motorcycle didn’t mean much anymore. Roscoe, the University’s star end, simply looked embarrassed, but he was the big, silent type, and that was normal.

  Harwin, the ex-soldier, had come up from the rows of olive drab barracks—quiet, experienced, a little swashbuckling. Flashy Phelps had left his sleek fission-driven car parked nearby, and money had made him sure of himself, unless you looked too close. Major Benrus, the glamor soldier, might have been a garage mechanic, except for the war. But now the calm force of him couldn’t stop pushing him on to victory.

  And finally, there was Little Thomas, the last—and maybe the least—of the ten. Precise, silent, excellent in mathematics, and about as noticeable as a snowflake in a blizzard.

  Like a good-natured impresario, Flashy Phelps now took command. “The caretaker is opening up!” he said. “Let’s roll...”

  A minute later they stood before the invention that promised to unlock the barriers of the solar system to almost anyone who had the nerve for such adventuring. It was a shiny tube, clamped vertically in a thrust-measuring harness, inside a glass case. Around it, setting it apart by contrast, was the dusty room, dating back to the eighteen-nineties. The other displays had been set up much more recently, of course. But could one ever look at dinosaur bones, apparatus for demonstrating physical facts, or cut-and-dried star-charts, now?

  The old caretaker touched a button gingerly, and a tenuous blue flame, a meter and a half long, shot down from the bottom end of the cylinder, causing it to jerk sharply upward in its thrust-harness. The protecting baffle below whitened with heat. The thick heat-and-radiation resistant glass of the case, took on a blue fluorescence. Gauge needles jumped and swung, registering.

  “This model Pusher weighs only twenty kilograms,” Roscoe, the football man, pointed out. “It says so here on the data poster. But she’s showing a sixty-four-kilo thrust!”

  “Sure!” Tobias affirmed. “And it also says that five hundred grams—hardly more than a pound—of powdered Dynamium, that new synthetic element number 101 of the Periodic Table, is enough fuel to keep it running at full tilt for an hour. It can keep on lifting, and accelerating, more than three times its own weight—straight up! It’s like a rocket with no heavy fuel load that burns out in a few minutes!”

  “That streamer of hyper-thin vapors, superheated, is so steady that it seems almost rigid,” Devlin muttered. “It’s hard to believe that it’s really moving at seventy percent of the speed of light. It’s that velocity that gives the force. Acceleration, going on for hours, could build up almost any speed...”

  Gannet kept staring at the engraved plate on the side of the jet engine. “Patented November 11th, 1992,” it said. More than ever he felt as if he were inside some kind of temple to coming history which both trapped and glorified him. The others couldn’t feel much different.

  “This is just a model,” Harwin, the ex-soldier, said hoarsely. “But we’ve all heard. A full-size Pusher is so simple and easy to make, that, with government subsidy because they want other worlds colonized, it costs only a thousand bucks.”

  To these students, some of them shabby for more reasons than the still-existing shortages, this remained a lot of money. As they were reminded of a price, their faces fell a
little.

  “Oh, well,” Gannet said.

  Regret was tempered some by relief. Perhaps the thought was shameful; but if finance kept you from doing a thrilling but fearsome thing, then you were excused with honor.

  But restless young minds have always been gifted with a special talent for getting the most for the least.

  Devlin’s eyes were a bit wild. “Do we have to be stymied that way,” he said, “when we know that if we can get the Pushers, we could build our ships with cheap war-surplus supplies?”

  Everybody looked at Devlin strangely. He was a book-theorist. A soft, pedantic kid. A high-strung, sheltered screwball.

  “Think your money will let you go?” Lenz taunted.

  Devlin’s cheeks paled. “Shut up, wiseacre,” he drawled.

  Then Phelps spoke with his usual flourish, saying what he had planned all along, and what was half expected of him by the others:

  “I can stake you all to a reasonable amount, without strings, fellas. It’s only fair. I can do that much for my buddies.”

  There was a tense pause, during which each man must have tried to weigh his own courage and dreams against the scare in him. Lenz was the first to answer.

  “Thanks, Phelps,” he said earnestly. “Count me in.”

  “Me, too,” Tobias seconded brashly.

  After that it was like ragged rifle fire.

  “I’ll finance myself. Pride,” Harwin, the veteran, stated.

  “Same here,” Roscoe, the football man announced.

  “I’ll be another independent,” Gannet declared.

  “I can't swing it alone, Phelps. Thanks,” little Thomas piped up. His companions stared.

  But they stared more when Dopy Devlin growled: “Do you really think I’d stay out of this? Just give me a hand, Phelps!”

  He was the defiant Mamma’s Boy. The young pedant, the rose petal. How would he survive out there? You heard the stories of what happened even to some stolid people. If he went through with his boast, you felt that it was suicide.

  Then there was Glodosky. Not exactly a stumble-bum, but with the same effect. The guy whom the paint bucket always fell on, and whom stray baseballs always hit. One of those called accident prone by statistics. A bird with a mysterious affinity for ill-luck. What would happen to him under the naked stars of space, away from the mellow scene of a campus?

  Ruefully he shrugged a pair of massive shoulders, and grinned.

  “You know me, fellas,” he said. “But should I stay in bed all my life? Thanks, Phelps.”

  Phelps and Benrus didn’t have to declare themselves in, for it was a foregone conclusion. Now everybody looked to Benrus for guidance. He was the oldest—twenty-five. He knew speed and power. As civilian kids they’d all seen the war. But they envied his deeper knowledge of living. It was a thing that they had to get caught up on.

  Benrus’ glance was sober and a bit quizzical. The others could hear sleet tapping on the windows.

  "Just to be sure,” he said, "we’d better each check on what we want from life.”

  “Philosophers are dopes to wonder what life means,” Lenz answered promptly. “Food, love, sex. Getting rich, maybe. And helping to find the materials to make living better, everywhere. After the war. But sidestep the myth of perfection. The fun of life is in the struggle and the gamble, the seeing what comes out of the years. Being able to look back, feeling that you haven’t missed too much—that your memory-mixture is rich, and quite a bit wild. Maybe most of all, life is to make yourself a man...."

  “For guys like us, he’s absolutely right,” Gannet joined in.

  He felt the truth of this boiling in his blood. And there were prompt secondings of his statement.

  "Ten years from now, to the hour," Tobias said loudly, "let's all meet in this same Hume Hall, and compare notes and adventures!"

  This bit of young whimsy echoed, thin and naive, in the big room.

  Benrus, the ex-flier, laughed. "Okay—let's," he said.

  From that moment, in their minds, they were really on chilly, fabulous Mars with its ruins and deserts, on hot, smothered Venus, or among the crazy, wonderful Asteroids, where an inhabited planet had been blown apart, perhaps by a colossal atomic torpedo that bored to its center, to leave the artifacts of its civilization drifting, preserved by the vacuum and the cold through millions of years, in a huge orbit around the sun.

  And what went on in the old garage that Phelps rented out of town, was no isolated phenomenon. All over America, and in scattered parts of the recently ripped-up world, the same strange phoenix was hatching, as youth with new technology—some of it war-born—behind it, reached for colonization of the solar system.

  Here were the ghosts of all the motorcycle, plane-model and aero clubs of the past, concentrating now on bigger objectives.

  Long before the ordered Pushers arrived, blueprints from supply houses became the guides for the welding of skeletons of Titanium-alloy tubing, meant originally for the frameworks of supra-atmospheric bombers. In that old garage, ten such skeletons, all about fifty feet in length, but of varying types, began to take form in a row. Fingers, some of them not as deft as others, blundered, but there was always help at hand. Within the frames, anti-radiation bulkheads, gyroscope rotors, chlorophane air-rejuvenators, and delicate electronic instruments, all meant for the bombers, and now purchased for almost nothing—were fastened into place according to precise directions in the instruction pamphlets.

  Then, over the skeletons, went the thick skin of insulated metal-sheathed plastic. Its seams were sealed and rubbed smooth, and tested for leaks. After that, the cabins—usually cylindrical, where a man could only lie prone and strapped to the padding before his observation window—could be arranged some according to personal taste: Supply lockers here, water tanks there, pin-up girls here, and so on.

  Maybe it was no surprise after all that in the late spring, shy, precise little Thomas completed his ship and bolted his Harmon Pusher into its tail two days ahead of his companions. Moreover, the government safety inspectors said that his craft was the best, and showed the finest workmanship of the lot.

  Perhaps Thomas got a bit scared, then. Or maybe hero worship cropped out in him. Anyway he said:

  "You test-fly it, Benrus. Show us how."

  So, on the next Saturday morning, from a nearby vacant field, the war flier took it straight up for a thousand miles, on its thin streamer of fire. And most of the way Benrus' rough laugh came back to the listeners by radio:

  "Beautiful ship, Thomas!..."

  But it came down in a vertical power dive. Benrus' mistake was to fly it manually, instead of switching in the delicate robot controls that space-craft are meant to use. Perhaps Benrus wasn't as fit as he used to be, blacking out under acceleration at the wrong instant.

  Anyway when Phelps drove with the gang for ten wild miles, the farmer told them that his potato field had splashed like water. The hole in the ground still glowed and smoked with the heat of impact. Of Benrus there wasn't much left to bury or cremate.

  Just the same, here was Phelps' chance to decide that it was his duty to run the food company he owned, himself, instead of delegating the job to others. Or for Glodosky to remember his jinx and unfinished medical studies. Or for others to consider the worries of their families. Gannet, himself, almost wished he weren't an orphan. Anyway, the key-man and main prop of the crowd's project was gone. But for Thomas, it might have withered like a rotten apple.

  He had built the death ship. He turned ghastly pale; then green. Then he lost his dinner—which is not a romantic or delicate way to show grief. Two big tears made the mess worse. But he said without phony dramatics:

  "I guess Benrus used up all his luck in the war. So I take his ship, Gremlin's Roost. And not to Mars, like I wanted. But to Venus, where he meant to go."

  What he could do, the others felt compelled to equal.

  "Stick to Mars," Tobias urged him later, with a touch of hysteria. "You know that Venus is no lovers' d
ream. Days and nights weeks long. Crazy seasons because of the extreme tilt of the planet's axis to the plane of its orbit. Smothering heat, then smothering blizzards. An atmosphere mostly of carbon dioxide. No place for anybody but a fanatical scientist. Like living in a dark hole—breathing canned air. Be smart, kid!..."

  Tobias looked tough and Thomas looked weak. With his nerve Thomas propped the sagging project. And in another way Tobias did the same.

  His case headed up several days later, when he brought a dark, fiery, and very pretty little girl to the workshop. Or maybe she insisted on coming.

  "I'm here to tell you fellows," she said evenly, "that Toby is through with all this."

  Gannet felt the meaning of this scene just as the others must have. An ancient situation. The sweetheart with all of a woman's capacity for gentleness and fury. The guy protected and possessed for his good or his detriment. Because she loved him, and had her own ideas. Because, partly, those ideas were his, too. Kids and a home. Tender, secret moments. Yeah, there was substance to such thinking, too.

  Tobias looked sour, shamed, and pleading. Yet he defied his companions and the half of himself that sought to prove his strength and to satisfy a burning romantic curiosity to see the strangest of the strange.

  His lips jutted. "l can't help it, gang!" he growled. "I'm not twins! I can't cut myself in halves and go—two ways! Kitty's right! I'm staying with her! But it's not because I'm yellow! Damn you all—you understand that, don't you!..."

  "Sure, Tobias," Phelps tried to soothe honestly. "We understand. We'll have wedding presents sent, and we wish you both the best of luck and happiness...."

  But the gang's inner contempt had to harden its remaining members. For they had to be above the thing they despised... Gannet wished mightily to escape the stigma of the white feather. And could it be any different with the others?