Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward--death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being stranded alone on another world!

  His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leading upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this nameless lair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He bounded out of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp.

  * * * * *

  He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slanting passage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and the occasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. But he emerged at last at the surface.

  He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow, crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground glistened with dry salt.

  "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone.

  Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he might as well be an exile on another planet--so changed had the Earth become.

  A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed the distances of time that had passed--those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes. He sensed death in that cold sea-bottom, but what of it? What reason did he have left to live? He'd be only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged and studied....

  Prison or a madhouse would be far better. He tried to get hold of his courage. But what was there to inspire it? Nothing! He laughed harshly as he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him in its clutch, and there was no answer in his hell-world, lost beyond the barrier of the years....

  * * * * *

  Loy Chuk and his followers presently came upon Ned Vince's unconscious form, a mile from the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying machine they took him back, and applied stimulants. He came to, in the same laboratory room as before. But he was firmly strapped to a low platform this time, so that he could not escape again. There he lay, helpless, until presently an idea occurred to him. It gave him a few crumbs of hope.

  "Hey, somebody!" he called.

  "You'd better get some rest, Ned Vince," came the answer from the black box. It was Loy Chuk speaking again.

  "But listen!" Ned protested. "You know a lot more than we did in the Twentieth Century. And--well--there's that thing called time-travel, that I used to read about. Maybe you know how to make it work! Maybe you could send me back to my own time after all!"

  Little Loy Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness had come.

  Loy Chuk was a scientist. In common with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which they spring, he loved the subjects of his researches. He wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy. Or this creature would be of scant value for study.

  So Loy considered carefully what Ned Vince had suggested. Time-travel. Almost a legend. An assault upon an intangible wall that had baffled far keener wits than Loy's. But he was bent, now, on the well-being of this anachronism he had so miraculously resurrected--this human, this Kaalleee....

  Loy jabbed buttons on the black box. "Yes, Ned Vince," said the sonic apparatus. "Time-travel. Perhaps that is the only thing to do--to send you back to your own period of history. For I see that you will never be yourself, here. It will be hard to accomplish, but we'll try. Now I shall put you under an anesthetic...."

  Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now, where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back in his home-town of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop, there. And the trees greening out in Spring. Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley, soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny hypo-needle bit into his arm....

  As soon as Ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk went to work once more, using that pair of brain-helmets again, exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research, he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of Kar-Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a prime member. It would be easy to get the help he needed.

  A horde of small, grey-furred beings and their machines, toiled for many days.

  * * * * *

  Ned Vince's mind swam gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He was wandering aimlessly about in a familiar room. The girders of the roof above were of red-painted steel. His tool-benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just as they had always been. He had a tractor to repair, and a seed-drill. Outside of the machine-shop, the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street was the small brown house, where he lived.

  With a sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous smile curved her lips. As though she had succeeded in creeping up on him, for a surprise.

  "Why, Ned," she chuckled. "You look as though you've been dreaming, and just woke up!"

  He grimaced ruefully as she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude, he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just like always.

  "I guess I was dreaming, Betty," he whispered, feeling that mighty sense of relief. "I must have fallen asleep at the bench, here, and had a nightmare. I thought I had an accident at Pit Bend--and that a lot of worse things happened.... But it wasn't true ..."

  Ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent facts simply.

  He did not know anything about the invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his brain, so that it would never question or doubt, or observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear. The lack of traffic in the street without, for instance--and the lack of people besides himself and Betty.

  He didn't know that this machine-shop was built from his own memories of the original. He didn't know that this Betty was of the same origin--a miraculous fabrication of metal and energy-units and soft plastic. The trees outside were only lantern-slide illusions.

  It was all built inside a great, opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems, too. Thus Loy Chuk's kind could study this ancient man--this Kaalleee. Thus, their motives were mostly selfish.

  Loy, though, was not observing, now. He had wandered far out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to ponder. He squeaked and chatted to himself, contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the ages. He remembered the ancient ruins, left by the final supermen.

  "The Kaalleee believes himself home," Loy was thinking. "He will survive and be happy. But there was no other way. Time is an Eternal Wall. Our archeological researches among the cities of the supermen show the truth. Even they, who once ruled Earth, never escaped from the present by so much as an instant...."

  * * *

  Contents

  SPILLTHROUGH

  By Daniel F. Galouye

  Ships switching from hyper to normal space had to do it in a micro-second--if the crews were to live. But it would take Brad suicidal minutes!

  Like the sibilant, labored breathing of a dying monster, the tortured ship wailed its de
ath sobs as it floundered in deep hyperstellar space.

  Clank-sss, clank-sss, went the battered safety valve of the pile cooling system.

  BOOM ... boom ... BOOM ... boom. A severed and dangling piston rod crashed in monotonous rhythm against a deck beam as the rest of the auxiliary compression unit strained to satisfy its function.

  An off-beat bass viol strum added its depressive note to the symphony of destruction's aftermath--throom-throom ... throom-throom. It was the persistent expansion of plate metal reacting to heat from a ruptured tube jacket.

  Forward, in the control compartment of the cargo craft, the sounds were muted. But the intervening bulkheads did not lessen their portent.

  Brad Conally ran a hand over the stubbles on his cheek and swayed forward in the bucket-type seat, his head falling to rest against the control column.

  Somewhere aft the ship groaned and metal scraped against metal with a sickening rending sound.

  There was a lurch and Brad was jerked to one side, his head ramming against the inclination control. The ventral jet came to life in unexpected protest and fired once.

  His hand shot out instinctively to return the loose, displaced lever to neutral. But the force of the single burst had already taken effect and the lower part of his stomach tied itself in a knot.

  Centrifugal force reeled him to the fringe of consciousness. He struggled to reach the dorsal-ventral firing lever, praying that the linkage was not severed and the mechanism was still operative. His hand found the lever and jerked. The dorsal jet came to life with a roar. He jockeyed the control back and forth across neutral position. The two jets fired alternately. The sickening, end-over-end gyration became gentler.

  The ship steadied itself again into immobility. But a snap sounded from back aft. It was followed by a grating noise that crescendoed and culminated in a terrific crash. His ears popped. A clang reverberated, evidence of an automatic airlock sealing off another punctured section of the vessel.

  Shrugging fatigue from his body, he looked up at the panel. The massometer showed a decrease of six tons. The explanation was simple, Brad laughed dryly: A good one-quarter of his load of crated inter-calc audio retention banks had rammed through the hull and floated into space.

  He glanced at the scope. The twenty odd crates, some of them taking up an orbital relationship with the vessel, were blips on the screen.

  Twisting the massometer section selector, he read off the figures. Hold One showed full cargo of inter-calc equipment. Hold Two, with its thirty bins of hematite, was intact. The third cargo compartment, containing more crated inter-calc units, was the damaged one. The massometer reading for that hold accounted for the missing weight.

  * * * * *

  "How're you doing, Brad?" the receiver rasped feebly. He recoiled at the unexpected sound.

  "She's still in one piece, Jim," he shouted to compensate for the strength the signal would lose in traveling the distance to the fleeing lifecraft. "Have you cleared through your second hyperjump yet?"

  "Getting ready to go into the third. There won't be any more communicating after that ... not with this short-range gear and your faulty transmitter. Find out the trouble yet?"

  Brad ignored the question. "How long, Jim?" His voice was eager. "How long before you get to port?"

  "Three jumps in one day. Seven more to go. That figures out to a little over two more days. I'm making better time than we expected with this peanut. Allow two more days for the slow tows to return.... Still think it'll hold together?"

  Brad was silent.

  "Brad," Jim's voice went into low gear. "I've still got enough juice to come back and pick you up. After all, one ship and one load of cargo ... it's just not worth it."

  Brad listened to the ominous convulsions of the ship for a moment. "Your orders are to continue to Vega IV. I'm sticking."

  "But, skipper! Dammit! There's always the chance of spilling through into normal! That's a torturous way to go!"

  Brad's lips brushed roughly against the bulkhead mike. "If I fall through it's just me, isn't it?"

  Although the sound level was too low, he knew there was a sigh on the other end. "Okay," the speaker whispered. "If I can't convince you...."

  Brad leaned against the bulkhead and shivered. He'd have to see whether he couldn't get more output from the heat converter--if he could chance going past the leaking pile again. Or was it the cold that was causing him to tremble?--If he entered normal space at less than minimum breakthrough speed.... He didn't complete the distasteful mental picture.

  He thought of his only functioning hyperdrive tube. Its gauge showed a power level that was only high enough to boost the craft back onto the hyperspace level when it started to conform with the normal tendency to fall through. How many times the tube could be counted on to repeat the performance he couldn't guess. It might be painful if he should let the drop gain too much momentum before correcting--human beings were built to cross the barrier in nothing longer than a micro-second. But, he resolved, he would worry about that when the time came.

  "Why don't you let it go, Brad?" the voice leaped through the grating again.

  Brad started. He thought Jim had cut the communication.

  "You know the score. If we swing this we can get all of West Cluster Supplies' work. We'll need an extra ship--several of them. But with the contract we'll be able to borrow as much as we want."

  Jim laughed. "At least I'm glad there's a rational, mercenary motive. For a while I thought you were going through with that go-down-with-the-ship routine."

  Boom ... Boom ... BOOM. The loose rod pounded with suddenly increasing fury.

  He lunged through the hatch. At least the compression unit was forward of the faulty pile. And, while he did the job which automatic regulators had abandoned, he would not have to keep track of his time of exposure to hard radiation.

  * * * * *

  "Calling Space Ship Fleury. Repeat: Calling Space Ship Fleury.... Answer please."

  Brad jerked his head off the panel ledge. Hot coffee from a container that his limp hand half-gripped sloshed over the brim and spilled on the deck. He turned a haggard, puzzled face to the bulkhead speaker.

  It had flooded the compartment with sound--live, vibrant sound. The signal had been loud and clear. Not weak. Not like the one from Jim's lifecraft two jumps away.

  "This is the SS Fleury!" he shouted, stumbling forward eagerly and gripping the gooseneck of the mike. "Come in!"

  "Fleury from SS Cluster Queen.... Answering your SOS."

  His hopes suddenly vanished. "Is that Altman? What are you doing on this run?"

  "Yeah, Conally. This is Altman. Freeholding to Vega.... What's your trouble? Anything serious?"

  Altman had come in to unload at Arcturus II Spaceport while the Fleury was still docked, Brad recalled. The huge ship had been berthed next to his.

  "Main drive jacket blown out in the engine compartment," Brad said hoarsely. "It happened at the end of the eighth jump. We're about a half-notch into hyper--just barely off the border."

  "That's tough." There was little consolation in the tone. "Got any passengers?"

  "No. None this trip. I'm solo now. My engineer's gone off in the craft."

  "Can't you replace that jacket and limp through?"

  "Got a faulty gasket on the replacement. Can't be patched up."

  "You're in a helluva fix, Conally. Even a Lunar ferry pilot's got enough sense to check his spare parts before blastoff."

  "I check mine after each landing. There isn't much that can happen to it when the pile's cold.... Can you give me a tow, Altman?"

  "Can't do that, Conally. I'm not...."

  "If you'll just give me a boost then. To the crest of this hyperjump. Then I won't have to worry about slipping through."

  "Like I started to tell you," Altman intoned insistently, "one of my grapples is sheared."

  "You still have two more."

  "Uh-uh. This wise boy ain't gonna take a chance of a line snapping and k
nocking a hunk outta my hull. Especially when you got cargo spilling all over space."

  Brad clenched his fists. He spoke through his teeth. "Look, Altman. Regulations say...."

  "... I gotta help you," the other cut him short. "I know that, pal. That's why I happen to be stopping off at this not too enticing spot. And I'm offering help.... Come aboard any time you want."

  "And hang up a free salvage sign on the Fleury?"

  Altman didn't answer.

  Twisting the gooseneck in his hand, Brad sucked in a deep breath and blew it out in a rush. But he didn't say what had leaped into his mind. Instead he glanced over at the panel's screen.

  Altman's ship showed up there--a large, greenish-yellow blip. There were other small dots on the scope too. As he looked, the large blip coasted over to one of the dots. The two became one mark on the screen.

  "You're picking up my cargo!" Brad shouted.

  "The stuff not in orbit around the Fleury ain't yours any longer, Conally," Altman laughed. "You oughta bone up on your salvage laws."

  "You damned scavenger!"

  "Now, now, Brad," the other said smoothly. "What would you do if you were in my position? Would you let top priority cargo slip through to normal and get lost off the hyperlane? Or would you scoop it up and bring it in for bonus price?"

  "You're not after a bonus," Brad roared into the mike. "You're after a contract.... Altman, I'll pay two thousand for a ten-minute tow up-arc. That'll almost wipe out my profit on this haul."

  "No sale."

  Brad gripped the mike with both hands. "So you're just going to sit around and pick up cargo droppings!"