Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  The camouflaged framework had been raised; soft motors were purring helicopter propellers around and lifting a plane up towards the stars hanging high above.

  The airplane was already feet off the ground and sweeping straight up. A sane man wouldn't have thought of it, but Chris wasn't quite sane just then. With a short sprint, he launched himself into a flying leap, grabbed out desperately--and felt the bar of the undercarriage between his hands.

  The plane jolted. Then it steadied; rose with terrific acceleration. And Chris hauled himself up onto the undercarriage and clung to one of the wheel-stanchions, breathing, hard, hidden by the fuselage from the invisible pilot.

  The clearing and the hut, with smoke billowing from it, dropped into nothingness. The night enclosed the helicopter-plane.

  * * * * *

  From the air, Panama Canal at night is a necklace of lights strung across the thin neck of land that separates sea from sea. Then, as a high-flying plane drops lower, the beams of light loosen into widely separated patches, which are the locks; between them the silky black ribbon of water runs, now widening into a dim, hill-girt lake, now narrowing as it passes through massive Culebra Cut, then widening again as it comes to the artificial Gatun Lake, at the far end of which stands Gatun Dam and its spillway.

  Silence hung close over the Canal. The last ship had passed through; the planes that daily maneuver over it had returned to their hangars; the men who shepherd ships through the locks had gone either to bed or to Panama City or Colon. The Canal, as always at night, seemed almost deserted.

  To Chris, clutching tight to his hazardous perch, it looked utterly deserted. The ride had been nightmare-like, fraught every second with peril. Several times the whip of wind had come near tearing him loose; the cold air of the upper layers had numbed his fingers, his whole body; he was chilled and, experiencing the inevitable let-down which comes after a great effort, miserable. Just then, the task ahead appeared well-nigh impossible.

  The only thing in his favor was that Kashtanov apparently did not know he was aboard, since the plane had flown evenly, steadily, not trying to shake off the man hanging to its landing gear by somersaulting in the sky. Evidently the jolt as it was rising hadn't warned the unseen pilot; the fog from the broken machine had obscured Chris's wild leap.

  But what, he thought, of that? The element of surprise was in his favor--but how to gain advantage by it? He had no weapon, nothing save bare hands with which to subdue a foe as elusive as the wind that was now hurtling by him. Clinging there, slipping now and again, drenched with cold, the odds looked hopeless.

  Then, suddenly, the booming of the main motor stopped. Only a quiet purring from the wings took its place. The helicopter-plane hovered almost motionless, quiet and deadly like a sinister bird of prey. It began to drop straight down through the dark. Chris Travers glanced below.

  * * * * *

  There, misty, fainty, small as the toy of a child, lay Gatun Dam, with the spillway in its center.

  Chris stared. So small the dam looked--this dream of an engineer, this tiny outpost of man's genius thrust boldly into the breast of the tropics, holding back a whole lake with its cement flanks, enabling ocean to be linked to ocean! It was the heart of the Canal; if burst, the veins would be drained.

  Something that cannot be caught in words seemed seize the lone American then. As in a trance, he saw more than the dam; he saw what it symbolized. He saw the Frenchmen who had tried to thrust the Canal through first, and who had failed, dying in hundreds. He saw the men of his own race who had carried that mighty work on; saw them gouging through the raw earth and moving mountains, tiny figures doing the work of giants; saw them stricken down by fever and disease, saw others fill the empty files and go on, never wavering. He saw them complete it and seal the waters in captivity with the dam that lay below....

  And with that vision of stupendous achievement, cold, weariness, hopelessness passed from Chris Travers and swept clean away. The odds that had loomed so large fell into insignificance.

  The golf course spread out and became dimly visible as the plane dropped cautiously down. Away to the left there were the few twinkling lights of Gatun Dam, whitening the crests of the waters that tumbled through the spillway. Their drone was dully audible. On every other side dark rolling hills stretched, covered in untamed jungle growth. The golf course was shrouded by them. Its smooth sward made a perfect landing place; an ordinary plane might alight there.

  Lower, lower, ever so slowly. A bare one hundred feet, now. Chris scanned the lay of the land. Right close to the spot Kashtanov had chosen to set the plane down on was a deep sand-trap, put there to snare unskilful golfers. Chris steadied himself on the cross-bar.

  "I'll have to go up over the side and grab him," he planned. "Then hold on to his throat till I feel him go limp."

  The wheels of the plane touched gently, and she settled to rest.

  * * * * *

  In one furious movement Chris was off and springing up the side of the fuselage into the single cockpit, his hands clutching for the invisible man who sat there.

  He heard a croak of alarm; then his fingers thumbed into bare flesh and slid up over a nude shoulder to the throat. They tightened, bored in, held with terrible pressure. Sprawled over the cockpit, he clung grimly, to what seemed nothing more than air.

  Spattering noises came from somewhere. An unseen body thrashed frantically. Transparent hands clawed over the American's frame, worried at him. But he held his grip, tightening it each second. There was a gasping, choking sound, a desperate writhe, another scratching of the invisible hands--and then came what Chris had feared, what he could not guard against since his eyes could not forewarn him. A heavy monkey-wrench appeared to rise of its own accord from the floor of the cockpit and come swinging at his head.

  He ducked at the last second. But it clipped him; his brain whirled dizzily. The next moment he slithered off the plane and fell to the ground, dragging the unseen Kashtanov with him. And as he pitched into the damp grass, the shock dislodged his grip.

  He was up in a flash, but the damage was done. The monkey-wrench curved through the darkness in a vicious swipe that landed it flush against his jaw; swung back, pounded again like a trip-hammer--again and again and again....

  Chris reeled back, teetered on the edge of nothingness, then went tumbling crazily down into the sand-trap behind. One leg was doubled underneath him as he crashed.

  A voice floated down out of the darkness. "That is the end of you!" it said. But Chris Travers did not hear it....

  * * * * *

  Pain. Agonizing pain. The whole lower side of his face was a burning, throbbing, aching lump of flesh, and his left leg seemed on fire. What had happened? Where was he?

  Then came remembrance, and it was far worse than the fangs of pain that were gnawing him. Chris cried out--a cracked, twisted cry. Kashtanov, the dam--the box of the ray! How much time had passed?

  He hunched his body over and stared up. Limned against the starlight were the wings of a plane, still standing where it had landed beside the sand-trap. He clutched his thoughts. The plane meant--it meant Kashtanov had gone on his errand, had not yet returned? Only minutes had gone by since the blows from the monkey-wrench. But was the box placed yet? Was Kashtanov already hurrying back?

  He listened. From far away came a drone that was separate from the throbbing of his head. The drone of waters, controlled waters. The normal sound of the spillway of Gatun Dam. The box had not yet unleashed its disintegrating bolt of blue.

  "I've got to stop it!" he whispered.

  He tried to rise. Only one leg held. The other twisted awrily with a rasp of broken bones. A spearing pain tore through him. Useless! His fall had broken it. He could not rise, could not walk, much less run. He was no more than a cripple.

  "Oh, God!" he groaned, "How can I, how can I?"

  Then his eyes fell on the plane resting above him.

  "I've got one leg," he muttered, "and two hands and two eyes.... T
hey're left me. Yes!"

  He rolled over. He shoved with his right leg and clawed at the bank of the sand-trap. Inch by inch he wormed up, slipping, scraping. The sand grated into his battered face and seeped through onto his tongue; he coughed and spluttered, groaning from the effort and his feebleness. Spots of blood showed black against the crazy course he left behind him; ages seemed to pass before he thrust his head over the top of the bank, dug his chin into it and pulled onto level ground. Ages, but in reality only seconds, and the whole Canal--America--lying at the mercy of what each one of those seconds might unloose!

  * * * * *

  But the plane was near now, and it almost seemed that some unseen force mightier than the strength of men hauled Chris's broken body to it and up the stretch of its fuselage-side into the cockpit.

  Ordinarily, he should have been delirious from the pain of jaw and leg, but the controls of the plane were before him and he saw nothing else. Wings and propeller were better than legs! He was in his element: by the sixth sense of born airmen, he knew and could handle any flying machine, no matter how foreign.

  In a second, his fingers had fumbled onto the starting button. The choke of the motor and then its full-throated roar were sweet to his ears.

  The lonely golf course and the night re-echoed with the bellow of twelve pistons thrusting in line; watching, one would not have dreamed that a cripple was at the controls of the plane that now swung around with a blast of power, leveled its nose down the course and raced smoothly over close-clipped grass. Its wheels bumped, spun on the ground and lifted into air.

  A mile to the dam! Istafiev's words came back to him. It would take Kashtanov twenty minutes at least, for he would go cautiously. But how long had passed--how long? That was the agonizing question.

  Staring forward through the hurtling prop, the night rushed at him; the dark hills melted away to either side; clear ground swept into view and then a long black thread that was the spillway channel. Behind was the bubbling, leaping flow of the spillway itself, and Gatun Dam. The smooth cement sides were as yet unharmed.

  "Thank God!" Chris muttered. "Now, where--where?"

  A stream of light flowed out from the hydro-electric station on the left side of the spillway channel. The opposite bank was bare, running right up to the face of the dam beneath the spillway's seven gates. There the box was to be placed. But from the air, the light was uncertain, deceptive--and a little two-foot-square box was all he had to go by!

  "I can't see!" Chris said hoarsely. "I can't see!"

  * * * * *

  Like a roaring black meteor the plane hurtled over the banks of the spillway, the eyes of its pilot scouring the ground. It zoomed just in time to miss the wall of the dam, banked, doubled like a scared jack-rabbit, dove down again, coming within feet of the spillway channel. Mad, inspired flying! But what good could it do?

  Then from its cockpit came a yell.

  "There! There! By heaven, I can make it!"

  Two or three hundred feet--it was not clear just how far--from the face of the dam, on the bare right bank of the channel, a tiny pin-prick of black was moving slowly along. It seemed to move by itself through the air. And now, as the screaming plane banked again and came rushing closer, the pin-prick grew into a black box that suddenly stopped its advance, held motionless some four feet off the ground. Though the man who held it was not visible, Chris could fancy him staring up at the plane, could fancy the look of consternation on his unseen face.

  Two hundred feet was the range of the rays! Was Kashtanov that close? Obviously the controls had not yet been set, for he still held the box. But he could switch them on in a second and fling the deadly machine up toward the dam, if he were at present just out of range. A second--a second!

  "Damn you, here goes!" roared Chris.

  He wrenched the stick way over. The plane appeared to hang crazily on one wing. Then it leveled off and stuck its nose down, flipping its tail up, and down--down--down it bellowed; with no hope in the world of ever coming out of its insane plunge.

  What he saw in that last momentary glimpse was burned forever into Chris Travers' memory. There was the black box, hanging in the air straight before the plane's thundering nose; there, behind it, the black tide of the spillway waters; and, still further behind, he could see the other bank and the hydro-electric station, and a few tiny figures that rushed out from it just then to see what some fool flyer was doing.

  All this flashed into his sight, etched against the sable night as if in flame. Then the plane's snout smashed into the black box hanging before it, and the propeller crunched through a naked, invisible body. A ragged scream that marked the passing of Kashtanov split through the air for a flash of time, and the dark, blurred mass that was an airplane teetered clean over and flopped into the rushing spillway channel.

  * * * * *

  The men who had scrambled out from the hydro-electric station stared at each other blankly. One of them stuttered:

  "But--he did that deliberately! Nothing went wrong with his ship! I saw him! He seemed to be diving at something!"

  "Come on!" snapped another. "We might be able to get him out. A mad fool like that's just the kind who'll live through it."

  * * *

  Contents

  THE MAN WHO SAVED THE EARTH

  By Austin Hall

  Chapter I.

  THE BEGINNING.

  Even the beginning. From the start the whole thing has the precision of machine work. Fate and its working—and the wonderful Providence which watches over Man and his future. The whole thing unerring: the incident, the work, the calamity, and the martyr. In the retrospect of disaster we may all of us grow strong in wisdom. Let us go into history.

  A hot July day. A sun of scant pity, and a staggering street; panting thousands dragging along, hatless; fans and parasols; the sultry vengeance of a real day of summer. A day of bursting tires; hot pavements, and wrecked endeavor, heartaches for the seashore, for leafy bowers beside rippling water, a day of broken hopes and listless ambition.

  Perhaps Fate chose the day because of its heat and because of its natural benefit on fecundity. We have no way of knowing. But we do know this: the date, the time, the meeting; the boy with the burning glass and the old doctor. So commonplace, so trivial and hidden in obscurity! Who would have guessed it? Yet it is—after the creation—one of the most important dates in the world's history.

  This is saying a whole lot. Let us go into it and see what it amounts to. Let us trace the thing out in history, weigh it up and balance it with sequence.

  Of Charley Huyck we know nothing up to this day. It is a thing which, for some reason, he has always kept hidden. Recent investigation as to his previous life and antecedents have availed us nothing. Perhaps he could have told us; but as he has gone down as the world's great martyr, there is no hope of gaining from his lips what we would so like to know.

  After all, it does not matter. We have the day—the incident, and its purport, and its climax of sequence to the day of the great disaster. Also we have the blasted mountains and the lake of blue water which will ever live with his memory. His greatness is not of warfare, nor personal ambition; but of all mankind. The wreaths that we bestow upon him have no doubtful color. The man who saved the earth!

  From such a beginning, Charley Huyck, lean and frail of body, with, even then, the wistfulness of the idealist, and the eyes of a poet. Charley Huyck, the boy, crossing the hot pavement with his pack of papers; the much treasured piece of glass in his pocket, and the sun which only he should master burning down upon him. A moment out of the ages; the turning of a straw destined to out-balance all the previous accumulation of man's history.

  The sun was hot and burning, and the child—he could not have been more than ten—cast a glance over his shoulder. It was in the way of calculation. In the heyday of childhood he was not dragged down by the heat and weather: he had the enthusiasm of his half-score of years and the joy of the plaything. We will not presume to call it th
e spirit of the scientist, though it was, perhaps, the spark of latent investigation that was destined to lead so far.

  A moment picked out of destiny! A boy and a plaything. Uncounted millions of boys have played with glass and the sun rays. Who cannot remember the little, round-burning dot in the palm of the hand and the subsequent exclamation? Charley Huyck had found a new toy, it was a simple thing and as old as glass. Fate will ever be so in her working.

  And the doctor? Why should he have been waiting? If it was not destiny, it was at least an accumulation of moment. In the heavy eye-glasses, the square, close-cut beard; and his uncompromising fact-seeking expression. Those who knew Dr. Robold are strong in the affirmation that he was the antithesis of all emotion. He was the sternest product of science: unbending, hardened by experiment, and caustic in his condemnation of the frailness of human nature.

  It had been his one function to topple over the castles of the foolish; with his hard-seeing wisdom he had spotted sophistry where we thought it not. Even into the castles of science he had gone like a juggernaut. It is hard to have one's theories derided— yea, even for a scientist—and to be called a fool! Dr. Robold knew no middle language; he was not relished by science.

  His memory, as we have it, is that of an eccentric. A man of slight compassion, abrupt of manner and with no tact in speaking. Genius is often so; it is a strange fact that many of the greatest of men have been denied by their follows. A great man and laughter. He was not accepted.

  None of us know today what it cost Dr. Robold. He was not the man to tell us. Perhaps Charley Huyck might; but his lips are sealed forever. We only know that he retired to the mountain, and of the subsequent flood of benefits that rained upon mankind. And we still denied him. The great cynic on the mountain. Of the secrets of the place we know little. He was not the man to accept the investigator; he despised the curious. He had been laughed at—let be—he would work alone on the great moment of the future.