Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "I'm a Normal after all!" I gasped, feeling a surge of blessed relief.

  He swiped at the air with a hand. "Don't be silly!" he snapped. "You've got a psi power so incredible that--" He whirled on me while I died for good.

  "You explain it," he insisted. "After your lovely Dr. King flew out of here, I shuffled the cards ten times under the desk, and you hit ten in a row, right?"

  "Right." Dismally.

  "I cheated on the shuffle," he told me. "I used TK to make sure that I put the two of spades on top all ten times."

  "No," I insisted. "Six times the heart was on top. You turned them over yourself."

  "That's just it," he whispered, leaning toward me. "I put that spade on top every time! I did! But when I turned it over, more than half the time it was a heart. What did you do?"

  "You mean I'm a hallucinator?" I asked. "Look, this is getting ridiculous! I was kidding myself, too?"

  "Nonsense. It was real." His face jerked in surprise. "You couldn't!" he gasped, as the idea hit him. "But you did!" he reminded himself. "Wait till Maragon hears this!"

  And then he told me. It couldn't be, I knew. But it was. He proved it to me--or I proved it to us.

  At some stage you have to get excited about it, if it's no more than a grisly fascination. At that, it was dawn before we could stop our intoxicated talk. Maragon had been yanked out of bed again, and when he heard the news, woke up a darned sight faster than the night before. Pheola of the race-horse legs joined us, and several other psis as well. Before it was over the Grand Master had put on a ridiculous piece of regalia and mumbled me into probationary membership in the Lodge. There was nothing creepy about the ritual--only about the way I felt.

  I guess, if we hadn't gotten hungry, we'd be there yet. Wally had one last little wrinkle for me as I started down the corridor for the elevator.

  "Pheola," he called.

  "Yes, darlin' Billy," she said, coming to his side.

  "How's Tex going to make out with that overeducated iceberg he's hot after?" he asked her. I flinched at the thought of Shari--I was getting used to considering her a memory.

  Pheola looked into the corner for a moment. "Oh, yum!" she said, smiling and showing the braces on her teeth. She kissed me. I think I was about as startled as Wally was. "Just so you let her be the only Cassandra," she said. "And you call that an iceberg?" She looked at me curiously. "You'd better start eating red meat, Tex," she told me, and would say no more.

  * * * * *

  I had a heck of a time getting Shari on the 'phone. An hour before lunch she caved in and accepted my call.

  She looked pale and shaken, even in the black and white of the screen. "Please," she said. "I've had all I can stand. You stayed there all night, didn't you?"

  "I'm not a PC, Shari," I said.

  Nothing else would have caught her ear.

  "Not?"

  "Proved it before I left," I said. "I can prove it to you, too."

  "Ridiculous. You can't prove a negative."

  "Well, in a manner of speaking. What I can do is show you how the card trick was worked."

  I had her hooked. "You mean it? It really was a trick after all?" she said, slumping.

  "It sure wasn't PC," I said. "Let me show you."

  "At the lab," Shari said. "I'll be there in ten minutes."

  A couple graduate students were there, fooling around with Rhine cards when we arrived, and Shari chased them out without ceremony. She locked the door behind them. We were to have privacy. She didn't bother with her lab coat this time.

  "Show me," she insisted.

  "The apparatus, Shari," I grinned. She gave me a deck of cards, and pulled out the two of hearts and two of spades.

  "We'll do it face-up," I said. "So you can see how it's done!"

  I laid the two cards side by side on her blotter, face up. "Now put a finger on each one." I directed. "And watch them like a hawk. What card is under your right forefinger?"

  "Heart," Shari said.

  "Wrong," I told her. "Spade."

  They could have heard that shriek clear to Keokuk. Good thing we were in a sound-proof laboratory.

  I got her calmed down after a while. "It didn't happen!" she insisted, clutching at her temples.

  "If you won't holler," I said. "I'll do it again. Remember, it's just a phenomenon, like osmosis."

  "It is not!" she gasped.

  But I did it for her. Ten times in a row. The cards changed under her fingers without moving.

  "So it's not PC," I said.

  "Oh, Tex, but what is it?"

  "You agree it's real?"

  Shari nodded. "It's real. You can do it, whatever it is. What is it?"

  "TK," I told her. "Telekinesis."

  "Nonsense," she said. "Are you trying to make me believe I wouldn't have felt the cards move if you'd snapped them out from under my fingers? I was pressing hard on them every time."

  "I didn't move the cards," I explained.

  "But you said it was telekinesis!"

  "Sure. I just moved the molecules of pigment in the printing ink and reassembled them in the opposite cards. You didn't expect to feel molecular movement, did you?"

  "No. Then it really happened?" I nodded. "What an incredible power!" she said. A glow of satisfaction spread over me. "Can you really test this molecular hypothesis?" she asked.

  * * * * *

  I told her of the hours of demonstrations I had made during the night. "The perception on scanning part of it goes on at some subconscious level, Shari," I said. "But we had evidence that it can be made completely conscious."

  She shuddered and hugged her arms to herself. "I hate to say this to you," she said. "But you're a freak."

  I took a deep breath and smiled. "Unique is the way the Grand Master puts it," I said, pleased with myself. "He says it has terrific possibilities." And then it hit me, that delicious thought that I was among the elect, that I always had been.

  "What possibilities?" Shari demanded, recoiling from me. "Doing card tricks?"

  "To name a few," I said. "They feel sure I can operate directly on the molecular chain in genes. This means we can alter heredity to suit ourselves. Next, why not rearrange the DNA molecule in a cancer? If you can change the genes in one cell, you can change them in another. Knock out the ability of cancerous cells to reproduce their own kind and the cancer disappears. A silly one: Maragon says I can be a one-man catalytic cracking station. Pipe a liquid through a tube within my TK range and I can make an equilibrium reaction run uphill as the stuff flows past me. How about a one-step operation to produce those rare drugs that now take forty-nine separate reactions?"

  "This does have a significance for science," she admitted. "The genetic part is right down your alley. And it's not PC, is it?"

  "Strictly TK," I told her. "You're the only PC in the family."

  "Family?" She turned pink as I went around the desk after her. "I told you the answer was 'no.'"

  "I have inside information," I said, pulling her to me. "One of the PC's up at the chapter house said this was what would happen."

  She didn't fight my kiss more than a couple seconds. Then it was a pure case of self-preservation for me. This girl was a tiger. Looks can be awfully deceiving. But she broke away from me.

  "Tex!" she gasped. "Stop, honey! Suppose somebody walks in."

  "A PC like you never gets that kind of surprise," I lied valiantly.

  "Am I?" she whispered. "Am I really a PC?"

  "That's why you locked the door," I said. "Remember?"

  * * *

  Contents

  ACID BATH

  By Vaseleos Garson

  The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.

  Jon Karyl was bolting in a new baffle plate on the stationary rocket engine. It was a tedious job and took all his concentration. So he wasn't paying too muc
h attention to what was going on in other parts of the little asteroid.

  He didn't see the peculiar blue space ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted to land only a few hundred yards away from his plastic igloo.

  Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's airlock.

  It was only as he crawled out of the depths of the rocket power plant that he realized something was wrong.

  By then it was almost too late. The six blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching him at a lope.

  Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot bounds.

  When you're a Lone Watcher, and strangers catch you unawares, you don't stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend upon your life.

  As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under his breath. The automatic alarm should have shrilled out a warning.

  Then he saved as much of his breath as he could as some sort of power wave tore up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get out of sight of the strangers.

  Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut back and head for the underground entrance to the service station.

  He glanced back finally.

  Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting after him, and rapidly closing the distance.

  Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for greater exertion, increased the gravity pull in his space-suit boots as he neared the ravine he'd been racing for.

  The oxygen was just taking hold when he hit the lip of the ravine and began sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn course.

  The power ray from behind ripped out great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But running naturally, bent close to the bottom of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare spots. The oxygen made the tremendous exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue stalkers.

  He'd eluded them, temporarily at least, Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off the dim trail and watched for movement along the route behind him.

  He stood up, finally, pushed aside the leafy overhang of a bush and looked for landmarks along the edge of the ravine.

  He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the ravine. The hidden entrance to the service station wasn't far off.

  His pistol held ready, he moved quietly on down the ravine until the old water course made an abrupt hairpin turn.

  Instead of following around the sharp bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead through the overhanging bushes until he came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his hands and knees he worked his way under the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out space in the center.

  * * * * *

  There, just ahead of him, was the lock leading into the service station. Slipping a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit, he jabbed it into the center of the lock, opening the lever housing.

  He pulled strongly on the lever. With a hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open. Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing softly behind.

  At the end of the long tunnel he stepped to the televisor which was fixed on the area surrounding the station.

  Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures. But he saw their ship. It squatted like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut tight.

  He tuned the televisor to its widest range and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues. He was looking into the stationary rocket engine.

  As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue came crawling out of the ship.

  The two Steel-Blues moved toward the center of the televisor range. They're coming toward the station, Karyl thought grimly.

  Karyl examined the two creatures. They were of the steel-blue color from the crown of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of their walking appendages.

  They were about the height of Karyl--six feet. But where he tapered from broad shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up and down. They had no legs, just appendages, many-jointed that stretched and shrank independent of the other, but keeping the cylindrical body with its four pairs of tentacles on a level balance.

  Where their eyes would have been was an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the egg-head, with its converging ends curving around the sides of the head.

  Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But where were their masters?

  The Steel-Blues moved out of the range of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard a pounding from the station upstairs.

  He chuckled. They were like the wolf of pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to blow the house down.

  The outer shell of the station was formed from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the solar system. With the self-sealing lock of the same resistant material, a mere pounding was nothing.

  Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway. He went up the steel ladder leading to the station's power plant and the televisor that could look into every room within the station.

  He heaved a slight sigh when he reached the power room, for right at his hand were weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid.

  Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the lock to the station. His teeth suddenly clamped down on his lower lip.

  Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes into the stelrylite with round-headed metal clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't break up that easily.

  Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up the revolving turret which capped the station so that its thin fin pointed at the squat ship of the invaders.

  Then he went to the atomic cannon's firing buttons.

  He pressed first the yellow, then the blue button. Finally the red one.

  The thin fin--the cannon's sight--split in half as the turret opened and the coiled nose of the cannon protruded. There was a soundless flash. Then a sharp crack.

  Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship of the solar system. There was nothing that could withstand even the slight jolt of power given by the station cannon on any of the Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of the ship had changed. A bubble of metal, like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off the vessel and struck the rocket of the asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets.

  He pressed the red button again.

  Then abruptly he was on the floor of the power room, his legs strangely cut out from under him. He tried to move them. They lay flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried to lever himself to an upright position.

  Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed from the waist down. But it couldn't happen that suddenly.

  He turned his head.

  A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked tentacle held a square black box.

  Jon could read nothing in that metallic face. He said, voice muffled by the confines of the plastic helmet, "Who are you?"

  "I am"--there was a rising inflection in the answer--"a Steel-Blue."

  There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's face to move. "That is what I have named you," Jon Karyl said. "But what are you?"

  "A robot," came the immediate answer. Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue was telepathic. "Yes," the Steel-Blue answered. "We talk in the language of the mind. Come!" he said peremptorily, motioning with the square black box.

  The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens he'd seen on the creature's face had a counterpart on the back of the egg-head.

  Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought. That's quite an innovation. "Thank you," Steel-Blue said.

  There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he had applied for this high-paying but man-killing job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar System's starways.

  He had little fear now, only curiosity. These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical. They could have snuffed out my life very simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be friends.

  Steel-Blue chuckled.

  * * * * *

  Jon followed him t
hrough the sundered lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a moment to examine the wreckage of the lock. It had been punched full of holes as if it had been some soft cheese instead of a metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a century perfecting.

  "We appreciate your compliment," Steel-Blue said. "But that metal also is found on our world. It's probably the softest and most malleable we have. We were surprised you--earthmen, is it?--use it as protective metal."

  "Why are you in this system?" Jon asked, hardly expecting an answer.

  It came anyway. "For the same reason you Earthmen are reaching out farther into your system. We need living room. You have strategically placed planets for our use. We will use them."

  Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had been preaching preparedness as Earth flung her ships into the reaches of the solar system, taking the first long step toward the conquest of space.

  There are other races somewhere, they argued. As strong and smart as man, many of them so transcending man in mental and inventive power that we must be prepared to strike the minute danger shows.

  Now here was the answer to the scientists' warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials.

  "What did you say?" asked Steel-Blue. "I couldn't understand."

  "Just thinking to myself," Jon answered. It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his thoughts had to be directed outward, rather than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to read it.

  He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping lock of the invaders' space ship wondering how he could warn Earth. The Space Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at his service station in 21 days. But by that time he probably would be mouldering in the rocky dust of the asteroid.

  It was pitch dark within the ship but the Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all maneuvering through the maze of corridors. Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle.

  Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular room, bright with light streaming from a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently were near topside of the vessel.

  A Steel-Blue, more massive than his guide and with four more pair of tentacles, including two short ones that grew from the top of its head, spoke out.