Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Minutes passed before the trio was awake again. Before Lauren could spout more venom, Bert stopped him with a growl. "Get out of my sight," he said. "Say another word and you'll get more of what you just got."

  They went, Lawler following to watch out for possible mischief.

  "None of us are hurt, yet," Bert told those near him, "though some things have gone wrong. Let's sit tight and see how matters turn out."

  As he looked around him Bert felt that most of the colonists didn't really care to listen to him. Maybe you couldn't blame them. They'd all heard and seen too much. And, in a sense, Bert felt little different than they did. There was fear in him, and tension. He had released a colossus. Calculations and minor tests might call it a genie of benevolence. But this remained still unproven.

  Outside, the wind howled, making the ship quiver. The glow from the Big Pill continued to paint the now murky sky. Bert and his wife waited grimly and silently in the lounge with the others. Hours passed without much change. Once, briefly, it was red-lit night. Then this changed for a while to daylight that was blurred, but far stronger than that to which a Saturnine moon was accustomed.

  A little later Lawler came back to the lounge. "Trenton and his bums got their spaceboat patched up," he announced. "I watched 'em do it. They went out protected by spacesuits, of course. They did a botch job, but I guess it'll hold. Now they're taking off."

  Through the leaded glass of the window-ports, the colonists watched the craft vanish into the steam-filled wind.

  A minute later disaster struck the colonists.

  The explosion was not heavy against the roar of the storm, but a jagged hole, a yard across, was ripped in the ship's hull. Into the hole rushed the hot, radioactive wind. Automatic safety doors failed to close properly. Maybe they had been sabotaged, too, by Lauren.

  Many of the colonists were wearing spacesuits. They were the lucky ones, only having to slam their face-windows shut to be protected sufficiently from radiation. The others had to scramble to armor themselves. Bert and Alice Kraskow, and Lawler, had been outside. The outer surfaces of their suits had been contaminated, so they had had to remove them inside the ship to avoid tainting their surroundings. And in the press of events they hadn't thought to put on other spacesuits.

  In the lounge and elsewhere, fastened against the walls, were such armor for emergency use. Bert tried to help his wife get into one. But she ordered sharply: "I can do this! Take care of yourself, Bert."

  He didn't do that. Nor did Lawler. They ran down a passage toward the rent in the ship, intent on stopping the gases that were flooding the craft's interior. Seconds were important. The radioactive wind, much cooled during the long journey from its point of origin, but poisoned by invisible emanations, struck their unprotected bodies. Yet they kept on. They dared not breathe or speak; still they worked together with an efficiency of terrible need, stepping over the forms of men who had already fallen.

  Bert found a flat sheet of metal to use as a patch. He fitted it over the rent, and, while Lawler piled boxes of supplies against it to hold it in place, sealed the edges with a thick, tarry substance.

  When the job was done they staggered back to the lounge. Blotches of color danced before their vision. Many corpuscles in their blood had already been destroyed by radiation. They sank to the deck.

  * * * * *

  Bert had a jangled impression of Alice, now in a spacesuit, holding his head. He saw her lips mouthing endearments.... Game little Allie.... His mind wandered off. He was going to die. Maybe everyone on the ship was going to die. Lauren's last move had been meant to provide a real disaster, with many deaths! Prove the Big Pill a failure. Make sure that it would be banned for good by the Safe Products Approval Board. Put the stamp of crime on Doc Kramer, the gentle little scientist who had been murdered! And on him, Bert Kraskow. And where was the rat, Lauren? On his way to the colonized moons of Jupiter, or even Mars, yelling and accusing by radio all along the line?

  As consciousness faded further, Bert stopped thinking unpleasant things. His mind drifted into Doc Kramer's dream--of the changes which would make the near-dead worlds of space really habitable and homelike, fit for human colonists. It was a beautiful, lost vision.

  He was out cold, then, for several Earth-days, and only dimly aware for many days afterward. He knew that he was in the ship's sick-bay, and that Lawler and other men were there, too. He heard their voices, and his own, without remembering what was said. Alice often came to see him. Often he heard roaring, watery sounds, as of vast rains.

  Gradually he came out of the dream-like period, learning of what had happened. Until the time when he walked from the sick-bay, unsteadily, but on the mend.

  Alice, at his elbow, spoke: "It was like Doc Kramer planned, Bert, solving the hardest problem."

  He knew what this meant. Transmutation, or any atomic process, must involve the generation of much radioactivity that can destroy life. In the Big Pill, the problem was to make all the atoms break, and rearrange their components into new elements as cleanly and sharply as possible, so that residual atomic instability--radioactivity, that is--would not linger for years, but would disappear quickly.

  "Titan's new atmosphere is clean and breathable, now, Bert," Alice went on. "And likewise the radioactive poisons that made you and Lawler and the others very ill disappeared quickly from your bodies. However, two colonists were beyond saving."

  Lawler was with the Kraskows. They went out of the ship without the cumbersome protection of spacesuits. A Space Patrolman hovered like a worried hawk, watching Bert, but the latter seemed not to mind.

  Far above, replacing the hard stars and blackness of space, common to the firmaments of all dead and near-dead worlds, were great fleecy clouds and blue sky. The atmosphere, because of Titan's low gravity, was highly expanded and hence thin, but rich in oxygen. The breeze smelled cool and fresh. Overhead was a second sun, seemingly much larger in diameter than the distant central orb of the solar system. It crept with visible motion across the sky. It was the molten globe of what had been the Prometheus and its cargo, locked in its sub-lunar orbit around Titan. But it was calculated to provide sufficient warmth and light to a small world such as this, for ten Earth-years, without renewal.

  Colonists were clearing away the wreckage of the now useless airdomes, and putting their cottages in order. But they still looked around in awe at the miracles that ended their space-nostalgia, making them feel truly at home here. Down in the valley there was even a great lake of rainwater from condensed steam--one of the end-products of the process that had gone on in the rocks of the great crater on the other side of Titan. That process had died to a sleepy smoking, now; but all over this moon of Saturn there were many lakes.

  Big Lawler chuckled gleefully, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. "Rejuvenation of burnt-out spheres on a really progressive basis," he growled. "No obsolete, jury-rigged junk! Expensive? Sure! But we can pay for it! Out there are Saturn's metal-rich Rings!"

  Bert was thinking that the same trick could be used on any world with enough gravity to hold down a respectable atmosphere. Half-dead Mars. Jupiter's four biggest moons. Some of the other satellites of Saturn. Mercury.

  "The one thing that burns me is that my brother, Nick, and Doc Kramer, and those two colonists, had to die!" Bert grated. "Poor Doc. He was rich from the atomic engines he invented. And I knew long ago that, by his will, all his stock is to be put in trust for the welfare of spacemen and colonists. Should we feel glad or humble?"

  Lawler's grin had become a snarl. "Damn Trenton Lauren!" he said.

  Alice didn't exactly smile. "I should have told you before this," she offered seriously, "but death always upsets me. By radio report from a scouting Patrol boat an hour ago, Lauren and his stooges were found, smashed and burned in the crash of their craft a hundred miles from camp. Their half-repaired spaceboat killed them."

  Bert and Lawler exchanged glances. Their anger faded.

  "What's new from the Safe Produc
ts Approval Board, Allie?" Lawler asked at last. "You seem to find things out fast."

  "Nothing new," she answered. "The latest messages are much the same as those from a while ago. Guarded enthusiasm, and the statement that an okay for the Kramer Methods must be withheld pending complete and prompt investigation. Can't blame them. Caution is important."

  "Maybe, if you played your cards right, you could become the new president of the Prometheus outfit, Bert," Lawler kidded.

  But the possibility was certainly there. Bert was proud of what he'd done. Prometheus owed him plenty. Still, looking across camp past cottages and shops to the red mud of the once-dry, frigid hills, and down to the blue lake in the valley, reflecting sky and clouds, he knew that his heart was here in this crescendoing colonial scene. Somewhere a circle-saw screamed. From the metals-shop came the clanging of a mechanical hammer. These were sounds of a great future here.

  "Nuts, pal," Bert chuckled to Lawler. "I'll leave the official pencil-pushing to the lab experts. The building and progress are here. You and Allie and I will all be back on Titan very soon."

  These three began to be aware that a crowd of still befuddled but happy colonists were gathering around them. Another Space Patrol man approached, and said very officially:

  "Mr. and Mrs. Kraskow, and Mr. Lawler: Our large ship leaves for Earth in five hours. Be ready to blast off. As you are aware, certain still valid charges were lodged against you by Trenton Lauren. You used dangerous equipment, not yet legally approved. As you are also aware, you must go to answer these charges. Sorry. But we of the Patrol know the score. In the face of your success I'm sure that this is mere red tape."

  Bert scowled until he saw the cop's sly grin.

  "Worried?" Alice asked him, smiling. She was pretty. She had courage. She had everything.

  "Worried?" Bert echoed. In general he approved the S.P.A.B. "How can we lose on this last gamble with all the cards stacked in our favor. We even win a needed short vacation on Earth!"

  "What are you two gonna bring back for me?" an old man, grimed from the forges, demanded, grinning. It was old Stan Kraskow, who had buried his younger son in the camp cemetery.

  "Hiyuh, Dad!" Bert greeted happily. "What'll we bring him, Allie?"

  "Wildbirds, Pop," Alice answered, her eyes twinkling. "You always liked wildbirds. No world is complete without them."

  Bert noticed that the gardens of the camp, planted weeks ago under airdomes that were now being cleared away, were now showing a faint green. The beginning of a new and verdant Titan.

  * * *

  Contents

  COMET'S BURIAL

  By Raymond Z. Gallun

  OUTSIDE Tycho Station on the Moon, Jess Brinker showed Arne Copeland the odd footprints made in the dust by explorers from Mars, fifty million years ago. A man-made cover of clear plastic now kept them from being trampled.

  "Who hasn't heard about such prints?" Copeland growled laconically. "There's no air or weather here to rub them out—even in eternity. Thanks for showing a fresh-arrived greenhorn around..."

  Copeland was nineteen, tough, willing to learn, but wary. His wide mouth was usually sullen, his grey eyes a little narrowed in a face that didn't have to be so grim. Back in Iowa he had a girl. Frances. But love had to wait, for he needed the Moon the way Peary had once needed the North Pole.

  Earth needed it, too—for minerals; as an easier, jump-off point to the planets because of its weak gravity; as a place for astronomical observatories, unhampered by the murk of an atmosphere; as sites for labs experimenting in forces too dangerous to be conducted on a heavily-populated world, and for a dozen other purposes.

  Young Copeland was ready for blood, sweat, and tears in his impulse to help conquer the lunar wastes. He sized up big, swaggering Jess Brinker, and admitted to himself that this man, who was at least ten years his senior, could easily be a phony, stalking suckers. Yet, Copeland reserved judgment. Like any tenderfoot anywhere, he needed an experienced man to show him the ropes.

  He already knew the Moon intimately from books: A hell of silence, some of it beautiful: Huge ringwalls. Blazing sunlight, inky shadow. Grey plains, black sky. Blazing stars, with the great blurry bluish globe of Earth among them. You could yearn to be on the Moon, but you could go bats and die there, too—or turn sour, because the place was too rough for your guts.

  Afield, you wore a spacesuit, and conversed by helmet radiophone. Otherwise you lived in rooms and holes dug underground, and sealed up. The scant water you dared use was roasted out of gypsum rock. The oxygen you breathed was extracted from lunar oxides by a chemical process. Then air-rejuvenator apparatus reseparated it from the carbon-dioxide you exhaled, so that you could use it over and over.

  Copeland had read the tales: With that kind of frugality as the price of survival, lunar prospectors could turn selfish to the point of queerness. Afraid somebody might follow them to their mineral claims, they'd take more pains to leave as little spoor as possible than a fox being tracked by dogs.

  "Speaking of how footprints last around here," Copeland remarked for the sake of conversation, "I understand you've got to be careful—stick to high ridges, and to parts of the flat maria where there's no old volcanic ash or dust of thermal erosion."

  "Guys who do that are misers and old women, kid," Brinker scoffed. "Hell—it sure ain't because they're modest that they're so cautious! Me—I do things right."

  He lifted a foot from the dust beside the path, revealing the mark of the specially etched steel sole of his spaceboot. A name was stamped across the print: BRINKER.

  "I'm proud of where I've been and where I'm going—like a true explorer," the big man said. "Get some soles like mine made for yourself, fella, and come along with me."

  Copeland was intrigued. "Let me think about it a little."

  DURING the next few hours he heard quite a lot.

  A big, blonde nurse—one of the two women in the sealed warrens of Tycho Station, said: "Young man, I love Jess Brinker. But keep away from him, or you'll wind up in the prison pits, or worse."

  And Copeland heard about Tom Brinker, Jess' dad—the kind of swindler always found in rough new territory, anywhere. He had promoted the idea of a real city on Lunar. Yeah—one with trees and flowers. What sentimental bait that was for home-starved, desolation-sick wanderers! No wonder somebody had murdered him recently.

  By common opinion, twenty-odd years was the only difference between Jess and his father. "Stay clear," was the warning; the name of Brinker was mud and poison.

  Arne Copeland was a cagey youngster; nobody influenced him when he made up his mind. He was no cow-eyed hero-worshipper; yet, on his own, he kind of liked the large, battered, egotist. Copeland knew that he was an egotist himself. He also knew that merely to be on the sketchily-explored Moon was to take chances.

  So he said "Okay," to Brinker, and got some metal boot-soles made, with his name etched into them in reverse, as in a rubber stamp.

  Under packs that no coolie could ever have lifted against Earth gravity, they left Tycho Station and moved toward the fringe of that lunar hemisphere which is never seen from Terra—though it is no different from the visible half in general character.

  Wherever their feet found a medium that would take an impression, they left their trademark behind them. Copeland could brush a name out with a glove; otherwise those names were about as permanent as if carved from granite, for there was no wind to blow the dust, and no rain to wash it away. Passing tractor-caravans would never blot out all of the footprints. Not in ages of time.

  "At least we got us a monument, Jess," Copeland said once, feeling somewhat thrilled. "That's what guys out exploring and prospecting need. A legend. A reputation."

  Jess Brinker's eyes narrowed, making him look sinister. "Yeah, Cope," he drawled. "But in my case it's a counter-reputation, with a little of Robin Hood thrown in, to help blow the stink of my Old Man off me. I want some friends and backing, so I can do what Dad really wanted to do—though he was as muc
h of a rogue as a saint. You listening, Cope?"

  Copeland kept his face stony. "Tell me what you want to, and then stop," he said softly.

  "Thanks," Brinker answered. "It doesn't matter too much that I can guess who killed Pop, and would like to square things. Yeah, a hatchet-faced ex-partner who turned pious and legal on the outside, after he got the breaks. How old is that story, I wonder? ... It doesn't even rile me terribly, knowing that Dad wasn't all crook, knowing he believed his idea was good for everybody, and was trying to get funds to put it across."

  Brinker sighed and went on: "The idea is the important thing, Cope. A place with trees and flowers, a city, maybe—an antidote for the Moon's desolation. Anyone here feels the need in his bones and nerves. But it would take more air and water than could ever be imported, or drawn from the lunar crust. You wouldn't know it on the dead surface, but two hundred miles deep in the Moon there's still molten lava, plentiful water in the form of steam, volcanic carbon-dioxide gas—the makings of oxygen. There's nitrogen, too.

  "How to reach that stuff is the question. Drills break under the pressure of depth at a tenth of the distance. Pop's idea involved Brulow's Comet, which will be coming back sunward from far space in three years. Imagine—a comet! It could be dangerous, too; nobody could ever get permission for an attempt."

  Brinker paused again. Copeland and he were plodding through a jagged valley. The stars were merciless pinpoints, the silence brittle and grating.

  "But there must be a way of blasting down to those life-giving raw-materials, Cope," Brinker continued. "Maybe with atomic explosive. Experiments call for funds and backing. So I save my money, and wish I had a head for making it faster. And I look for weak spots in the lunar crust with radar. And I try to get people to know I'm around, and to like me..."

  Copeland realized that what he had just heard could be a line of malarky meant to kid a yokel, or a bid to get him involved in something. But he found himself kind of falling for the yarn. More than ever he suspected that folks were wrong about Jess Brinker; his warning instincts were being lulled to sleep.