by Hank Davis
“You shouldn’t have too much trouble finding the jumpoff point, then.”
“I don’t expect any.” Marie Ward’s ridiculous song came back to him. “He fell into a dark hole, and covered himself over with charcoal, he went back over the mountain—” But Harriman wouldn’t be going back over the mountain. Or would he? What was a Black Hole, anyway? Could it really be a time tunnel?
Harriman poured more coffee. “I better get over to Lorelei myself. Can you spare a pound of coffee?”
“Sure.”
Harriman stood. He drained the mug. “Don’t see much point in coming back to Daniel Webster in that case. Your people can plot me a course and send it aboard Lorelei.” He flexed his fingers as if seeing them for the first time, then brushed imaginary lint from his patched uniform. “Yeah. I’ll go with the cutter. Now.”
“Now? But don’t you want to—”
“No, I think not. What would I say?” Harriman very carefully put the coffee mug into the table rack. “Tell her I loved her, will you? And be sure to send that coffee over. Funny the things you can get to miss in five years.”
DANIEL WEBSTER THIS IS LORELEI BREAK BREAK TELL TREVOR HIS COURSE WAS FINE STOP I APPEAR TO BE ONE-HALF-MILLION KILOMETERS FROM THE BLACK HOLE WITH NO OBSERVABLE ORBITAL VELOCITY STOP WILL PROCEED AT POINT l-G FROM HERE STOP STILL CANNOT SEE THAT BEEHIVE AT ALL WELL STOP NOTHING TO OBSERVE IN BEST CALCULATED POSITION OF BLACK HOLE STOP TELL MARIE WARD SHE IS NOT MISSING A THING STOP BREAK MESSAGE ENDS
Barbara Jean and her father sat in Captain Ramsey’s cabin. Despite the luxury of a shower, she didn’t feel clean. She read the message flimsy her father handed her.
“I ought to say something to him, hadn’t I? Shouldn’t I? Dad, I can’t just let him die like this.”
“Leave him alone, kitten,” Senator Grant told her. “He’s got enough to do, working that half-dead ship by himself. And he has to work fast. One of those gravity storms while he’s this close and—” Grant shuddered involuntarily.
“But—God, I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I?”
“How? Would you rather it was Bart taking that ship in there?”
“No. No, no, no! But I still—wasn’t there any other way, Daddy? Did somebody really have to do it?”
“As far as I can tell, Barbara Jean. I was there when Jim volunteered. Bart tried to talk him out of it. you know.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You’re right, of course,” Grant sighed. “He didn’t try very hard. There wasn’t any point in it anyway. Commander Harriman was the obvious man to do it. You didn’t enter the decision at all.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Yes. So does your husband. But it’s still true. Are you coming down to the bridge? I don’t think it’s a good idea, but you can.”
“No. You go on, though. I have to take care of Jeanette. Bill Hartley has her in the sick bay. Daddy, what am I going to do?”
“You’re going to go home with your husband and be an admiral’s lady. For a while, anyway. And when there aren’t any admirals because there isn’t any fleet, God knows what you’ll do. Make the best of it like all the rest of us, I guess.”
The bridge was a blur of activity as they waited for Lorelei to approach the Black Hole. As the minutes ticked off, tension grew. A gravity storm just now would wipe out their only chance.
Finally, Ramsey spoke. “You can get the spin off the ship, Mr. Trevor. Put the crew to jump stations.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Can we talk to Harriman still?” Senator Grant asked.
Ramsey’s eyes flicked to the screens, past the predicted time of impact to the others, taking in every detail. “No.” He continued to look at the data pouring across the screens. Their position had to be right. Everything had to be right, they’d get only the one chance at best . . . “Not to get an answer. You could get a message to Lorelei, but before we’d hear a reply it’ll be all over.”
Grant looked relieved. “I guess not, then.”
“Damnedest thing.” Harriman’s voice was loud over the bridge speaker. “Star was occulted by the Hole. Made a bright ring in space. Real bright. Just hanging there, never saw anything like it.”
“Nobody else ever will,” Marie Ward said quietly. “Or will they? Can the Navy send more ships out here to study it? Oh, I wish I could see!”
They waited forever until Harriman spoke again. “Got a good position fix,” they heard. “Looks good, Ramsey, damn good.”
“Stand by for jumpoff,” Bart ordered. Alarm bells rang through Daniel Webster.
“Another bright ring. Must be getting close.”
“What’s happening to his voice?” Senator Grant demanded.
“Time differential,” Marie Ward answered. “His ship is accelerating to a significant fraction of light velocity. Time is slowing down for him relative to us.”
“Looks good for jump here, skipper,” Trevor announced.
“Right.” Bart inspected his screens again. The predicted time to impact ticked off inexorably, but it was only a prediction. Without a more exact location of the Hole it couldn’t be perfect. As Ramsey watched, the ship’s computers updated the prediction from Harriman’s signals.
Ramsey fingered the keys on his console. The Alderson drive generators could be kept on for less than a minute in normal space, but if they weren’t on when Lorelei hit . . . he pressed the key. Daniel Webster shuddered as the ship’s fusion engines went to full power, consuming hydrogen and thorium catalyst at a prodigal rate, pouring out energy into the drive where it—vanished.
Into hyperspace, if that was a real place. Or on the other side of the Lepton Barrier. Maybe to where you went when you fell through a Black Hole if there was anything to that theory. Marie Ward had been fascinated by it and had seen nothing to make her give it up.
Wherever the energy went, it left the measurable universe. But not all of it. The efficiency wasn’t that good. The drive generators screamed . . .
“There’s another bright ring. Quite a sight. Best damn view in the universe.” The time distortion was quite noticeable now. Time to impact loomed big on Ramsey’s screens, seconds to go.
Marie Ward hummed her nursery rhyme. Unwanted, the words rang through Ramsey’s head. “He fell into a dark hole—” The time to impact clicked off to zero. Nothing happened.
“Ramsey, you lucky bastard,” the speaker said. “Did you know she kept your damned picture the whole time? The whole bloody time, Ramsey. Tell her—”
The bridge blurred. There was a twisted, intolerable, eternal instant of agony. And confusion. Ramsey shook his head. The screens remained blurred.
“We—we’re in the 81 Eridani system, skipper!” Trevor shouted. “We—hot damn, we made it!”
Ramsey cut him off. “Jump completed. Check ship.”
“It worked,” Marie Ward said. Her voice was low, quiet, almost dazed. “It really worked.” She grinned at Dave Trevor, who grinned back. “Dave, it worked! There are Black Holes, and they do bend light, and they can generate Alderson forces, and I’m the first person to ever study one! Oh!” Her face fell.
“What’s wrong?” Trevor asked quickly.
“I can’t publish.” She pouted. That was what had got her in trouble in the first place. The CoDominium couldn’t keep people from thinking. Die Gedanken, Sie sind frei. But CDI could ruthlessly suppress books and letters and arrest everyone who tried to tell others about their unlicensed speculations.
“I can arrange something,” Senator Grant told her. “After all, you’re the expert on Black Holes. We’ll see that you get a chance to study them for the fleet.” He sighed and tapped the arm of his acceleration chair, then whacked it hard with his open palm. “I don’t know. Maybe the CoDominium Treaty wasn’t such a good idea. We got peace, but—you know, all we ever wanted to do was keep national forces from getting new weapons. Just suppress military technology. But that turned out to be nearly everything. And did we really get pea
ce?”
“We’ll need a course, Mr. Trevor,” Ramsey growled. “This is still a Navy ship. I want the fastest route home.”
Home. Sol System, and the house in Luna Base compound. It’s still there. And I’ll leave you, Daniel Webster, but I’ll miss you, old girl, old boy, whatever you are. I’ll miss you, but I can leave you.
Or can I? Barbara Jean, are you mine now? Some of you will always belong to Jim Harriman. Five goddam years that man kept his crew and passengers alive, five years when there wasn’t a shred of hope they’d get home again. She’ll never forget him.
And that’s unworthy, Bart Ramsey. Neither one of us ought to forget him.
“But I still wonder,” Marie Ward said. Her voice was very low and quiet, plaintive in tone. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.”
“Know what?” Ramsey asked. It wasn’t hard to be polite to her now.
“It’s the song.” She hummed her nursery rhyme. “What did he really see on the other side of the mountain?”
WHAT’S IT LIKE OUT THERE?
by Edmond Hamilton
Although Edmond Hamilton was one of the biggest and most popular names in the fields of both science fiction and horror in the 1940s, he was unable to sell this story when he wrote it. Later on, taking note of a more realistic trend in sf, he rewrote it in a leaner style, and it was published in 1952 with a blurb announcing a “new Edmond Hamilton.” Not really, of course—even with more pulpish prose, this story that dared to picture space exploration as something that would be hard, brutal, and deadly was ahead of its time, and the field had needed time to catch up with the “new” Hamilton.
I hadn’t wanted to wear my uniform when I left the hospital, but I didn’t have any other clothes there and I was too glad to get out to argue about it. But as soon as I got on the local plane I was taking to Los Angeles, I was sorry I had it on.
People gawked at me and began to whisper. The stewardess gave me a special big smile. She must have spoken to the pilot, for he came back and shook hands, and said, “Well, I guess a trip like this is sort of a comedown for you.”
A little man came in, looked around for a seat, and took the one beside me. He was a fussy, spectacled guy of fifty or sixty, and he took a few minutes to get settled. Then he looked at me, and stared at my uniform and at the little brass button on it that said “two.”
“Why,” he said, “you’re one of those Expedition Two men!” And then, as though he’d only just figured it out, “Why, you’ve been to Mars!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was there.”
He beamed at me in a kind of wonder. I didn’t like it, but his curiosity was so friendly that I couldn’t quite resent it.
“Tell me,” he said, “what’s it like out there?”
The plane was lifting, and I looked out at the Arizona desert sliding by close underneath.
“Different,” I said. “It’s different.”
The answer seemed to satisfy him completely. “I’ll just bet it is,” he said. “Are you going home, Mr. . . .”
“Haddon. Sergeant Frank Haddon.”
“You going home, Sergeant?”
“My home’s back in Ohio,” I told him. “I’m going in to L.A. to look up some people before I go home.”
“Well, that’s fine. I hope you have a good time, Sergeant. You deserve it. You boys did a great job out there. Why, I read in the newspapers that after the U.N. sends out a couple more expeditions, we’ll have cities out there, and regular passenger lines, and all that.”
“Look,” I said, “that stuff is for the birds. You might as well build cities down there in Mojave, and have them a lot closer. There’s only one reason for going to Mars now, and that’s uranium.”
I could see he didn’t quite believe me. “Oh, sure,” he said, “I know that’s important too, the uranium we’re all using now for our power stations—but that isn’t all, is it?”
“It’ll be all, for a long, long time,” I said.
“But look, Sergeant, this newspaper article said . . .”
I didn’t say anything more. By the time he’d finished telling me about the newspaper article, we were coming down into L.A. He pumped my hand when we got out of the plane.
“Have yourself a time, Sergeant! You sure rate it. I hear a lot of chaps on Two didn’t come back.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard that.”
I was feeling shaky by the time I got to downtown L.A. I went in a bar and had a double bourbon and it made me feel a little better. Then I went out and found a cabby and asked him to drive me out to San Gabriel. He was a fat man with a broad red face.
“Hop right in, buddy,” he said. “Say, you’re one of those Mars guys, aren’t you?”
I said, “That’s right.”
“Well, well,” he said. “Tell me, how was it out there?”
“It was a pretty dull grind, in a way,” I told him.
“I’ll bet it was!” he said, as we started through traffic. “Me, I was in the Army in World War Two, twenty years ago. That’s just what it was, a dull grind nine-tenths of the time. I guess it hasn’t changed any.”
“This wasn’t any Army expedition,” I explained. “It was a United Nations one, not an Army one—but we had officers and rules of discipline like the Army.”
“Sure, it’s the same thing,” said the cabby. “You don’t need to tell me what it’s like, buddy. Why, back there in ’forty-two, or was it ’forty-three?—anyway, back there I remember that . . .”
I leaned back and watched Huntington Boulevard slide past. The sun poured in on me and seemed very hot, and the air seemed very thick and soupy. It hadn’t been so bad up on the Arizona plateau, but it was a little hard to breathe down here.
The cabby wanted to know what address in San Gabriel. I got the little packet of letters out of my pocket and found the one that had “Martin Valinez” and a street address on the back. I told the cabby and put the letters back into my pocket.
I wished now that I’d never answered them.
But how could I keep from answering when Joe Valinez’ parents wrote to me at the hospital? And it was the same with Jim’s girl, and Walter’s family. I’d had to write back, and the first thing I knew I’d promised to come and see them, and now if I went back to Ohio without doing it I’d feel like a heel. Right now, I wished I’d decided to be a heel.
The address was on the south side of San Gabriel, in a section that still had a faintly Mexican tinge to it. There was a little frame grocery store with a small house beside it, and a picket fence around the yard of the house; very neat, but a queer, homely place after all the slick California stucco.
I went into the little grocery and a tall, dark man with quiet eyes took a look at me and called a woman’s name in a low voice and then came around the counter and took my hand.
“You’re Sergeant Haddon,” he said. “Yes. Of course. We’ve been hoping you’d come.”
His wife came in a hurry from the back. She looked a little too old to be Joe’s mother, for Joe had been just a kid; but then she didn’t look so old either, but just sort of worn.
She said to Valinez, “Please, a chair. Can’t you see he’s tired? And just from the hospital.”
I sat down and looked between them at a case of canned peppers, and they asked me how I felt, and wouldn’t I be glad to get home, and they hoped all my family were well.
They were gentlefolk. They hadn’t said a word about Joe, just waited for me to say something. And I felt in a spot, for I hadn’t known Joe well, not really. He’d been moved into our squad only a couple of weeks before take-off, and since he’d been our first casualty, I’d never got to know him much.
I finally had to get it over with, and all I could think to say was, “They wrote you in detail about Joe, didn’t they?”
Valinez nodded gravely. “Yes—that he died from shock within twenty-four hours after take-off. The letter was very nice.”
His wife nodded too. “Very nice,” she murmured. She loo
ked at me, and I guess she saw that I didn’t know quite what to say, for she said, “You can tell us more about it. Yet you must not if it pains you.”
I could tell them more. Oh, yes, I could tell them a lot more, if I wanted to. It was all clear in my mind, like a movie film you run over and over till you know it by heart.
I could tell them all about the take-off that had killed their son. The long lines of us, uniformed backs going up into Rocket Four and all the other nineteen rockets—the lights flaring up there on the plateau, the grind of machinery and blast of whistles and the inside of the big rocket as we climbed up the ladders of its center well.
The movie was running again in my mind, clear as crystal, and I was back in Cell Fourteen of Rocket Four, with the minutes ticking away and the walls quivering every time one of the other rockets blasted off, and us ten men in our hammocks, prisoned inside that odd-shaped windowless metal room, waiting. Waiting, till that big, giant hand came and smacked us down deep into our recoil springs, crushing the breath out of us, so that you fought to breathe, and the blood roared into your head, and your stomach heaved in spite of all the pills they’d given you, and you heard the giant laughing, b-r-room! b-r-r-room! b-r-r-oom!
Smash, smash, again and again, hitting us in the guts and cutting our breath, and someone being sick, and someone else sobbing, and the b-r-r-oom! b-r-r-oom! laughing as it killed us; and then the giant quit laughing, and quit slapping us down, and you could feel your sore and shaky body and wonder if it was still all there.
Walter Millis cursing a blue streak in the hammock underneath me, and Breck Jergen, our sergeant then, clambering painfully out of his straps to look us over, and then through the voices a thin, ragged voice saying uncertainly, “Breck, I think I’m hurt . . .”
Sure, that was their boy Joe, and there was blood on his lips, and he’d had it—we knew when we first looked at him that he’d had it. A handsome kid, turned waxy now as he held his hand on his middle and looked up at us. Expedition One had proved that take-off would hit a certain percentage with internal injuries every time, and in our squad, in our little windowless cell, it was Joe that had been hit.