Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet, but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the danger of predicament. Whatever brought me here anesthetized me first, he thought. That sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle.

  Panic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his belt and call Stryker....

  He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and failed.

  His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny surface ripples.

  On shore he could see the Marco Four resting between thorn forest and beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open, and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet returned with the scouter.

  He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip--unfelt before--was pressing against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hope flaring through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud....

  The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief.

  "Stryker!" he yelled. "Lee, roll out--Stryker!"

  The audicom hummed gently, without answer.

  He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before. Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be easily disturbed.

  The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless suggestion of flapping wings.

  * * * * *

  He tried again. "Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!"

  The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but Gibson's.

  "Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?"

  Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. "Never mind that--get here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards--"

  He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought with shock-born lucidity: I wanted a backstage look at this show, and now I'm one of the cast.

  The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as Gibson met the lizard swarm head on.

  Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. "Scattered them for the moment, Arthur--blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand fast, now. I'm going to pick you up."

  The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native. The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.

  Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid Arzian native carefully above water between them.

  "Gib," Farrell croaked. "Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've gone mad."

  The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. "You're all right, Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe in the Marco."

  Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the painful pricking of returning sensation. "I might have known it, damn you," he said. "You found your lost city, didn't you?"

  Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with himself over some private stupidity. "I'd have found it sooner if I'd had any brains. It was under water, of course."

  * * * * *

  In the Marco Four, Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear of being permanently disabled.

  "We never saw the city from the scouter because we didn't go high enough," Gibson said. "I realized that finally, remembering how they used high-altitude blimps during the First Wars to spot submarines, and when I took the scouter up far enough there it was, at the ocean bottom--a city to compare with anything men ever built."

  Stryker stared. "A marine city? What use would sea-creatures have for buildings?"

  "None," Gibson said. "I think the city must have been built ages ago--by men or by a manlike race, judging from the architecture--and was submerged later by a sinking of land masses that killed off the original builders and left Arz nothing but an oversized archipelago. The squids took over then, and from all appearances they've developed a culture of their own."

  "I don't see it," Stryker complained, shaking his head. "The pink fishers--"

  "Are cattle, or less," Gibson finished. "The octopods are the dominant race, and they're so far above Fifth Order that we're completely out of bounds here. Under Terran Regulations we can't colonize Arz. It would be armed invasion."

  "Invasion of a squid world?" Farrell protested, baffled. "Why should surface colonization conflict with an undersea culture, Gib? Why couldn't we share the planet?"

  "Because the octopods own the islands too, and keep them policed," Gibson said patiently. "They even own the pink fishers. It was one of the squid-people, making a dry-land canvass of his preserve here to pick a couple of victims for this morning's show, that carried you off last night."

  "Behold a familiar pattern shaping up," Stryker said. He laughed suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. "Arz is a squid's world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the pink fishers for--"

  Farrell swore in astonishment. "Then those poor devils are put out there deliberately, like worms on a hook--angling in reverse! No wonder I couldn't spot their motivation!"

  Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze. "Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up to the acceleration, Arthur?"

  Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: "You don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?"

  He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused, blasted the Marco Four free of Arz.

  * * *

  Contents

  TO REMEMBER CHARLIE BY

  By Roger Dee

  Just a one-eyed dog named Charlie and a crippled boy named Joey--but between them they changed the face of the universe ... perhaps.

  I nearly stumbled over the kid in the dark before I saw him.

  His wheelchair was parked as usual on the tired strip of carpet grass that separated his mother's trailer from the one Doc Shull and I lived in, but it wasn't exactly where I'd learned to expect it when I rolled in at night from the fishing boats. Usually it was nearer the west end of the strip where Joey could look across the crushed-shell square of the Twin Palms trailer court and the palmetto flats to the Tampa highway beyond. But this time it was pushed back into the shadows away from the court lights.

  The boy wasn't watching the flats tonight, as he usually did. Instead he was lying back in his chair with his face turned to the sky, staring upward with such absorbed intensity that he didn't even know I was there until I spoke.

  "Anything wrong, Joey?" I asked.

  He said, "No, Roy," without takin
g his eyes off the sky.

  For a minute I had the prickly feeling you get when you are watching a movie and find that you know just what is going to happen next. You're puzzled and a little spooked until you realize that the reason you can predict the action so exactly is because you've seen the same thing happen somewhere else a long time ago. I forgot the feeling when I remembered why the kid wasn't watching the palmetto flats. But I couldn't help wondering why he'd turned to watching the sky instead.

  "What're you looking for up there, Joey?" I asked.

  He didn't move and from the tone of his voice I got the impression that he only half heard me.

  "I'm moving some stars," he said softly.

  I gave it up and went on to my own trailer without asking any more fool questions. How can you talk to a kid like that?

  Doc Shull wasn't in, but for once I didn't worry about him. I was trying to remember just what it was about my stumbling over Joey's wheelchair that had given me that screwy double-exposure feeling of familiarity. I got a can of beer out of the ice-box because I think better with something cold in my hand, and by the time I had finished the beer I had my answer.

  The business I'd gone through with Joey outside was familiar because it had happened before, about six weeks back when Doc and I first parked our trailer at the Twin Palms court. I'd nearly stumbled over Joey that time too, but he wasn't moving stars then. He was just staring ahead of him, waiting.

  He'd been sitting in his wheelchair at the west end of the carpet-grass strip, staring out over the palmetto flats toward the highway. He was practically holding his breath, as if he was waiting for somebody special to show up, so absorbed in his watching that he didn't know I was there until I spoke. He reminded me a little of a ventriloquist's dummy with his skinny, knob-kneed body, thin face and round, still eyes. Only there wasn't anything comical about him the way there is about a dummy. Maybe that's why I spoke, because he looked so deadly serious.

  "Anything wrong, kid?" I asked.

  He didn't jump or look up. His voice placed him as a cracker, either south Georgian or native Floridian.

  "I'm waiting for Charlie to come home," he said, keeping his eyes on the highway.

  Probably I'd have asked who Charlie was but just then the trailer door opened behind him and his mother took over.

  I couldn't see her too well because the lights were off inside the trailer. But I could tell from the way she filled up the doorway that she was big. I could make out the white blur of a cigarette in her mouth, and when she struck a match to light it--on her thumb-nail, like a man--I saw that she was fairly young and not bad-looking in a tough, sullen sort of way. The wind was blowing in my direction and it told me she'd had a drink recently, gin, by the smell of it.

  "This is none of your business, mister," she said. Her voice was Southern like the boy's but with all the softness ground out of it from living on the Florida coast where you hear a hundred different accents every day. "Let the boy alone."

  She was right about it being none of my business. I went on into the trailer I shared with Doc Shull and left the two of them waiting for Charlie together.

  Our trailer was dark inside, which meant first that Doc had probably gone out looking for a drink as soon as I left that morning to pick up a job, and second that he'd probably got too tight to find his way back. But I was wrong on at least one count, because when I switched on the light and dumped the packages I'd brought on the sink cabinet I saw Doc asleep in his bunk.

  He'd had a drink, though. I could smell it on him when I shook him awake, and it smelled like gin.

  Doc sat up and blinked against the light, a thin, elderly little man with bright blue eyes, a clipped brown mustache and scanty brown hair tousled and wild from sleep. He was stripped to his shorts against the heat, but at some time during the day he had bathed and shaved. He had even washed and ironed a shirt; it hung on a nail over his bunk with a crumpled pack of cigarettes in the pocket.

  "Crawl out and cook supper, Rip," I said, holding him to his end of our working agreement. "I've made a day and I'm hungry."

  Doc got up and stepped into his pants. He padded barefoot across the linoleum and poked at the packages on the sink cabinet.

  "Snapper steak again," he complained. "Roy, I'm sick of fish!"

  "You don't catch sirloins with a hand-line," I told him. And because I'd never been able to stay sore at him for long I added, "But we got beer. Where's the opener?"

  "I'm sick of beer, too," Doc said. "I need a real drink."

  I sniffed the air, making a business of it. "You've had one already. Where?"

  He grinned at me then with the wise-to-himself-and-the-world grin that lit up his face like turning on a light inside and made him different from anybody else on earth.

  "The largess of Providence," he said, "is bestowed impartially upon sot and Samaritan. I helped the little fellow next door to the bathroom this afternoon while his mother was away at work, and my selflessness had its just reward."

  Sometimes it's hard to tell when Doc is kidding. He's an educated man--used to teach at some Northern college, he said once, and I never doubted it--and talks like one when he wants to. But Doc's no bum, though he's a semi-alcoholic and lets me support him like an invalid uncle, and he's keen enough to read my mind like a racing form.

  "No, I didn't batter down the cupboard and help myself," he said. "The lady--her name is Mrs. Ethel Pond--gave me the drink. Why else do you suppose I'd launder a shirt?"

  That was like Doc. He hadn't touched her bottle though his insides were probably snarled up like barbed wire for the want of it. He'd shaved and pressed a shirt instead so he'd look decent enough to rate a shot of gin she'd offer him as a reward. It wasn't such a doubtful gamble at that, because Doc has a way with him when he bothers to use it; maybe that's why he bums around with me after the commercial fishing and migratory crop work, because he's used that charm too often in the wrong places.

  "Good enough," I said and punctured a can of beer apiece for us while Doc put the snapper steaks to cook.

  He told me more about our neighbors while we killed the beer. The Ponds were permanent residents. The kid--his name was Joey and he was ten--was a polio case who hadn't walked for over a year, and his mother was a waitress at a roadside joint named the Sea Shell Diner. There wasn't any Mr. Pond. I guessed there never had been, which would explain why Ethel acted so tough and sullen.

  We were halfway through supper when I remembered something the kid had said.

  "Who's Charlie?" I asked.

  Doc frowned at his plate. "The kid had a dog named Charlie, a big shaggy mutt with only one eye and no love for anybody but the boy. The dog isn't coming home. He was run down by a car on the highway while Joey was hospitalized with polio."

  "Tough," I said, thinking of the kid sitting out there all day in his wheelchair, straining his eyes across the palmetto flats. "You mean he's been waiting a year?"

  Doc nodded, seemed to lose interest in the Ponds, so I let the subject drop. We sat around after supper and polished off the rest of the beer. When we turned in around midnight I figured we wouldn't be staying long at the Twin Palms trailer court. It wasn't a very comfortable place.

  I was wrong there. It wasn't comfortable, but we stayed.

  I couldn't have said at first why we stuck, and if Doc could he didn't volunteer. Neither of us talked about it. We just went on living the way we were used to living, a few weeks here and a few there, all over the States.

  We'd hit the Florida west coast too late for the citrus season, so I went in for the fishing instead. I worked the fishing boats all the way from Tampa down to Fort Myers, not signing on with any of the commercial companies because I like to move quick when I get restless. I picked the independent deep-water snapper runs mostly, because the percentage is good there if you've got a strong back and tough hands.

  Snapper fishing isn't the sport it seems to the one-day tourists who flock along because the fee is cheap. You fish from a wide-
beamed old scow, usually, with hand-lines instead of regular tackle, and you use multiple hooks that go down to the bottom where the big red ones are. There's no real thrill to it, as the one-day anglers find out quickly. A snapper puts up no more fight than a catfish and the biggest job is to haul out his dead weight once you've got him surfaced.

  Usually a pro like me sells his catch to the boat's owner or to some clumsy sport who wants his picture shot with a big one, and there's nearly always a jackpot--from a pool made up at the beginning of every run--for the man landing the biggest fish of the day. There's a knack to hooking the big ones, and when the jackpots were running good I only worked a day or so a week and spent the rest of the time lying around the trailer playing cribbage and drinking beer with Doc Shull.

  Usually it was the life of Riley, but somehow it wasn't enough in this place. We'd get about half-oiled and work up a promising argument about what was wrong with the world. Then, just when we'd got life looking its screwball funniest with our arguments one or the other of us would look out the window and see Joey Pond in his wheelchair, waiting for a one-eyed dog named Charlie to come trotting home across the palmetto flats. He was always there, day or night, until his mother came home from work and rolled him inside.

  It wasn't right or natural for a kid to wait like that for anything and it worried me. I even offered once to buy the kid another mutt but Ethel Pond told me quick to mind my own business. Doc explained that the kid didn't want another mutt because he had what Doc called a psychological block.

  "Charlie was more than just a dog to him," Doc said. "He was a sort of symbol because he offered the kid two things that no one else in the world could--security and independence. With Charlie keeping him company he felt secure, and he was independent of the kids who could run and play because he had Charlie to play with. If he took another dog now he'd be giving up more than Charlie. He'd be giving up everything that Charlie had meant to him, then there wouldn't be any point in living."