Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Alice's eyes were wet, her small jaw set hard. "Your brother's death was at least an unintentional accident caused by carelessly made equipment, Bert," she said. "But Doc was murdered."

  "Yeah," Bert grated thickly. "Only murder is awful hard to prove as far from civilization as this. Come on, we can't do a thing about it right now."

  * * * * *

  Double rage and grief drove him on toward what he must do with greater insistence than before. With a key from his hip-pouch, he opened the airlock of the Prometheus. With great caution they went inside but found no one in the ship.

  The mood of its interior was brooding and sullen. Every cubic foot of space not taken up by its machinery and fuel was packed with black ingots of an alloy, a large proportion of which was fissionable metal, quiescent now, and harmless, but under the right kind of primer, capable of bursting into a specialized hell of energy. Five thousand tons of the stuff, Earth-weight!

  But even all this was the secondary part of the purpose for which the Prometheus had been fitted. Bert and Alice followed a narrow catwalk to a compartment along the keel of the ship which was fitted like a huge bomb-bay. And the monster that rested there, gripped by mechanically operated claws, would certainly have fitted the definition of a bomb as well as anything that had ever been made by Earth-science. Child, it was, of the now ancient H-bomb.

  It was a tapered cylinder, a hundred feet long and thirty feet thick. For one grim, devilish moment Bert Kraskow paused to pat its flank, to feel the solid metallic slap of its tremendous shellcase under his palm, to be aware of the intricacies of its hidden parts: The forklike masses of fissionable metals that could dovetail and join instantly; the heavy-water, the lead, the steel, the beryllium.

  Here was watchlike perfection and delicacy of mechanism--precision meant to function faultlessly for but a fragment of a second, and then to perish in a mighty and furious fulfillment. Here was the thought of man crystallized--trying to tread a hairline past inconceivable disaster, to the realization of a dream that was splendid.

  In that moment this thing seemed the answer to all the fury of wrong and sorrow that burned in Bert Kraskow. And the vision soared in his mind like a legend of green fields and light. For a few seconds he was sure, until doubt crept up again from the bottom of his brain, and until Alice put that uncertainty into words.

  "Doc is gone," she said. "Even with his expert help, using the Big Pill would be taking a chance. Bert, do you think we can do it alone? Will it be all right? Are you certain, Bert?"

  Her large, dark eyes pleaded for reassurance.

  He sighed as the strain plucked at his nerves, in spite of what he knew of Doc Kramer's careful small-scale tests. Maybe what he felt was just a normal suspicion of anything so new and so colossal.

  "No, Allie, not absolutely certain," he replied. "But how can anybody ever be sure of anything unless they try it? Doc died for an idea that holds tremendous hope for the good of all people who make their living in space. He was the principal inventor, and much more than just the boss of a new company. We aren't going to let him down. What we're going to do is for Nick, and for everybody who ever died violently on near-dead worlds. Lauren, and what he stands for, won't stop us. We can radio another warning and instruct everyone on Titan to blast off for a while."

  Alice seemed to draw confidence from her husband's words. She smiled a bit wanly. "Okay, Bert," she said. "This is also for the folks who have gone nuts, or have just gotten terribly homesick from seeing too much black sky of space for too long. Let's go!"

  They strapped themselves to the seats in the Prometheus' control room. Bert depressed the throttle. Rocket jets flamed. The rebuilt freighter lifted heavily and gained momentum toward a speed of miles per second. In the rear-vision screen the Kraskows saw two police spaceboats flashing the blue signal for them to land.

  Bert set the Prometheus in an orbit around Titan, about a thousand miles above the bleak and dried out surface of this Saturnian satellite. Thus the ship became a little moon of a moon.

  Alice was shouting into the mike of the large radio transmitter: "Colonists at Camp Titan! Enter your ship! Blast into space for safety! We are about to use the Big Pill! Colonists at Camp Titan! Blast for safety!... Police boats, give us room! Don't interfere!..."

  This was the start of wild drama. When Alice switched from transmission to reception, the calls from the patrol craft were stern: "Freighter Prometheus, this is the Space Patrol. Proceed to a landing or we blast."

  But these calls still seemed secondary, compared to other words also coming from the receiver, like another, overlapping radio program. It was Trenton Lauren's scared voice that spoke:

  "Space Colonists' Supply, Incorporated, calling deep-space units of patrol! Send more help to Titan! Maniac named Kraskow amuck with freighter Prometheus, known to contain huge bomb! Destroy on sight: Bomb supposed to be invention of group headed by one, Emil Kramer, renegade scientist believed to have a grudge against S. C. S. Claims for invention wholly extravagant and unbased. Hurry, deep-space units of Patrol. More help! Or all of Titan will be flooded with heat and deadly radioactivity! Hurry.... Hurry.... Hurry...."

  Just then the Prometheus rocked from the impact of a blaster-beam; and though the Kraskows could not see the effect of the weapon, they knew that there were glowing spots on their ship's tough hull. If the Patrol boats could bear down with their beams on a particular area for a few seconds, a mighty episode could end violently before it had a chance to start.

  Alice's small hands were on the complicated aiming and firing mechanism of the heavy blaster, mounted externally on the hull of the Prometheus.

  "I'll keep the cops at a distance with a few near-misses," she said. "Maybe they aren't too anxious to take the chance of setting off the Big Pill, anyway. Let me worry about them, Bert. Just do what you've got to do...."

  They had shut off their radio. There was no need to listen to the somewhat hysterical repetitions of what had come through before.

  Every few moments there was a burst of humming sound as Alice fired. Bert put additional power into the rockets to surpass fixed orbital speed; but he held the ship to a tight curve around Titan. It was best to cover distance as quickly as possible. In his speeding course, he passed almost over the camp. But his purpose was to bomb a point at antipodes from it, halfway around this Saturnian moon.

  * * * * *

  Under full acceleration, the Prometheus was soon nearing this destination. To allow for the Big Pill's forward motion, imparted to it by the ship's velocity even after release, he pressed the lever that opened the bomb-bay doors, and then jabbed the single button that controlled both release, and the firing of the gigantic missile's own propulsive jets. Without those jets, considering the centrifugal force of its vast velocity in a circular path around Titan, much overbalancing the feebler gravitational pull of the moon, it could not have started its fall at all. It needed jets to drive it down.

  Bert jabbed the button with his eyes closed since he had no precise target to hit. His teeth were gritted.

  With the sudden loss of mass, the ship lurched. Bert had to struggle for a moment to adjust the angle of its flaming stern-jets, and bring it back on course. In another few seconds he cut the stern-jets out entirely, and opened the fore-nozzles wide to check excess speed, and reestablish the Prometheus in a stable orbit around Titan. One that could last forever without additional thrust.

  "Well, the Big Pill is on its way--for better or worse," Alice remarked. "Half of our job is done."

  But time had to pass before that metal colossus could drive itself and fall the thousand miles to the bleak, dried-out hills below. And the space ship hurtled on, to leave the point of coming impact far beyond the horizon. This, the Kraskows knew, was fortunate for them. The solid bulk of Titan would be the shield between them and holocaust. No human eyes could have looked directly on such a holocaust, at a range of a mere thousand miles, and not be burned from their sockets.

  Bert and Alice noticed th
at the Space Patrol craft were no longer pursuing them. Alice switched on the radio again but only jangled sounds came through.

  "Now for the last half of our job, Allie," Bert said. "First we attach shoulder-pack jets to our spacesuits."

  This was accomplished a few seconds before the stupendous flash of the Big Pill's explosion blazed beyond the horizon. The dark curve of Titan's bulk was limned against thin white fire that streamed outward toward the stars like comet's hair. The spectacle looked like a much-enlarged color-photo of a segment of a solar eclipse. The glare on the other side of Titan was so intense and far-reaching that the night-portions of huge Saturn and his other satellites, and the shadowed part of the fabulous, treasure-filled Rings, all hundreds of thousands of miles away, registered an easily perceptible flicker. But in airless space, of course, no sound was transmitted.

  Alice's face went pale. Bert did not stop doing what must be done--adjusting the timing system in the black case beside his pilot seat, and looking with a final, intense glance along the cable which led back through the hull of the ship to a silvery, pipelike thing around which the thousands of tons of sinister black ingots were stacked. It was the primer-cap of another kind of subatomic fury.

  About the white fire beyond the horizon, hardly dimming at all after its first dazzling flash, neither Alice nor Bert said anything. Maybe their awe and concern were too great. But already long fingers of incandescent gases were jetting and flowing over the hilltops, as if to catch up with the speeding ship.

  Bert Kraskow knew pretty well what was going on where the Big Pill had struck the crust of Titan. First, there had been that stupendous blast. Then, inconceivable blue-white incandescence, like the heart of a star, began gnawing more gradually into the walls of the gigantic crater that had been formed. A chain-reacting process was now spreading through the silicates and other components of Titan's crust. It was a blunt and terrible inferno.

  But to the scientist's view, chemical compounds were being broken apart; atoms were being shattered, and recast in new forms, as floods of neutrons, and other basic particles raced like bullets through their structure. On a small scale, here was something that was like the birth of the universe.

  Bert found his voice at last. "The ship is firm in its orbit around Titan, Allie. The primer is set for thirty minutes from now. And we're approaching position above camp again. So here's where we bail out."

  The Kraskow's closed their helmet face-windows and jumped from the airlock together. Flame-propelled by their shoulder-pack jets, they darted downward toward the sad, rolling hills that curved away under the weak light of the distance-shrunken sun. It was hard to believe that eons ago, before most of Titan's air and water had leaked away into space, those hills had been green with life.

  Even with an ugly, red-lit vapor pouring and spreading over the arc of Titan's edge, they thought of such things.

  * * * * *

  Their helmet radiophones were full of static from intense electromagnetic disturbances, so that it was hard to converse.

  But presently Alice shouted: "Bert! It's funny that we don't see the ship from camp anywhere in space. They must have gotten our warning to blast off with everybody. Radio reception was clear as a bell, then!... Wait! Somebody's trying to call us now...."

  Bert strained his ears to penetrate the scratchy noises thrown up by the atomic holocaust that he had set off, and hear the words spoken blurredly by a familiar voice:

  "... Bert ... Alice.... This is Lawler.... Rockets of ship won't function.... So ... can't leave ... camp.... Two Space Patrol boats cleared Titan with some ... women.... Too small ... few passengers.... Most ... stranded here.... Bert--what?... I think ... Lauren...."

  The rest of the words were drowned in a cataract of static.

  Bert gulped. His mouth tasted suddenly sour with near-panic. "Lauren," he grated, his voice like a file. "Again. It would be a long chance that the ship broke down just by coincidence. He doctored those rockets and probably got clear in his own spaceboat. Leave it to him to make the use of the Big Pill look like disaster. And it can be that, now, with people left in the danger zone, losing their heads, acting foolishly."

  Bert felt much more than just bitter, furious chagrin. His fellow colonists might lose their lives. He was responsible. He had launched a gigantic experiment recklessly.

  "All we can do is get back to camp as fast as possible," Alice shouted above the static. "Come on, Bert! Bear down on the jets!"

  So they hurtled at even greater speed toward the surface of Titan below. Meanwhile, faintly luminous vapors continued to pour over the hills from the direction of the terrible glow that fringed the horizon. Minutes before they reached the ground, hot, dusty murk thickened around them. It blew against them like a devil's wind.

  They began to use their jets to brake speed. The camp was all but lost to view in the thickening haze. They landed heavily a mile outside it and went rolling for a few yards after the impact. Dazed, they staggered up.

  For a while their impressions were blurred, as if they struggled through some murky, cobwebby nightmare. Once more on Titan, silent as death for unthinkable ages, there were howling wind-sounds that found their way to Alice and Bert dimly through their oxygen helmets. Often the hot blast bowled them over, but they arose and kept on toward camp.

  Bert took a Geiger counter, pencil-size from his chest-pouch. In it, flashes of light replaced the ancient clicking. It flickered madly. This meant that outside their shielding spacesuits was radioactive death. The gases of the wind that howled around them, had been in part released from chemical compounds, but more had been transmuted from other elements of the rock and dust in the crust of Titan, in that atomic vortex where the Big Pill had struck. Those gases were so new that they were tainted with the fires of their birth--saturated with radioactivity.

  "It's nothing that we didn't expect, Allie," Bert grated into his helmet-phone, as if to reassure himself as well as his wife. "We knew beforehand."

  His arm was around Alice, supporting her unsteady steps. Through blowing clouds of dust and gas that had surpassed hurricane force, they reached camp. Through the murk they saw that the wind had flattened and scorched every airdome. But there was no one in sight.

  "The people must be inside the ship!" Alice shouted. "Even if it can't fly, it can protect them! There it is, undamaged!..."

  "Yeah," Bert agreed, but he knew that her cheerfulness was a little like grabbing at a straw.

  Then Alice had another thought, "By now there isn't anymore Space Ship Prometheus," she said. "It has melted to a globe of incandescent metal, kept hot by a slow atomic breakdown in its substance. But it's sticking to the same tight orbit around Titan."

  They hadn't seen it happen because by then the Prometheus had passed beyond the horizon. But the globe would circle Titan and return.

  Alice kept trying to be cheerful. Bert felt a flicker of that same mood when he said, "Sure, Allie." But then his mind dropped the subject of the Prometheus. For there was too much terrible uncertainty and human confusion to be dealt with.

  Bert led Alice to the small, seldom-used airlock near the stern of the camp ship. He had a logical hunch that Lawler would be waiting just inside to tell them what the situation was on board.

  The hunch proved true. The lock's inner door slid aside stiffly and there was Lawler, a finger to his lips.

  Quickly the Kraskows removed their radioactivity-tainted spacesuits. Bert spoke softly.

  "Well, Lawler, how do the gases that are spreading over Titan test out chemically?"

  "As was expected, Bert. Plenty of nitrogen. Some helium. Plenty of hydrogen. A lot more oxygen. So that, as all of the hydrogen burns--combines with it to form water-vapor--there still will be lots of oxygen left over, floating free. Of course these gases are still so radioactive that half a lungful would kill. Only time will tell if Doc figured things straight. By the way, where is he?"

  "Dead," Bert answered. "Murdered."

  Lawler's lip curled, but h
e showed no surprise. "Uhunh," he grunted. "We can't prove the sabotage of this ship's rockets, either. When we tried to take off they just fizzled out their insides."

  Then Lawler's eyes gleamed. "But," he said, "I foresaw funny business, so I doctored the jets of Lauren's private spaceboat as a precaution. He's still here with a couple of his stooges. He just about had hysterics when the space cops couldn't find room for him. He's been yelling accusations and promises of court action ever since while trying to repair his spaceboat."

  "How are the colonists taking what happened?" Bert cut in.

  Lawler shrugged. "Not bad. Not good. What you'd expect. Lots of those people are new to space. That was hard to take in itself. Add some messy deaths, and now this. And with Lauren yelling--well--plenty of them don't like us."

  "Did anybody get hurt, yet?" Bert demanded.

  "Not yet. Want to see the bunch?"

  "Sure," Bert answered.

  * * * * *

  He thrust Alice behind him as they approached the main lounge of the ship where most of the colonists were assembled.

  Trenton Lauren's voice burst on his ears. "There he is! Kraskow, I'll see that you spend your life in prison! A Patrol ship is coming out from Mars right now to get you! You may even hang! Out there in camp are ten million dollars' worth of equipment--property of my firm--which has been destroyed by your malicious action. And you've made a whole world useless for colonization for centuries to come! It's poisoned with radioactivity! Maybe we'll all die! Do you hear me, Kraskow? Die!"

  Bert Kraskow moved quietly forward, past faces that glowered at him. Then he struck. There was a vicious thud. Lauren went down, drooling blood, his eyes glazed. Bert did not lose a motion as he stepped forward, and laid Lauren's two henchmen low with equal dispatch.