Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Gerry was communicating again with the Proteans.

  "The Sun's proximity won't hurt these beasties," she said. "Apparently they can resist electric energy much better than we can." Her voice turned wistful. "Maybe we could come back to the comet after it rounds the Sun."

  "Nope." Quade shook his head hopelessly. "No ship. Your Ark won't be ready till too late, and there's no other vessel. After we get through the coma again and pull away from the Sun -- if we do -- this boat of ours will need complete overhauling. When we leave Almussen's Comet, it means good-bye."

  He pondered.

  "Unless we can take some of the Proteans with us," he added at length. "Find out, will you?"

  The woman conversed silently. Then she shook her head.

  "They won't leave home. Although, I'll tell you what. Go back and get to work on the ship. Take Tommy and the others with you. Pick me up here when you take off, and I may be able to convince some of the Proteans in the meantime."

  "Better get more than one," Quade said, "or you'll lose out."

  The woman's eyes narrowed.

  "I'll attend to that," she observed. "Scram."

  But Quade still hesitated to leave.

  "Sure you'll be safe?"

  Gerry patted her water tank

  "Plenty safe. My audiophone's working, anyway. But I guess you'd better leave Tommy Strike here with me."

  Bearing their unconscious burdens, Quade and his men set out on the return journey. Luckily the gravity of the comet was so small that they were able to negotiate the trip without too much delay.

  Once aboard the ship, every man pitched in and sweated and toiled over the motors. Even those who had been put to sleep were revivified without trouble, and they also contributed their efforts. Yet Quade watched his chronometer worriedly.

  It seemed hours before the final tests were completed. The reliability of the ship was still uncertain, but there was no time to waste. The deadline was already past.

  Quade worked hurriedly at the controls. The craft lifted waveringly, and slid along thirty feet above the uneven surface.

  Soon they sighted the tower. Quade landed beside it. From the monolith emerged Gerry, Strike, and two blue Proteans. The woman called Quade on the audiophone.

  "Two of them will go with us. One for you, one for me. Let me in the ship, will you?"

  "Swell," Quade replied, pressing a lever that opened the airlock nearest Gerry. "Hop aboard."

  She and Strike complied. In the ship, they removed their helmets and rushed to the control room.

  "Open the lock again," Gerry gasped. "Get cyanogen into it. The Proteans can't live in oxygen, so we'll have to keep 'em in the lock till we can fix up an air-tight room for them."

  "Check."

  Quade opened the lock, and the two Proteans hastily rolled into it. The valve shut after them.

  Gerry had already scurried off to prepare a home for her cometary guests. Strike remained with Quade, mopping his brow.

  "What an experience. Worse than going under ether, Tony. I've got the worst headache."

  He fumbled in a closet for a pain-killer.

  "You'll have a worse headache if luck isn't with us," Quade said grimly. "The deadline's past, Strike. I'm going to take the biggest chance I've ever taken in my life."

  The other man turned.

  "Eh?" he asked bewilderedly

  Quade sent the ship arrowing up.

  "We're a lot nearer the Sun than we should be. But this boat's too strained to stand up long in the electronic bombardment of the coma. We can't stay in it as long as we did before. Our only chance is to accelerate like hell and go straight through the thinnest part."

  Strike's jaw dropped considerably.

  "The thinnest part. You mean --"

  "Yeah. The tail of a comet always points away from the Sun. The Sun's energy pushes at the comet's coma and tail. That means the thinnest section of the coma is directly opposite the tail on the side facing the Sun."

  "Jumping Jupiter," said Tommy Strike weakly. "We break through at top speed, headed for the Sun. And we're inside Mercury's orbit?"

  "Way inside. Tell your side-kick to get the Proteans out of the lock in a hurry or they'll be fried alive. Unless they can resist plenty of energy."

  Strike departed in a frantic rush.

  Quade crouched over the controls, his lean face grim and expressionless, a cold fire in his eyes. He was taking a long chance. But it was the only one. To remain on the comet an hour or two longer would mean certain destruction.

  He jammed on more acceleration. The ship streaked up like a thunderbolt, heading for the turgidly flaming skies. Faster -- faster --

  He called Morgan, spoke briefly over his shoulder.

  "Strap me in. Bandage me. I'm accelerating plenty."

  The other man obeyed.

  Quade, looking more like a mummy than a human being, snapped another order.

  "Take care of the men. Ready them for acceleration."

  Morgan nodded silently and went out.

  Already the space devils were tearing at the ship. The struts groaned and shrilled under the terrific strain. But this was only the beginning, Quade knew. The real test would come later.

  White fires loomed ahead. The coma! Quade jammed on more power, felt sickness tug at his stomach, felt his eyes press out of shape as the muscles strained to focus the delicate mechanism of vision.

  And now they were in the coma.

  Faster, faster! Added to the tremendous speed was the electronic bombardment that ripped at the fabric of the already weakened vessel. Once more the metal of the ship began to glow faintly. Again the craft yelled in shrill metallic protest.

  The visiplate was a hell of raving white fire. It cleared without warning. In place of the curdled flames was a round, blazing disk. The Sun --

  And the space ship was driving toward it at top acceleration.

  Quade took a deep breath. Closing his eyes, he touched three buttons in rapid succession. Immediately he was flung sideward, as though by a giant's hand. Glass shattered throughout the ship. Light metal bent like putty. Men screamed in agony as ribs and small bones cracked. Everyone was strapped into safety compartments, well padded, but those puny devices were far from enough.

  The ship curved. At top speed it swerved away from the Sun. Quade had not dared decelerate, for the mighty mass of the Sun could overcome any number of gravity-screens at this small distance. The outer hull glowed flaming red. The straining motors hummed, rattled, hissed under the overload.

  A pointer on a gauge before Quade hovered on a red line, went past it, hesitated, and crept slowly back. He breathed again. Gasping, he began to decelerate.

  It was over. They were safe. They had fought against comet and Sun.

  And they had won the fight!

  Chapter XXV.

  Double Double-Cross

  Exactly one month later, Gerry Carlyle and Tommy Strike were sitting in the woman's private office in the London Zoo, sipping cocktails and reading rave press notices.

  "What a draw," Strike chortled. "Our blue Protean is drawing customers like flypaper."

  "Uh-huh," the woman said happily. "And that isn't the best of it, either, I'm just waiting for a televisor call."

  Strike put down a clipping.

  "You've been gloating over this secret of yours for a month. What the devil is it?"

  Gerry's answer was cut short as the televisor buzzed. She sprang up and answered it. On the screen appeared the simian, contorted face of Von Zorn.

  "You chiseler," he yelped. "You double-crossing so-and-so. I'll sue you from here to Pluto."

  Tommy Strike got in front of the screen.

  "Listen, drizzlepuss, you're talking to a lady."

  Von Zorn turned a brilliant green. "Ha, a lady! Would a lady palm off a dream on me? A Protean? What a laugh. For a month it acted all right. And now, right when I was making a speech at the Rotary Club with the thing on the table beside me -- it vanishes. Just like that!"
>
  Strike turned to see that Gerry was helpless with laughter. Feebly she reached up and turned off the televisor.

  "You palmed off one of the fake Proteans on Von Zorn," Tommy accused.

  "I told you they couldn't play me for a sucker," Gerry gasped, and exploded into a fresh outburst of merriment. "It's turn and turn about. They tricked me into giving 'em publicity. So I just turned the tables."

  The televisor buzzed again. This time Strike turned it on. But it wasn't Von Zorn. It was, instead, Tony Quade, and he was looking surprisingly happy.

  "Hello," he greeted cordially, removing a battered pipe from his firm mouth. "Everybody cheerful, I see. That's nice."

  Gerry sobered suddenly. "Well?"

  "Oh, nothing much. Von Zorn told you our little pet vanished, didn't he?"

  "Yes."

  "I just wanted to get it straight. You arranged with one of the Proteans to create a dream-duplicate, and for me to get the duplicate. And you fixed it up so my Proteans would disappear after a time. That right?"

  "That," said Gerry, "is right. And I'm not apologizing."

  "Oh, don't apologize," Quade said urbanely. "Everything's just fine. I wanted to show you this."

  He lifted a three-sheet placard which read:

  NINE PLANETS PRESENTS

  CALL OF THE COMET

  Produced and Directed by

  Anthony Quade

  Starring

  The Proteans

  and

  Gerry Carlyle

  The woman gasped inarticulately. "It's a fake," she cried at last. "You only shot a few backgrounds on the comet."

  "Yeah," Quade acknowledged. "But I managed to get acquainted with my dream Protean. He was as intelligent as his original, you know. He told me he was a fake, that he'd vanish after awhile. So I knew what to expect, and I took precautions."

  "It's still a fake," Gerry said stubbornly.

  "Think so? Remember how the Proteans communicate? By projecting colored, three-dimensional images on their skins. Those pictures can be photographed, Miss Carlyle.

  "I got my Protean to think and project a complete photoplay -- starring you -- and we shot and transcribed it directly from Protean's membranous skin. I photographed a photoplay. I told you the creatures were intelligent.

  "It's a perfect reproduction," Quade went on. "Nobody could tell it from the real thing. I've got the history of the Proteans, our arrival, your capture -- everything that happened."

  "It's illegal to pretend I'm in the picture," Gerry snapped furiously. "I know that, at any rate."

  "You signed a contract in Von Zorn's office," Quade pointed out. "We've a perfect right to bill you as star of this picture." He grinned. "It'll be swell publicity for you, lady. And you don't deserve it."

  Gerry breathed deeply. But the training of years stood her in good stead.

  "At least, I've got the only Protean in existence in this System," she merely remarked. "That's something you can't swipe."

  Quade chuckled maliciously.

  "Yeah? How do you tell a real Protean from a dream one? The dream one vanishes. Yours hasn't vanished yet, has he?"

  Gerry struck angrily at the televisor, shutting it off. She barked into an audiophone: "Peters! Peters! Is my Protean still there?"

  "Sure," came an unseen voice. "Why shouldn't he be? He's rolling around in his tank of cyanogen, happy as a lark."

  Don't worry," Strike said, putting a capable arm around Gerry. "He's real enough."

  The woman emitted a small groan.

  "But is he? There's only one way of telling. If he vanishes, he's a fake."

  "Well," said Tommy Strike, after thoroughly kissing his fiancée, "at least there's no danger of my vanishing. After all, what's a Protean or two?"

  The words were unfortunate. Gerry seemed to regain her usual spirits. Her voice crackled like an electronic bombardment.

  "Yes, indeed," she remarked coldly. "Just who were you dreaming about on that comet?"

  Strike released the woman and headed for the door.

  "See you later, honey," he said over his shoulder. "I'm off to Mars. I hear the mariloca are running . . ."

  For some reason, "Catch-'em-Alive" Gerry Carlyle scampered frantically after him.

  * * *

  Contents

  SEED OF THE ARCTIC ICE

  By Harry Bates

  Sleepily the lookout stared at the scope-screen before him, wishing for something that would break the monotony of the scene it pictured: the schools of ghostly fish fleeting by, the occasional shafts of pale sunlight filtering down through breaks in the ice-floes above, the long snaky ropes of underwater growth. None of this was conducive to wakefulness; nor did the half-speed drone of the electric engines aft and the snores of some distant sleeper help him. The four other men on duty in the submarine—the helmsman; the second mate, whose watch it was; the quartermaster and the second engineer—might not have been present, so motionless and silent were they.

  The lookout man stifled another yawn and glanced at a clock to see how much more time remained of his trick. Then suddenly something on the screen brought him to alert attention. He blinked at it; stared hard—and thrilled.

  Far ahead, caught for an instant by the submarine Narwhal's light-beams, a number of sleek bodies moved through the foggy murk, with a flash of white bellies and an easy graceful thrust of flukes.

  The watcher's hands cupped his mouth; he turned and sang out:

  "K-i-i-ll-ers! I see killers!"

  The cry rang in every corner, and immediately there was a feverish response. Rubbing their eyes, men appeared as if from nowhere and jumped to posts; with a clang, the telegraph under the second mate's hand went over to full speed; Captain Streight rolled heavily out of his bunk, flipped his feet mechanically into sea-boots and came stamping forward. First Torpooner Kenneth Torrance, as he sat up and stretched, heard the usual crisp question:

  "Where away?"

  "Five points off sta'b'd bow, sir; quarter-mile away; swimming slow."

  "How large a school?"

  "Couldn't say, sir. Looks around a dozen."

  "Whew!" whistled Ken Torrance. "That's a strike!" He pulled on a sweater and strode forward to the scope-screen to see for himself, even as Captain Streight, all at once testy with eagerness, bawled:

  "Sta'b'd five! Torpoon ready, Mister Torrance! Mister Torr—oh, here you are. Take a look."

  Never in the two years of experience which had brought him to the important post of first torpooner had Ken failed to thrill at the sight which now met his eyes. Directly ahead, now that the Narwhal's bow was turned in pursuit, but veering slowly to port, swam a pack of the twenty to thirty-foot dolphins which are called "killer whales," their bodies so close-pressed that they seemed to be an undulating wave of black, occasionally sliced with white as the fluke-thrusts brought their bellies into view. Their speed through the shadowed, gloomy water was equal to the submarine's; when alarmed, it would almost double.

  "Three more of 'em will fill our tanks," grunted Streight, his chunky face almost glowing. He bit on a plug of tobacco, his eyes never moving from the screen. "Now, if only we hadn't lost Beddoes.... Y' think you can bag three, Mister Torrance?"

  "Well, if three'll fill our tanks—sure!" grinned Ken.

  The other's eyebrows twitched suddenly. "They're speeding up!" he shouted, and then: "That torpoon ready, there? Good." His voice lowered again as Ken pulled his belt a notch tighter and snatched a last glimpse of the fish before leaving. "I want you to try for three, son," he said soberly: "but—be careful. Don't take fool chances, and keep alert. Remember Beddoes."

  Ken nodded and walked to the torpoon catapult, hearing Streight's familiar send-off echoed by the men of the crew who were nearby:

  "Good hunting!"

  The idea of an underwater craft for the pursuit of killer whales—tremendously valuable since the discovery of valuable medicinal qualities in their oil—had been scoffed at by the majority of the Alaska Whaling Company's
officials at the time of its suggestion, but the Narwhal after her first two months of service had decisively proved her worth. She was not restricted to the open seas, now swept almost clean of the highly prized killers; she could follow them to their last refuge, right beneath the floe-edges of the Arctic Circle; and as a result she could bring back more oil than any four surface whalers.

  With a cruising radius of twenty-five hundred miles, she stayed out from the base until her torpoons had accounted for anywhere from sixty to eighty killers. One by one these sea-animals would be taken to the surface and there cut up and boiled down, until her tanks were full of the precious blubber oil. Ever farther she pressed in her quest for the fish schools, dipping for leagues into a silent sea that for ages had been known only to the whale and the seal and their kindred; a sea always dark and mysterious beneath its sheath of ice.

  The inner catapult door closed behind Kenneth Torrance, and he slid into his torpoon. Twelve feet long, and resembling in miniature a dirigible, was this weapon that made practical an underwater whaling craft. The tapered stern bore long directional rudders, which curved round the squat high-speed propeller: its smooth flanks of burnished steel were marked only by the lines of the entrance port, which the torpooner now drew tight and locked. Twin eyes of light-beam projectors were set in the bow, which was cut also by a vision-plate of fused quartz and the nitro-shell gun's tube, successor to the gun-cast harpoon.

  Ken lay full-length in the padded body compartment, his feet resting on the controlling bars of the directional planes, hands on the torpoon's engine levers. A harness was buckled all around him, to keep him in place. His gray eyes, level and sober, peered through the vision-plate at the outer catapult door.

  Suddenly a spot of red light glowed in it; the door quivered, swung out. A black tide swirled into the chamber. There came the hiss of released air-pressure, and the slim undersea steed rocketed out into the exterior gloom, her light-beams flashing on and propeller settling into a blur of speed as she was flung.

  Ken turned on her full twenty-four knots, zoomed above the dark bulk of the slower mother ship, whose light-beams flashed across him for a second, and then straightened out in a long, slight-angled dive after the great black bodies ahead.