Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  Once he hid from a mob that came splashing along a dark tube. They had flaring torches. Their leader carried a woman’s head on a stake. They were singing the “Battle Hymn of God.”

  Dimly, he tried to understand what had turned human beings into such frightful things. Of course, the rule of the Union had been a heavy burden, but he remembered signing many measures for the relief of the masses. Melkart, he remembered, said that he was three generations late.

  It was twenty years since Kellon had felt the wet chill of the drainage levels. But suddenly the last secret meeting of the New Commonwealth party seemed only yesterday. This intricate maze of dripping tunnels remained as familiar as if he had never left it.

  Reeling to his burden of fatigue, he found a little niche that he had dug long ago in the side of a shaft above a drainage pump. He slept for a long time, and woke staring at the even marks of his drill still visible in the damp sandstone.

  It gave him a curious and surprising pleasure to see that evidence of the old strength and skill of his hands. For it was a long time since he had even dressed himself completely without some aid.

  He was hungry, but still the far past served him. He climbed, by a way he had known, to the freight levels. Traffic had ceased. He saw no Goons or workmen. In most sections, only a few pale emergency lights were glowing.

  A few other looters were busy. He avoided them. Presently, he found a wrecked electric truck, and loaded his gray pockets from its cargo of hydroponic oranges and tinned imitation beef. He ate, and cached what was left in the little cave.

  It was dawn of the second day when he came up a sloping freight ramp, into the tangled weeds and rusting metal and time-dulled luxion masonry of the long-abandoned Saturn Docks.

  He was searching for his son.

  It was five years, now, since their quarrel. He couldn’t be sure that Roy would want to see him. But the bright shadow of Selene was no longer between them. He was lonely, and Roy was all he had left.

  If his Tower had been the brain of the Union, the spaceport had been its pulsing heart. Remembering the great batteries on the mili-technic reservation, he hoped that refugees from the bombarded city might have gathered here, to make a last defense upon the natural fortress of the mesa.

  Eagerly, he pushed through the weeds toward the Venus Docks. Stumbling in the dim early light, he came upon a new mountain of fresh black earth and broken stone. The heart went out of him. He climbed wearily to the summit of the shell-built ridge.

  Beyond, where the busy Venus Docks had been, was only a wide black chasm. Bitter fumes stung his nostrils. But it was more than the explosive reek that blurred his eyes with tears.

  Chaos met him. The shell-torn mesa looked desolate as the crater-pitted Moon. Outside the Saturn Docks, scarcely any familiar structure was even a recognizable ruin. Death had plowed deep. Only a few twisted scraps of metal even hinted that docks and cradles and ships had ever existed.

  Miles away, on the rough field of dark debris where the militechnic reservation had been, he saw a fallen cruiser. All the stern was gone, as if the magazine had exploded. The plates still glowed with red heat over the battery rooms, and smoke lifted a sharp thin exclamation point against the gloomy sky.

  Sadly, he recognized the Technarch’s lines.

  Beyond the dead ship, Sunport was burning. A terrible red dawn glowed all across the east. But the low sky overhead remained dark with smoke from the conflagration. Hours dragged on, as he searched for the ruin of the unitronics laboratory where Roy had worked. But the Sun didn’t rise.

  It must have been noon when he came to what was left of the laboratory. Hope ebbed out of him, when he saw the shattered ruin of the dead luxion walls. For the old building had been directly hit.

  A huge, yet-smoking pit opened where the left wing had been. The roof was torn off the massive gray walls. They were banked high with debris. It seemed impossible that anybody could have survived, in all the building.

  “Who comes?”

  Kellon whirled, startled. Behind him, a big man had risen silently from behind a mound of rubble. The labor number printed across the front of his gray overalls showed that he had been a dock worker. He carried a stubby automatic rifle.

  “Steve Wolfe.” Cautiously, Kellon answered with his old party name. “Freight handler.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for Engineer Roy Kellon,” he said desperately. “I have a message for him. He worked in the unitronics lab. Do you know him? Was he hurt?”

  The big man made no immediate reply. His keen eyes studied Kellon over the level gun. Puzzled and impatient, Kellon kicked uneasily at a bomb-tossed stone. At last, as if he had reached some decision, the guard nodded.

  “I think you’ll do. Come along, and I’ll let you talk to Tom Pharr.” He pointed with the gun toward a gap in the shattered wall. “Roy Kellon is here,” he added, “but you will find it hard to deliver any message right now. Because he is buried under a thousand tons of rock.”

  Kellon walked ahead, through a maze of ruined rooms and roofless passages. He heard voices and the muffled clink of tools. Abruptly, his guide brought him upon a surprising scene.

  A cracked, unroofed wall inclosed a long rectangle. It was piled deep with broken rock and debris, flung from the crater where the other wing had been. But scores of men and women were toiling desperately to move the rubble. They had half uncovered a long, mirror-bright torpedo shape. The guard hailed a slim young man in gray, who appeared to be in charge of the excavation.

  “Pharr! Here’s another man for you.”

  The slim youth came to meet them. Kellon knew him. He had seen him here at the laboratory when he came to beg Roy to give up his research. But his face showed no recognition, and Kellon was glad of it.

  “Refugee?” Pharr asked quickly. “You don’t like the Preacher? You want to leave Sunport?” Kellon scarcely had time to nod. “Are you willing to go to space?”

  “I am.” Kellon felt bewildered. “But I was looking for my . . . for Engineer Roy Kellon. Is he all right?”

  “He’s aboard the Nova.” Tom Pharr jerked a hurried thumb at the half-buried torpedo. “He’ll be all right—if we can get him uncovered before the Preacher’s fanatics get wind of us.”

  “That?” Puzzled, Kellon nodded at the bright spindle. “A spaceship?”

  “Interstellar cruiser,” Pharr explained swiftly. “We’ve been working on it, for years. It was almost ready to test. When the bombardment started, Roy tried to get it into space. The shell caught him.

  “Lucky I was in the city—trying to find a crew. I got back in a glider, after the bombardment. I’ve been collecting refugees to dig him out.” His quick eyes ran over the busy scores. “We’ll save a tiny seed of civilization—if we get away.”

  Pharr’s lean face betrayed faint worry.

  “Some damage to the Nova. But Roy signaled that he is making repairs. Expects to be able to take off, as soon as we can get it uncovered. There’s fuel enough for Venus or Mercury. But we’ll have to find dynodes and supplies for the interstellar flight.”

  Eagerly, Kellon echoed, “Interstellar?”

  Bright enthusiasm burned all the fatigue from Tom Pharr’s face.

  “Roy believes every star has planets of its own. Won’t matter so much if dark ages come to Earth. Because we and our children will be sowing the seed of mankind across the stars.” His intense eyes peered at Kellon. “Want to sign for the voyage?”

  Kellon gulped in vain to speak. This was something more than a chance to escape the chaos of a crumbling world. Tom Pharr’s quiet, brief words had painted a new vision, suggested a new purpose. He nodded mutely.

  “Then get to work.”

  Kellon went to help a man and a girl who were trying to roll a raw new boulder away from the Nova. It was queerly comforting to be accepted as a member of this busy, efficient group. Never before had he quite realized how lonely the boss had been.

  As the hours went on, he w
as scarcely conscious of fatigue. He wasn’t much concerned with the blood that presently began to ooze from his soft, uncalloused hands. There was time for only a few brief words, but he began to feel an eager interest in these new companions.

  A curiously assorted group. Burly dock hands in gray. A few young cadets who had survived the destruction of the militechnic college. A dozen veterans who had escaped from the Outstation in a life tube, when it was blown up. Engineers, white-collar workers, servants, grays.

  But their one intense purpose had fused them all into a single unit. Class distinction was gone. Kellon noticed a pretty girl, in low-cut dance pajamas. She looked a little like Selene du Mars. But she was serving soup to a line of hungry stevedores in gray.

  Melkart’s dictum came back to him. Sunport was dead, because it had lost the purpose that created it. But this desperate, tattered little group was still somehow a vital entity. Because, as the old historian would have put it, they shared a destiny.

  Night fell again. Still Sunport was burning. Smoke blotted out the stars. The eastward horizon was a wall of terrible red. Lightless towers stood against it, broken and truncated by the space bombardment, like monuments of some dead gigantic race.

  They worked on without resting. Now and again, a clatter of auomatic fire told them that the guards were fighting some intruder. It was midnight when they reached the valves of the Nova. Roy Kellon came out, with an arm in a sling, to inspect the battered hull.

  Kellon stood back in the shadows, too weary to call out. His breath came faster, and his throat ached suddenly. Roy looked lean and strong; those were his mother’s eager gray eyes.

  “Come aboard,” he called. “I think she’ll do. I’ve patched up the damage in the power room. We can make Venus for repairs and supplies—and then the stars!”

  Kellon followed the shuffling line of weary men and women through the valve. Roy was standing in the light, inside. His lean face lit with astonished pleasure, and he put out his good hand.

  “Why, father!” he whispered. “I’m so glad!”

  “Good to see you, Roy.” Kellon blinked and tried not to choke. “Now I understand what you tried to tell me once—about the importance of those other planets.” He gulped, and hesitated. “But—I’m an old man, Roy. If ... if you need the space for younger men and women—I’ll stay.”

  “Nonsense, boss!” Roy gripped his hand. “Tickled. Just so we get away before the Preacher comes.”

  “Forget the boss!’ Kellon grinned and blinked again. “But we’ll be loading supplies on Venus. You’ll find that I’m a hell of a good foreman on a cargo gang.”

  The skirmishing guards retreated aboard. The valves were sealed. Anxiously, Roy cut in the Novas untested drive. She lifted silently, swifter than any unitron vessel had ever been. The burning city slipped beneath its dark shroud of smoke. Ahead were the stars.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Although science and sanity were temporarily halted by the Preacher’s world-wide revolution, Mankind avoided complete chaos and recovered its balance. A sensible peace was restored and with new initiative the people of Earth settled down to greater interplanetary exploration. In 2200 the first interstellar ship took off on a journey that was to mark a new progressive period and the beginning of a galactic empire.

  DANCE OF A NEW WORLD

  by John D. MacDonald

  S

  hane Brent sat in the air-conditioned personnel office of the Solaray Plantations near Allada, Venus, and stared sleepily at the brown, powerful man across the table from him. Shane was an angular blond man, dressed in the pale-gray uniform of Space Control. On his left lapel was the interlocked C.A. of Central Assignment and on the right lapel was the small gold question mark of Investigation Section. Shane Brent had the faculty of complete relaxation, almost an animal stillness.

  His hair was a cropped golden cap and his eyes a quiet gray. Below the edge of the gray shorts the hair, tight curled on his brown legs, had been burned white by the sun.

  The man on the other side of the table was stocky, sullen and powerful. His face was livid with the seamed burns of space radiation before the days of adequate pilot protection. His name was Hiram Lee.

  The conversation had lasted more than an hour and as yet Shane Brent was no closer to a solution. He had been carefully trained in all the arts of persuasion, of mental and emotional appeals. Hiram Lee had resisted them all.

  Shane Brent said: “Lee, the whole thing is ridiculous. You’re thirty-eight now. At least seven years of piloting ahead of you.”

  Lee snorted. “Piloting! Tell your boss that I’m unadjusted or something.”

  “Let’s review the case again. You, at the age of eighteen, were the first third-generation space pilot in history. Your grandfather was John Lee who was an army pilot and who ran out of soup on the second swing around the Moon. As a memorial they left the little silver ship in orbit.”

  Lee’s expression softened for the first time. “That’s the way he would have wanted it.”

  “And your father, David Lee, was kicked off the spaceways for getting tight and balancing the old Los Angeles of the Donnovan Lines on its tail fifty feet in the air for ten minutes.”

  “And he won his bet of fifty bucks, junior. Don’t forget that.”

  “And that brings us down to you, Hiram Lee. You made eighty-three trips with Space Combo in the VME triangle. Your education cost Central Assignment a lot of time and money. There aren’t enough trained pilots who can stand the responsibility.”

  “The monotony, you mean.” Lee stood up suddenly, his fists on his slim waist. “I told you before and I’ll tell you again. When I started, it was a fine racket. You took off on manual controls and got your corrections en route from Central Astro. You made the corrections manually. You ripped off in those rusty buckets and the acceleration nearly tore your guts out. When I started we had a mean time of one five nine days from Earth to Venus. The trip was rugged. As a pilot you were somebody.

  “Then some bright gent had to invent the Tapeworm. Central Astro plots your entire trip and sends the tape over. You co-ordinate the Tapeworm with takeoff time and feed in the tape. You’ve got a stand-by Tapeworm with a duplicate tape and you’ve got an escape tape which you feed in if anything goes too far off.

  “The pilot sits there like a stuffed doll and the tape does everything. You don’t even have to worry about meteorites. The Pusher obliques the little ones off and the Change-Scanner gives you an automatic course correction around the big one. It just got too dull, Brent. I’m not a guy who wants to play up to the rich passengers and tickle the babies under the chin and say kitcheekoo. I took three years of rocking chair circuits and then I quit. And I won’t go back.”

  “What makes the job you’ve got so attractive, Lee? You’re just a foreman and nursemaid to a bunch of Harids working in your herb patches.”

  Lee smiled tightly. “I keep ‘em working and I tell ‘em what to do and I try to keep them happy. You know the final psycho report on them. Their culture is much like the culture of ants on Earth—with one exception. They have a high degree of emotional instability. Did you ever see a Harid run berserk ? A bunch of them are picking away and all of a sudden one will stop and start swaying his head from side to side. The others light out for far places. The one who has gone over the edge starts clicking those teeth of his. He lets out a scream that would split your head wide open and comes at you with his arms all coiled to strike. Bullets won’t stop them. You haven’t got time to mess with a powerpack and turn a ray on him. All you need is a knife. You just step inside the arms, slice his head clean off and get out of the way fast. See this scar ? I didn’t move fast enough six months ago.”

  Shane looked puzzled. “Then danger is an integral part of your pattern of living. Are you trying to tell me there’s no danger in space?”

  “It’s a different kind, Brent. Once every few years a ship gets it. The people on it don’t even know what happened. I like a littl
e danger all the time.”

  “Would you consent to an alteration of glandular secretions to take away this yen for danger?”

  “And start kissing babies again? Not a chance! Every Saturday I draw my pay and I hit all the joints along the Allada Strip. You meet some interesting people. All Sunday I have a head and a half. On Monday I’m out in the weeds again with my crew of Harids.”

  “Central Assignment isn’t going to like my report on this.”

  Lee chuckled. “I sure weep for you pretty boys in gray. Tell them to mark my file closed and tell them where to file it for me, will you?”

  Shane Brent stood up slowly, looking more than ever like a big sleepy animal. “Suppose, Lee, that you could take a route on one of the old ships? Manual controls, magnetic shoes, creaking plates—all the fixings.”