Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "Dad," the boy inquired earnestly, "would it be a good or a bad thing for the human race if someone discovered how to make people live forever?"

  "Well, well," the doctor replied. "You are being mighty serious about it. Is that for one of your debates?"

  "Yes," Ronald answered eagerly; that excuse was as good as any.

  "I believe," the doctor continued, "that if everlasting life were given to the human race, it would be a very bad thing. If no one died, in a population which is now stationary, it would double in one generation."

  "You mean," the son reminded, "that if the birth-rate continued unchanged."

  "It would," the doctor assured him. "No ifs are needed. You can fancy, after a few generations, the horrible crowding up of the earth. Think of the pressure, the competition, the lowered standard of living, worse than anything in India or China—and growing worse and no end to it."

  "But supposing," suggested Ronald, "that birth-control were put into effect?"

  "Don't make me laugh," his father countered. "Voluntarily or individually, people would never do anything. By public measures, perhaps in a hundred years after everybody was crazy, something might be done. No, I rather think your gift of everlasting life would be no boon to race, and of questionable benefit to the individual."

  As the boy said nothing further, the doctor resumed his reading. At intervals however, be glanced over the top of his paper at his son, who sat there motionless in a stiff chair, staring straight ahead of him and saying nothing. Undoubtedly something was preying on his mind. The doctor, a practical man who knew boys well, said nothing, realizing that it would all eventually come out.

  The boy maintained his puzzled posture for nearly two hours before he stirred. Then he rose, stretched himself, and remarked that he hated to go to bed.

  At that moment there was a gallop of many footsteps on the porch floor, and a ring at the doorbell. In a moment the room was filled with Chiefs of Police and Government officers.

  "THERE used to be a light in old man Dragstedt's window every morning at 4:30," Ronald began his explanation, "when I passed his house carrying papers. I knew he was a sickly old man who never went anywhere, and lived alone. Sometimes one of the windows went funny colors in the night, as I went by with my paper-bags. He's got a crazy chimney on his house, like a tall pipe, and shiny, like polished metal.

  "Although it is against the rules of the paper, one morning I couldn't resist trying a peek in at one of his windows. I tiptoed up on the porch, but the minute I stepped on his rug, an alarm went off somewhere in the house. The door opened, and he started to roar at me, and then collapsed on the floor. He has heart disease, and gets attacks when he gets sore.

  "I dragged him to the davenport and was going to call up my dad, but he begged me not to. He had some pills that he took. I got them for him and they made him better in half an hour. I stayed with him and warmed him a glass of milk. I saw nothing in the house out of the way, but in the direction of the queerly lighted windows there was a closed door.

  "The next day I walked boldly up and knocked on the door. He had me in and I asked him how he was. I got to dropping in that way and found that he was grateful for a lot of little things I could do to help him. But, he never opened that door.

  "I thought I would never find out what was in there, until one day when I rang his doorbell and he didn't answer. I opened up and went in, fearing that something had happened to him. I found the secret door open, and he was just about to come in through it, when he had another spell. He fell down and his face was so blue it gave me the creeps. I got him to bed, gave him his tablet, and had a look at the room. "A lot of the stuff there was undoubtedly short-wave equipment. I've got a ham station of my own, and am up on it. The scanning elements and the big screen of a television set were also familiar. But there was an awful pile of strange stuff there that meant nothing to me.

  "He came to as I was standing in the middle of the apparatus room, looking around, trying to figure out stuff. He didn't get sore; he got to know that it would give him another spell with his heart. So I just shut the door, warmed him some more milk, and never said a word and he didn't either.

  "But after that he let me come in and watch him working at the apparatus. He used cw, but be had six keys instead of one; he played five of them with the fingers of his right hand like piano keys; it must have taken a lot of practice to get that way, because he really made 'em sing. Another odd thing was that his transmission wave had several tones to it—no; he must have had several transmission waves. It gave a musical effect as he sent."

  "Say!" interrupted Chief Henderson, "Where is this old bird? Dragstedt you say? We'll listen to the rest of it from him."

  "Well, I guess he's gone to them. Or they took him away with them. He hasn't been at his house for 24 hours. But his stuff is all right."

  "What do you mean by they? Who took him away?"

  The boy showed embarrassment.

  "Well," he hesitated; "I know you'll think I'm crazy—"

  "Suppose you are!" said the police chief, his voice rough with impatience. "Who took him away?"

  "Well—the Martians. But wait till I get to 'em."

  THE men settled in their chairs with a certain amount of relief. Martians! If that was all, they needn't worry. They had thought it might be some well-known crooks. The boy continued his narrative:

  "Then one day, when he didn't come to the doorbell, I opened the door again and walked on in. The inner door was open. I could see him at the television apparatus. I really saw a Martian on the screen!

  "I saw him plenty plain and had a long time to look at him. Dragstedt was so absorbed that he didn't know I was there for thirty minutes.

  "The thing on the screen moved, and worked little pieces of a vast stack of machinery behind it. It had bright eyes, and arms and legs, and wasn't so very different from people after all. But for a person, it looked small and fragile and easy to fall to pieces. It moved with quick jerks. As it moved, little buzzes on different notes came out of Dragstedt's machine. It gestured with its hands, and then brought out papers. Or, you know, whatever they use for papers. But it looked just like papers. Some had maps and some had mathematical stuff on them.

  "Then Dragstedt turned around and saw that I had been watching him. He came near having another spell. But, he's a smart guy, and he calmed down and held it off. He decided he might as well tell me about it. I understand the stuff pretty well and can give you the high spots—"

  "Whatever Ronald says about radio and related subjects," his father interrupted, turning to the police officers, "you can put down as being accurate and dependable. I myself am amazed at the amount of knowledge he has on those things."

  "Kids are hot on that stuff," the grizzled old D. C. I. chief mumbled to himself.

  "He had been a professor of physics," Ronald went on. "But he inherited a lot of dough from a relative and got to experimenting on his own. He was interested in picking up the portion of radio waves that are reflected from the Heaviside layer. He had some odd notion about the thing and was measuring intensities. He found that the reflected portion was weaker than the transmitted portion to an extent not explained by the square of the distance equation. He tried it with direction beams, and the more nearly vertical he got his beams, the greater the loss in intensity—just opposite to what you'd expect—"

  Chief Hawes grunted and mumbled something about what he would expect.

  "When he finally directed a successfully controlled beam in an accurately vertical direction, he lost most of his short-wave energy. Can't you see—that he was putting a wave through the Heaviside layer?"

  Chief Haves grunted again, so that Donald had to smile.

  "He played with it a lot, and sent out a lot of amateur broadcasting, and cw.

  "It wasn't really very long, a few weeks, till he was amazed to find that he was getting signals in return. The poor fellow must have gone nearly crazy before he figured out what those odd, broken tones were.
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  "FOR many months he worked on them, but could make no sense out of them. After quite a while, it struck him that he ought to build a television apparatus in connection. By that time his heart was getting bad; he went to a doctor and the doctor wanted to put him in a hospital. He couldn't stand that, and went back to his apparatus. After some weary months he finally saw his first Martian on the screen.

  "Eventually he learned to talk to them. By means of the vision screen and his multitoned cw, he and the Martians developed a language from gestures and pointing to objects, and then gradually into words. I got on to a good deal of the stuff myself as I watched him, and it isn't so hard at that. When I got so that I could stand there and get what the cw was saying, I got quite a thrill out of it.

  "Well, it turned out that these Martians lived under the ground on their planet, because it was too cold and dry on top and no air. They had it all fixed livable underground. They were an old, old race, much older than ours. They had learned among other things, the secret of preventing death, or at least of putting it off indefinitely. As their births were regulated in the laboratory merely to replace rare losses by death, the race was stable.

  "However, within the recent century, a new disease had sprung up among them which they could not conquer with all their science. Deaths occurred in such numbers that the laboratories could not replace them by a sufficient number of births; their mathematicians predicted the early extinction of the race. Their physicists said that the disease was due to the complete loss of radioactive minerals, due to the old age of the planet itself. I saw some of the sick ones on the television screen, and it must have been some kind of cancer.

  "What did Dragstedt do, but describe radium to them, and ask them if they knew what it was, and if they thought it would cure their stuff. Of course that is the first thing that would have occurred to me. No, all their radium had finally broken itself up into non-radioactive elements. But they grasped the idea, only too promptly.

  "The gist of it is, that Dragstedt and the Martians got up a scheme, where he is to steer them to the caches of radium when they come to Earth in a space ship. In return, they will cure his heart disease and give him everlasting life. Dragstedt has been all over the country, getting the layouts of hospitals and universities, which he could easily do, for he is a well known physicist himself.

  "Those birds up there on Mars even planned mechanical things to get around in, when they got to Earth, because their bodies are too flimsily built for our heavier gravitation.

  "That's all I know, except that I overheard that their ship is down in the sandhills, about fifty miles southeast of Alliance; and that they are sticking around about a week to treat old Dragstedt."

  The Martian Ship

  By the next morning, the entire Eighth Army Corps was on the move, swarming from all directions toward Alliance, Nebraska. Its airplanes, and also two squadrons of Navy hydroplanes from the Great Lakes Training Station, were at Alliance by daybreak.

  Field artillery and tanks on flat-cars came in on the railroads from the East, West, and South. From four directions came tracks loaded with men and small equipment.

  By noon, Alliance looked like the center of a war zone. The sky hummed with planes. Tanks clanked along the roads, and motorized artillery pointed its long, keen noses at the sky. Trim, khaki-clad detachments clicked precisely along the pavements, their rifle-barrels all neatly parallel. The entire division was mobilized. It was being strung out in a new-moon-shaped line, thickest in the center, and the points feeling outward, to surround the object as soon as it was found.

  The airplanes located it early in the afternoon. It was described as an egg-shaped affair as big as an ocean liner, located in a hollow in the sand hills, practically where Ronald Worth had predicted it would be found.

  The young captain in command of the airplane squadron from the Great Lakes Navy Base saluted General Barry, the Commander of the expedition, and stood in front of him waiting for orders. He could not conceal a restlessness, stepping from one foot to the other, even though trying hard to stand rigid.

  The grizzled old General smiled.

  "What is the Captain jittery about?" he asked.

  "Begging the General's pardon," the Captain said in embarrassment, "I am awaiting orders to bomb the space ship. It is just a pippin of a target. We could smash it in thirty seconds—"

  "What about the radium?" the General interrupted.

  The Captain's face suddenly fell, and he stood there puzzled.

  "Do you know," the General continued, "that the entire nation's supply of radium is inside that vessel. If you throw explosives down there, you will scatter several million dollars' worth of precious stuff out in the sand. It would cost as much money and take as much time to recover it, as it did to make it in the first place."

  "Yes, Sir!" replied the Captain meekly. "We've got a job on hand!"

  In the modest residence section of Lincoln, Nebraska, three swift cars that had just dashed across the town from the airport, drew up in front of Dragstedt's deserted little house. General Barry; his aides, and a squad of guards tramped into the house.

  There, in the room of apparatus which old Dragstedt had built, sat Ronald Worth, high-school student and paper-carrier. Sleepiness showed in his eyes, and at his elbow were partly consumed bottles of milk and plates of cheese and crackers.

  "Ronald Worth calling Professor Dragstedt! Ronald Worth calling Professor Dragstedt! Will you please answer! It will be to your interest to communicate with us!"

  The boy's voice droned monotonously on, uninterrupted by the entry of the men into the room. Then he stopped, took a drink of milk, and put his hand on the six keys. The queer musical drone started and whined monotonously on. The military men stood silently about the room.

  "You are sure that no other operator could take this over?" General Barry asked.

  "I'd have to teach him. It would take time. Took me months to get on to it," the boy answered. "This is different from ordinary radios. And common radios won't tune with those of the Martians."

  "You look tired," the General said.

  Suddenly the boy stiffened, and took his hand away from the keys. The musical drone continued, in a different rhythm.

  "He is answering. Wouldn't answer on the telephone, but bit on the cw at once." Ronald was elated.

  "Tell him," said General Barry, "to tell these Martians, that if they give us back our radium, we shall treat them royally, entertain them, show them the Earth; and then let them go home unharmed, with a gift of enough radium for their purpose."

  The cw transmitter hummed awhile; and there were stirs of impatience among the soldiers who filled the room. After a while, the boy spoke again.

  "The best I can make out of these answers, Sir," he said, "is that the Martians refuse to recognize us as intelligent beings. They refuse to deal with us. They think we are just some sort of animals."

  "You tell him, then," the General directed, "that we have got them surrounded on land and in the air. We shall not permit them to rise, and shall simply lay siege to them until they starve. Do not be alarmed when we put a small shell through the skin of their vessel; that will be to keep them from rising out into space. Advise them again, that they will be better off if they surrender."

  The cw spoke again for a period; and again the boy spoke, with some excitement in his voice:

  "Apparently the shell has arrived, and blown a hole in the nose of their ship. Dragstedt didn't think it did any damage. But the Martians have become very busy about something, moving jerkily about. The shell-hole seems to have interfered with their arrangements for decreased gravitation inside the vessel. He doesn't know how many there are, but over a hundred. He says they are disturbed."

  "That was Grigsby of the 110th Field Artillery that disturbed them."

  "SWOOP" Martin, the crack observation pilot, circled around over the scene of operations, at 30,000 feet. He had to use an oxygen helmet, fitted with binocular glasses. But he was invisible
and inaudible from below.

  He could see the gleaming, egg-shaped hull, nestling in the sand like some child's toy; and around it, the dotted, splotched, irregular circle formed by the Eighth Army Corps. As he watched, a puff of smoke came from one of the splotches below; in a moment a puff of smoke appeared at the smaller end of the egg; and when it cleared, a small black hole remained in the metal. He reported it all promptly to headquarters by radio.

  The next thing that happened was that a square of metal opened in the side of the vessel, like a door, and an odd thing stepped out of it, and started walking out across the sand away from the ship.

  In another second, a dozen airplanes, far below him, swooped down toward the thing. The faint patter of their machine guns came up to him. The mechanical thing that had come out of the vessel careened over on its side and lay still. The door in the side of the hull quickly closed.

  For some minutes nothing happened, and then a row of little round ports appeared higher up off the ground. "Swoop" Martin could not see anything else happen, except that there were a dozen loud explosions, with flashes of fire in the air, and the airplanes which had fusilladed the Martian coming out of his ship, all exploded there beneath him, and only a litter of small fragments dropped on down to the ground. Then, systematically down there in that investing circle, one battery after another blew up in a flash and a cloud of smoke, huge gun barrels and artillery wheels flying high in the air mingled with the bodies of men, whirling down to be buried in a cloud of sand.

  A few seconds later there were scores of explosions in the air, as distant airplanes blew up. There must have been communication from them to the ground, because some of the batteries in the second and third lines banged loudly two or three times before they finally blew up. Their marksmanship was good. Shells shrieked across the interval and huge holes were ripped in the shining side of the Martian vessel.

  However, the Martians were the swifter. Before vital damage had been done to their vessel, there was not a tank, not a field gun, not an intact infantry company left. The Eighth Army Corps had been wiped out and was represented only by a few stragglers staggering in the sand.