Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  It was comic and sad to watch the dog tangle with the conditions of some of the lesser of these Minor Planets. Large and small—chips of a once populous world that was blown to fragments in a pushbutton war with Mars fifty million years ago—they were all atmosphereless, of course, except where Man had intruded with his airdomes. Such a circumstance imposes even on space-travelling pups the indignity of cumbersome attire.

  Snowdrop had been stuffed into his armor several times while he was still on Earth. This ordeal happened again aboard the liner, once more in domed Ceres City, and finally aboard the small spaceboat which Lisky and his two-man crew used to scrounge the unexplored regions of the Belt for the various means of making money.

  "It's gotta be now, Snowdrop," Lisky half growled and half crooned. "Because we've arrived on a pay-dirt Asteroid."

  Once more, with muzzle-licking fear, and with both reproach and trust of his stubborn and sometimes perverse master in his brown eyes. Snowdrop submitted. The miniature spacesuit engulfed him like a crocodile swallowing him up.

  It made Big Thorne smile with sour amusement, and Helpern, who was thin and dark, guffaw uproariously, until Lisky's hardened jaw gave warning.

  "To Snowdrop it ain't funny!" Lisky snapped.

  But he had to laugh, too, later. The smaller Asteroids—mere chunks of meteoric iron and stone a few miles in extent—have very little gravity indeed. Outside the spaceboat, Snowdrop tried to run, but catapulted himself high off the ground, where, writhing, he described a long, graceful parabola, before he bounced on solidity again.

  After that the terrified pooch, looking like an armadillo in his costume of rubberized wire fabric, would keep his belly to the ground and advance one paw ahead of the other with ludicrous care. Inside his oxygen helmet of transparent plastic, his ears were laid back. His space armor had no special member for his tall, but now it would have been between his legs, anyway.

  But he began to learn to get around without using too much muscular force, and with lessened fear. His ears stood up again. His interest in things came back. And he went into his yapping phase.

  Yes, like the helmets of the men his helmet had a small radio transmitter and receiver unit inside it. Lisky's sentimental side wouldn't have had it otherwise.

  "What are you boneheads smirking about?" he grumbled at Thorne and Helpern. "A man wants to hear his dog bark, doesn’t he?"

  Lisky guessed that Snowdrop yapped not at a noise but at the appalling stillness of space, where, in the absence of atmosphere, sound, apart from its transmission in solid objects, could not exist.

  Mutts were silly. Lisky knew of one that, returned from space to an Earth that it had all but forgotten, barked its fool head off at every cricket-chirp.

  But Lisky, beneath a general cynicism that extended beyond dogs to humans, himself, and his own purposes, had a deeper faith in canine talents. Back to his earliest memories extended a long succession of pup-dogs that had been his.

  "That's right, Snowdrop," he said once, while they were wandering alone on that first small Asteroid that they had landed on. "Live and learn. Get the nonsense out of your system. Find out what's worth barking at, and what isn't. Keep your eyes peeled. Because there's more mystery in space than men will ever find out about in a long, long time. Especially in the Belt. We could get into strange trouble, fast."

  This was a practical statement, with a nervous chill behind it. But in Lisky it also had deeper roots of awe and appreciation that stood before the universe and nature in perhaps poetic wonder, and yearned for nameless and special adventures, even though Lisky was a blunt, realistic man by his own lights. He was selfish, and capable of cruelty. Still he had his occasional suspicions of other facets in himself. Sometimes they even embarrassed him, as if they marked him as partly a mollycoddle.

  There wasn't too much that was new to him in the first several months of his return to the Belt. He and Thorne and Helpern, and of course the worthy Snowdrop, late a lover of the Wisconsin woods, skipped from Asteroid to Asteroid, the men hunting wealth.

  Gold—from the deep core of the original and now shattered planet, where, as in all worlds, it had settled and lodged by its own massiveness—was not for them. It was cheaper than dirt, here.

  But industrial metals were a different matter—the radioactive ones, harboring atomic power, and the specially hard or soft or flexible ones, whose properties gave them unique usefulness and value in Earth's expanding technology. You collected only the richest lumps of ore, in a great steel net to be towed by your spaceboat. Even near an Asteroid there was scant weight to such booty. It behaved like a huge sluggish balloon, trailing astern.

  And there was another kind of plunder. Fifty million years ago, out here, a world had been blown up. In a terrible second, millions of degrees of heat had blazed and died; vast blasting forces had acted. Artifacts of metal, glass, stone, and fabric were fused, burned, and shattered; but the freakish whimsy often associated with violence still left much intact. The fury had passed very quickly, and the cold vacuum of the void had taken over, preserving what was left so well that it was as if space had stopped time itself.

  Thinly scattered, floating free in the emptiness, or clinging to Asteroids which had once been part of the soil-clad cruet of the parent planet, was the wreckage of a dead culture: fragments of machines and buildings, eerie art-works, furniture—whatnot.

  Lisky had grown callous to such wonders. They were now too familiar. Let Snowdrop try to sniff in canine interest at a space-dried piece of mummy that had tentacles instead of arms, it he wanted to. His master's main reaction was humorous regret that the pooch's so important nose was stymied both by the odorless void and by the plastic cover around his head.

  In common with Thorne and Helpern, Lisky's eye was trained for things that would bring a price at the mart: the shining ornament, the bit of rich mineral fabric, the dented platinum vase—and so forth. Of course they were cautious when rummaging among ancient rubbish. Machines which had been atom-powered, whether meant for violence or not, might still be dangerous.

  But when these men were sure of safety, they proceeded with blunt efficiency. What was not immediately valuable enough was so much waste, to be scattered like straw; and hang the scientists who were reconstructing a picture of pre-Asteroid civilization. Vandalism? Thus accused, Tom Lisky would have shrugged and grinned like a pirate. If it was true, what of it? Space hardened the hardest, further. You always wondered if supplies of food and oxygen would last. The silence dug into your soul, twisting it. If Lisky's thoughts were ever softer about the things he found, his family or his fiancee were always involved. Would Hilda like him to mail this or that? Or his kid brother, maybe?

  Still, certain forces were strong in Tom Lisky. The gambling instinct. And, buried deeper than hope in his ego, the idea of vast luck and glory. And a touch of the mood of boy and dog exploring a field.

  Something dangerous and frightening, and stranger than strange, was already at hand for Lisky. The first signs, unrecognized, were a slight feeling of illness, and a burning sensation at the back of his neck.

  "We're getting a nice haul this trip, Tom," Thorne said to him once, gleefully.

  Thorne's jubilance meant that he'd already made his Great Find, and had his secret. He did not know it, but this had nothing to do with the dead people of the Asteroid Planet. But in space there was deeper and perhaps more enthralling history than theirs.

  When Thorne's secret was a hundred hours old, Lisky and Helpern took the jet-motors of the ship apart for an overhaul, before starting the return trip to Ceres City. Their craft was grounded on a fair-sized chunk of the smashed planet's crust.

  Thorne had just come in from outside. Like the others, he made many exploratory jaunts afield, alone, with a shoulder-jet clamped to his back, for short-range propulsion in neighboring space.

  He shed his armor and put it in his locker. Then he fumbled with some perpetual nicknacks. He smiled to himself. His broad face showed scare, awed questionin
g, wolfish hope. It was too bad that Lisky was in the motor pit, and couldn't see him.

  Only Snowdrop was around—not shelled in a space armor, now. Thorne ignored him. For what did a mutt know?

  But all of a sudden the little dog let out a thin, protracted howl, when for months he had been vocal for only obvious reasons. He stopped just long enough to gather breath; then he did it again.

  Lisky heard. His spine prickled and chilled in response. A picture, characteristic of his beliefs, naive perhaps, but none the less borne out by the facts of human and canine relationships, crossed his mind—that of a pooch making a rumpus to warn a sleeping family of fire. Lisky came up through the motor-pit-hatch, his hard face set, his cold eyes questioning.

  Snowdrop's forepaws were scratching at Thorne's knee. His howls had changed to excited whines and yelps. His eyes and nose were intent—whether eagerly or in terror, only he could know.

  "What have you got on you that makes the dog all riled up, Thorne?" Lisky said at last, quietly.

  "What have I got?" Thorne snapped. "Are you nuts—like the mutt?"

  It was no good. Thorne's scared and guilty secretiveness was written all over his heavy face. In the Asteroid Belt, wealth-hunger fosters both hold-outs against companions, and suspicion of same on the part of the latter. Besides, in Lisky, and in Helpern too, who now stood at his shoulder, a driving spark of dread had been kindled by Snowdrop's noise and actions.

  Lisky was a somewhat crude character. He could have thrashed the bigger man easily, alone.

  "Come—on—Thorne!" he drawled and snarled.

  His tone was as blunt and no louder than the thud of a sledgehammer on flesh—and as persuasive. Beside him Halpern's narrowed eyes were hot gimlet-points, directed at Thorne in the same brutal demand. These two were like starved wolves.

  Thorne paled. His wide eyes cast wild glances about the spaceboat's interior, as if seeking aid. Then he shoved the yammering, dancing dog aside with his boot, and fumbled helplessly inside his large, loose jacket. His hand brought forth something about the size of a grapefruit, wrapped in rags. Nervously he peeled the rags away.

  The object thus revealed was roughly spherical. It looked natural—unmarked by any tool. There were dark greens and blues in it—and some brown. And its substance transmitted light, for there were frosty glints from deep in its interior. This was all that Lisky's first intent glance photographed.

  In his mind there was at once a great question-mark, for experience gave him no exact name for this thing. Either it was an utter trifle—a glassy clinker, perhaps—or it was more. Those sombre sparks of light in it looked both ugly and rich. Or were both of these tingly impressions just imagination, excited in part by the yapping and antics of Snowdrop, who was now as hysterical as if he had freed a dinosaur? Lisky wondered. His brain did have its analytical side.

  "Jeez!" Halpern gasped. "Maybe it's some kind of big jewel in the rough!"

  Thorne's perhaps naive hope was plainly similar. His gloat showed it. Lisky was no stranger himself to the hungry emotion behind such a look. Briefly, an odd, defensive thought, far removed from his usual self, hit him—from a book he'd read; one thing about spacemen—lack of other common diversions forced them to read a good deal: Was avarice a little like poetry? What was it except the desire to hold, to fondle, to possess—beauty? Here Lisky wanted no derisive comments from his other self about pretty girls! Way back in time some caveman must have been the first to catch the gleam of a gold-nugget or the sparkle of a diamond—and had been entranced . . .

  Lisky's mind came to grips again with the sinister side of the nameless. His hide puckered. But caution, and knowledge gained by examination, were the only antidote for this sense of menace. Relating to the glinting lump in Thorne's palm, Lisky's acquired indifference to the relics of the Asteroid Planet did not apply. It was too unordinary. It could be harmless and valueless—something he might wish to send home to his small brother. Yet, too, its baleful shine might mean the clink of money. Or, in a more soulful mood, it might be something to think of as a precious gift for Hilda, his girl. Just possibly, it could be deadly dangerous. But Lisky didn't quite believe this—yet.

  "I’ll take care of the thing, Thorne—until we find out what it is," Lisky growled, cupidity tainting his belief that he was a more responsible person. "Hand it over."

  Thorne's lips still could assume the pout of defiance and ownership that has marked the treasure-mad in strange, wild regions, long before space travel was even thought of.

  "I found it! It's mine!" he complained.

  While Snowdrop howled and yipped, Lisky wrenched the object from Thorne's hand.

  "Shut the poor pooch in the motor-pit to cool off, Helpern," he ordered.

  Lisky turned the lump over once in his heavy gloves. Then, seeing that little could be learned about it by casual scrutiny, and being wary of holding it for too long, he put it down on the chart table.

  "Let's hear where you got this, Thorne," he said.

  Thorne shrugged sullenly. "It was—like a meteor," he answered. "A few watches ago, when you and Helpern were scouting the other side of this Asteroid, I saw a very bright speck maybe half a mile off, in space. It didn't show much relative motion, since it was moving around the sun in about the same direction as the Asteroids do. Using my shoulder-jet, I flashed out and got the thing. That's all."

  Lisky's gaze was directed at Thorne's open shirt, where his hairy chest showed. Splinters of worry jabbed deeper into Lisky. He remembered being cautioned about the very slight chance that ancient infections might still linger in the regular ruins and relics out here. The lump seemed of a different class. Still, the hint herein contained blended unpleasantly with the fact of his not feeling so good, lately. At last he commented with cruelty and sarcasm:

  "Thorne, you got a rash right over where you've been carrying this thing, inside your jacket. I wonder why?"

  Thorne's expression of scare deepened. "You're foolish!" he snapped, as if emphasis and fury could rub out a fact. "A few pimples! Give me back my property!"

  Lisky smirked. "Now you're telling yourself stories," he said.

  Momentarily, Thorne seemed to stare at nothing. And almost musing, he made a remark which appeared irrelevant, though it was part of his harassed thinking:

  "The meteorite was more green and blue before. But now it's turning brown ..."

  Lisky saw Helpern rubbing an elbow. And had the back of his own neck started to burn more? Puzzlement, mystery, avarice, and dread formed a muddled murk in his brain. Under other circumstances he would have put the enigmatic lump out of the way of giving or receiving harm, until better minds could tell him what it was. But now there was an urgency, like smelling smoke in a house at night. You had to try to know at once what you were up against.

  "Maybe we should get rid of the thing, Tom," Helpern said.

  "No!" Thorne cried. "That's nonsense!"

  "Get some chemotherapeutic shots in your blood, you two," Lisky snapped irritably. "For luck. Then go finish fixing the motors. Or go to sleep. Just don't bother me . . . "

  Lisky gave himself a shot, though he felt no assurance that it would work against some alien infection—if truly such a catastrophe was his. Then he donned rubber gloves from the medical supplies, and took the glinting object to the lab-cubby used for testing ore-samples, and shut the door.

  His first test—for radioactivity—showed nothing unusual. Then he risked his nose, thinking that smell might have caused Snowdrop's wild reaction. Maybe there was a slight muskiness—as if some miasmic vapor were seeping from the spongy, glassy material.

  Then, trying hard to tempt fate no further than necessary, Lisky donned a surgical mask that he had brought along.

  Inspection with his unaided eyes still showed him little. But now he had another idea, as he heard another of poor Snowdrop's graveyard howls from the motor pit: the ears of dogs could detect sounds of higher, thinner pitch than those of humans. Well—there was a way to bring such sounds
down a few octaves, so that he could hear them. Sonic radar was regulation equipment for those who were probing for the position and formation of buried ore deposits. He had such a device; and part of it was an apparatus to make high-frequency sound-echoes audible.

  Now he rigged it quickly, and pressed its tiny microphone against the glittering meteorite.

  He was on the right track! For he heard what Snowdrop's delicate ears must have picked up. It was like a distant tumult—like a flock of gulls, a mile away over water, yammering and screeching. And there was a backdrop as of far-off surf. The sounds had a protest in them—an ancientness and a sadness, maybe. Or so he thought in his first chilly impression. These were like death-cries.

  The back of Lisky's neck burned ominously more than before. He fought down the impulse to rub the welt that was forming there. A sickness was in his stomach. But in another way, his mind spun. He was out of his depth. His thick brows scowled, and he cursed. He was no scientist! What did he know?

  Under chemical test, a tiny splinter from the lump proved to be silicate. Like plain quartz—nothing more. That again could be disappointing to a character like Tom Lisky. Yet it deepened an enigma.

  The best instrument to use turned out to be the microscope. With strong light burning under the translucent spheroid, Lisky peered into the eyepiece, focusing for various depths.

  His eyes adjusted, and his mind slaved to interpret what he saw. The internal structure of the lump was soon plain. It was like a clinker or a sponge. In the glassy stuff, thousands of bubble-cavities of various sizes were packed close together. This queer meteorite had no doubt been formed naturally in some cosmic furnace.

  Like one crystal-walled chamber behind another, and so on in long sequence, those bubble-cavities blurred away into the depths, their lines lost partly in the faint tinting of blue and green, which must show a taint of iron coloring in the otherwise clear substance.

  Much of the rest was a little like peering at small things in stagnant water through a microscope, or like motion-picture fantasies in bright, shifting hues that Lisky used to see as a kid. Through the medium of the magnifying lenses, there was even an illusion of descent into those regions—those tiny caverns grown huge, where physical laws remained the same, but where smallness imposed a difference of effect.