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Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

Page 526

by Anthology


  Jan, his head just above ground level, surveyed the terrain. There was flat ground to the east, clear in a fairly broad alley for at least half a kilometer before any of the domes protruded up into it.

  "This is as good a spot for takeoff as we'll find," he said to Sanchez.

  The men put three heavy ropes on the platform's windward rail and secured it by them to the heavy chain that ran by the dome. The platform quivered and shuddered in the heavy wind, but its base was too low for it to overturn.

  Shortly the two men returned with the fuel from the groundcar, struggling along the chain. Jan got above ground in a crouch, clinging to the rail of the platform, and helped them fill the fuel tank with it. He primed the carburetors and spun the engines.

  Nothing happened.

  * * * * *

  He turned the engines over again. One of them coughed, and a cloud of blue smoke burst from its exhaust, but they did not catch.

  "What is the matter, señor?" asked Sanchez from the dome entrance.

  "I don't know," replied Jan. "Maybe it's that the engines haven't been used in so long. I'm afraid I'm not a good enough mechanic to tell."

  "Some of these men were good mechanics when the navy was here," said Sanchez. "Wait."

  He turned and spoke to someone in the dome. One of the men of Rathole came to Jan's side and tried the engines. They refused to catch. The man made carburetor adjustments and tried again. No success.

  He sniffed, took the cap from the fuel tank and stuck a finger inside. He withdrew it, wet and oily, and examined it. He turned and spoke to Sanchez.

  "He says that your groundcar must have a diesel engine," Sanchez interpreted to Jan. "Is that correct?"

  "Why, yes, that's true."

  "He says the fuel will not work then, señor. He says it is low-grade fuel and the platform must have high octane gasoline."

  Jan threw up his hands and went back into the dome.

  "I should have known that," he said unhappily. "I would have known if I had thought of it."

  "What is to be done, then?" asked Sanchez.

  "There's nothing that can be done," answered Jan. "They may as well put the fuel back in my groundcar."

  Sanchez called orders to the men at the platform. While they worked, Jan stared out at the furiously spinning windmills that dotted Rathole.

  "There's nothing that can be done," he repeated. "We can't make the trip overland because of the chasm out there in Den Hoorn, and we can't fly the platform because we have no power for it."

  Windmills. Again Jan could imagine the flat land around them as his native Holland, with the Zuider Zee sparkling to the west where here the desert stretched under darkling clouds.

  * * * * *

  Jan looked at his watch. A little more than two hours before the G-boat's blastoff time, and it couldn't wait for them. It was nearly eight hours since he had left Oostpoort, and the afternoon was getting noticeably darker.

  Jan was sorry. He had done his best, but Venus had beaten him.

  He looked around for Diego. The boy was not in the dome. He was outside, crouched in the lee of the dome, playing with some sticks.

  Diego must know of his ailment, and why he had to go to Oostpoort. If Jan was any judge of character, Sanchez would have told him that. Whether Diego knew it was a life-or-death matter for him to be aboard the Vanderdecken when it blasted off for Earth, Jan did not know. But the boy was around eight years old and he was bright, and he must realize the seriousness involved in a decision to send him all the way to Earth.

  Jan felt ashamed of the exuberant foolishness which had led him to spout ancient history and claim descent from William of Orange. It had been a hobby, and artificial topic for conversation that amused him and his companions, a defense against the monotony of Venus that had begun to affect his personality perhaps a bit more than he realized. He did not dislike Spaniards; he had no reason to dislike them. They were all humans--the Spanish, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans, even the Russians--fighting a hostile planet together. He could not understand a word Diego said when the boy spoke to him, but he liked Diego and wished desperately he could do something.

  Outside, the windmills of Rathole spun merrily.

  There was power, the power that lighted and air-conditioned Rathole, power in the air all around them. If he could only use it! But to turn the platform on its side and let the wind spin the propellers was pointless.

  He turned to Sanchez.

  "Ask the men if there are any spare parts for the platform," he said. "Some of those legs it stands on, transmission belts, spare propellers."

  Sanchez asked.

  "Yes," he said. "Many spare parts, but no fuel."

  Jan smiled a tight smile.

  "Tell them to take the engines out," he said. "Since we have no fuel, we may as well have no engines."

  * * * * *

  Pieter Heemskerk stood by the ramp to the stubby G-boat and checked his watch. It was X minus fifteen--fifteen minutes before blastoff time.

  Heemskerk wore a spacesuit. Everything was ready, except climbing aboard, closing the airlock and pressing the firing pin.

  What on Venus could have happened to Van Artevelde? The last radio message they had received, more than an hour ago, had said he and the patient took off successfully in an aircraft. What sort of aircraft could he be flying that would require an hour to cover eighty kilometers, with the wind?

  Heemskerk could only draw the conclusion that the aircraft had been wrecked somewhere in Den Hoorn. As a matter of fact, he knew that preparations were being made now to send a couple of groundcars out to search for it.

  This, of course, would be too late to help the patient Van Artevelde was bringing, but Heemskerk had no personal interest in the patient. His worry was all for his friend. The two of them had enjoyed chess and good beer together on his last three trips to Venus, and Heemskerk hoped very sincerely that the big blond man wasn't hurt.

  He glanced at his watch again. X minus twelve. In two minutes, it would be time for him to walk up the ramp into the G-boat. In seven minutes the backward count before blastoff would start over the area loudspeakers.

  Heemskerk shook his head sadly. And Van Artevelde had promised to come back triumphant, with a broom at his masthead!

  It was a high thin whine borne on the wind, carrying even through the walls of his spacehelmet, that attracted Heemskerk's attention and caused him to pause with his foot on the ramp. Around him, the rocket mechanics were staring up at the sky, trying to pinpoint the noise.

  Heemskerk looked westward. At first he could see nothing, then there was a moving dot above the mountain, against the indigo umbrella of clouds. It grew, it swooped, it approached and became a strange little flying disc with two people standing on it and something sticking up from its deck in front of them.

  A broom?

  No. The platform hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever it was that stuck up on it--a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly and the platform slid to the ground with a rush. It hit with a clatter and its two passengers tumbled prone to the ground.

  "Jan!" boomed Heemskerk, forcing his voice through the helmet diaphragm and rushing over to his friend. "I was afraid you were lost!"

  Jan struggled to his feet and leaned down to help the boy up.

  "Here's your patient, Pieter," he said. "Hope you have a spacesuit in his size."

  "I can find one. And we'll have to hurry for blastoff. But, first, what happened? Even that damned thing ought to get here from Rathole faster than that."

  "Had no fuel," replied Jan briefly. "My engines were all right, but I had no power to run them. So I had to pull the engines and rig up a power source."

  Heemskerk stared at t
he platform. On its railing was rigged a tripod of battered metal pipes, atop which a big four-blade propeller spun slowly in what wind was left after it came over the western mountain. Over the edges of the platform, running from the two propellers in its base, hung a series of tattered transmission belts.

  "Power source?" repeated Heemskerk. "That?"

  "Certainly," replied Jan with dignity. "The power source any good Dutchman turns to in an emergency: a windmill!"

  * * *

  Contents

  THE MACHINE STOPS

  by E.M. Forster

  THE AIR-SHIP

  Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk--that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh--a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

  An electric bell rang.

  The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

  "I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.

  "Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

  But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:

  "Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes--for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on 'Music during the Australian Period'."

  She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.

  "Be quick!" She called, her irritation returning. "Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time."

  But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.

  "Kuno, how slow you are."

  He smiled gravely.

  "I really believe you enjoy dawdling."

  "I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say."

  "What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?"

  "Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want--"

  "Well?"

  "I want you to come and see me."

  Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.

  "But I can see you!" she exclaimed. "What more do you want?"

  "I want to see you not through the Machine," said Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."

  "Oh, hush!" said his mother, vaguely shocked. "You mustn't say anything against the Machine."

  "Why not?"

  "One mustn't."

  "You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."

  She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

  "The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you."

  "I dislike air-ships."

  "Why?"

  "I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship."

  "I do not get them anywhere else."

  "What kind of ideas can the air give you?"

  He paused for an instant.

  "Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these stars, three other stars?"

  "No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give you an idea? How interesting; tell me."

  "I had an idea that they were like a man."

  "I do not understand."

  "The four big stars are the man's shoulders and his knees.

  The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the three stars hanging are like a sword."

  "A sword?;"

  "Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals and other men."

  "It does not strike me as a very good idea, but it is certainly original. When did it come to you first?"

  "In the air-ship---" He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people--an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race.

  "The truth is," he continued, "that I want to see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth."

  She was shocked again.

  "Mother, you must come, if only to explain to me what is the harm of visiting the surface of the earth."

  "No harm," she replied, controlling herself. "But no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air."

  "I know; of course I shall take all precautions."

  "And besides--"

  "Well?"

  She considered, and chose her words with care. Her son had a queer temper, and she wished to dissuade him from the expedition.

  "It is contrary to the spirit of the age," she asserted.

  "Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"

  "In a sense, but--"

  His image is the blue plate faded.

  "Kuno!"

  He had isolated himself.

  For a moment Vashti felt lonely.

  Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere--buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

  Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?--say this day month.

  To most of these questions she replied with irritation--a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had
no ideas of her own but had just been told one--that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.

  The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and prim¾val as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.

  The bed was not to her liking. It was too large, and she had a feeling for a small bed. Complaint was useless, for beds were of the same dimension all over the world, and to have had an alternative size would have involved vast alterations in the Machine. Vashti isolated herself--it was necessary, for neither day nor night existed under the ground--and reviewed all that had happened since she had summoned the bed last. Ideas? Scarcely any. Events--was Kuno's invitation an event?

  By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter--one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book, and it told her which button to press. The Central Committee published it. In accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound.

  Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if some one might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured "O Machine!" and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence. Her ritual performed, she turned to page 1367, which gave the times of the departure of the air-ships from the island in the southern hemisphere, under whose soil she lived, to the island in the northern hemisphere, whereunder lived her son.

 

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