Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "By Heaven!" Henry exclaimed excitedly. "There's a chance I could do it! A trick to overmatch Egir's poisoned arrows!"

  His wife watched him puzzledly as he pored excitedly over certain volumes of their encyclopedia. She saw him hastily jot down notes, and then for a long time that evening he sat, moving his lips, apparently memorizing.

  Henry was vibrant with excitement and hope. He, Henry Stevens of Earth, might be able to save Khal Kan's city for him!

  "If Khal Kan will only do it!" he thought prayerfully. "If he won't just ignore it as dream—"

  Waiting tensely for sleep that night, Henry repeated over and over to himself the simple formula he had gleaned from the encyclopedia.

  "Khal Kan must try it!" he told himself desperately.

  Sleep came slowly to him. And as he fell asleep, he knew that in his dream he would wake to what might be the last day of Jotan's existence....

  Khal Kan awoke with that thought from his dream vibrating in his mind like an ominous tolling.

  "The last day of Jotan!" he whispered. "By all the gods—no!"

  Fiercely, the tall young prince rose and buckled on his sword. It was just dawn, and sea-mists shrouded all the city outside in gray fog.

  Golden Wings still lay sleeping, Khal Kan heard a persistent hammering from out in the fog, as he went down to the lower level of the palace. Brusul, in full armor, came stalking up to him.

  "All's quiet," reported the brawny captain. "The Bunts are still working away at their cursed scaling-ladders. When they are ready, they'll dear the walls of our men with their damned poisoned arrows, and then come over."

  Khal Kan went out with him and inspected their defenses. As he supervised the placing of their fighting-men around the wall, and gave the white-faced people rough encouragement, something oppressed Khal Kan's mind. Something he should be doing for the defense of the city—

  When he got back to the palace with Brusul, Golden Wings' slim, leather-clad figure came flying into his arms.

  "I dreamed the Bunts were already in the city!" she cried. "And then I awoke and found you gone—"

  Khal Kan, soothing her, suddenly stiffened. Her words had recalled that vague, forgotten something that had oppressed him.

  "My dream!" he exclaimed. "I remember now—in the dream, on that other world, I learned how to make a weapon against the Bunts."

  It had all come back to him now—the dream in which Henry Stevens had feverishly memorized a formula out of the science of that dream-world of Earth, to help him in his struggle against the Bunts.

  For a moment, Khal Kan clutched at new hope. Then his eagerness faded. After all, that was only a dream. Henry Stevens and Earth and its science were only an insubstantial vision of his sleeping mind, and nothing that he learned in that could be of any value.

  "I could wish you'd dreamed away the Bunts entirely," Brusul was saying dryly. "Unfortunately, they're still outside and it won't be many hours before they attack."

  Khal Kan was not listening. His mind was revolving the simple formula that Henry Stevens had desperately memorized, in the dream.

  "It wouldn't work," he thought. "It couldn't work, when there's no reality to all that—"

  Yet he kept remembering Henry Stevens' desperate effort to help him. That timid, thin little man he was in his dream each night—that little man had prayed that Khal Kan would not ignore his help, would try the formula.

  Khal Kan reached decision. "I'm going to try it—the thing I learned in the dream!" he told the others.

  Brusul stared. "Are you wit-struck? Dreams won't help us now! How could a dream-weapon be of any use?"

  "I'm not so sure now it was a dream," Khal Kan muttered. "Maybe this is the dream, after all. Oh, hell take all speculations—dream or reality, I'm going to try this thing."

  He shot orders. "Bring all the charcoal you can find, all the sulphur from the street of the apothecaries, and all of the white crystals we use for drying fruits. Those crystals were called 'saltpeter' in the dream."

  Scared, wondering men brought the materials to the palace. There, Brusul and Zoor and Golden Wings watched mystifiedly as Khal Kan supervised their preparation.

  He remembered clearly the formula that Henry Stevens had memorized in the dream. He had the men pound and pulverize and mix, until a big mass of granular black powder was the result.

  "Now bring small metal vases—enough to hold all this—and lampwicks and day," he ordered.

  A captain came running, breathless. "The Bunts have finished their ladders and I think they're soon going to make their attack, sire!" he cried.

  "And our leader lingers here, muddling in minerals!" cried Brusul gustily. "Khal Kan, forget this crazy dream and make ready for battle!"

  Khal Kan paid no attention. He was having the men stuff the small metal vases with the black powder, stopping their mouths with clay through which a fuse-like wick protruded.

  "Distribute these vases to all our men along the walls," he ordered. "Tell them, that when the Bunts place their ladders, they are to light the fuses and fling the vases down among the green warriors, at my command."

  "Hell destroy all dreams!" raged Brusul. "What good will such a crazy plan do? Do you think dropping vases on the Bunts will stop them?"

  "I don't know," Khal Kan muttered. "In the dream, I thought it would. The dream-me called the powder 'gunpowder' and the vases 'grenades.' And in the dream they seemed a more terrible weapon even than the poisoned arrows."

  Yells from the walls and the warning blare of trumpets ripped across the sunlit city. A great cry swept through Jotan's streets.

  "The Bunts are coming!"

  "To the wall!" Khal Kan cried.

  From the parapet atop the great wall, the rising sun revealed an ominous spectacle. From all around the landward side of Jotan, the hordes of the Bunts were surging toward the city.

  First came a line of green bowmen whose hissing, poisoned shafts were already rattling along the top of the wall. Jotanian warriors sank groaning as the swift poison sped into their blood. Khal Kan held his shield up, and swept Golden Wings behind him as they waited.

  Behind the first line of bowmen came Bunts carrying long, rough wooden scaling-ladders. Behind these came the main masses of the stocky green men, armed with bows and short-swords, led by Egir himself.

  The ladders came up against the wall, and the blood-chilling Bunt yell broke around the city as the green warriors swarmed catlike up them. Joranians who sought to push over the ladders were smitten by arrows.

  "Over the wall and open the gates!" Egir's bull voice was yelling to his green men. "Let us into Jotan!"

  The main horde of the Bunts was already surging toward the gates of the city, while their attackers on the ladders sought to win the wall.

  "Now—light the fuses and drop the vases!" Khal Kan yelled along the parapet, through the melee.

  Torches at readiness set the wicks alight. The seemingly harmless little metal vases were tossed over into the surging mass of the Bunts.

  A series of ear-splitting crashes shook the air, like thunder. White smoke drifted away to show masses of the Bunts felled by the explosions.

  "Gods!" cried Brusul appaliedly. "Your dream-weapon is thunder of heaven itself!"

  "Magic!" yelled the Bunts, shrinking back aghast from their own dead, tumbling in panic off the ladders. "Flee, brothers!"

  The fear-maddened green warriors surged back from the walls of Jotan, breaking in panic-stricken, disorganized masses. Egir's bull voice could be heard raging, trying to rally them, but in vain.

  The men of Jotan who had lighted and flung the new weapons were as horrified as their victims. Khal Kan's yell aroused them.

  "Horses, and after them!" he cried. "Now is our chance to avenge yesterday!"

  The gates ground open—and every horsemen left in jotan galloped out after Khal Kan and Golden Wings in pursuit of the routed, green men.

  The Bunts made hardly any effort to turn and fight They were madly intent on
putting as great a distance as possible between them and Jotan.

  "It's Egir I'm after!" Khal Kan cried to Brusul. "While he lives, no safety for Jotan!"

  "See—there he rides!" cried Golden Wings' silvery voice.

  Khal Kan yelled and put spur to his horse as he saw Egir and his Bunt captains riding full tilt toward the Dragals, in an effort to escape.

  They rode right through the Seeing Bunts in pursuit of the traitor. They were overtaking him, when Egir turned and saw them coming. The Jotanian renegade uttered a yell, and he and his green captains turned.

  "'Ware arrows!" shouted Brusul, behind Khal Kan.

  Khal Kan saw the Bunts loosing the vicious shafts, but he saw it only vaguely, for only Egir's sardonic face was clear to him as he charged.

  Sword out, he galloped toward his uncle. Something stung his arm, and he heard a scream from Golden Wings and knew an arrow had hit him.

  "My dear nephew, you've two minutes to live!" panted Egir, his eyes blazing hate and triumph as they met and their swords clashed. "You're a dead man now—"

  Khal Kan felt a cold, deadly numbness creeping through his arm with incredible rapidity. He summoned all his fast-flowing strength to swing his sword up.

  It left his guard open and Egir stabbed viciously as their horses wheeled. Then Khal Kan's nerveless arm brought his blade down.

  "This for my father, Egir!"

  The sword shore the traitor's shoulder and neck half through. And a moment after Egir dropped from the saddle, Khal Kan felt his own numb body falling. He could not feel the impact with the ground.

  His mind was darkening and everything was spinning around. It was as though he whirled in a black funnel, and was being sucked down into its depths, yet he could still hear voices of those bending over him.

  "Khal Kan!" That was Golden Wings, he knew.

  He tried to speak up to them out of the roaring darkness that was engulfing him.

  "Jotan—safe now, with Egir gone. The kingship to Brusul. Golden Wings—"

  He could not form more words. Khal Kan knew that he was dying. But he knew, at last, that Thar was not a dream, for even though his own life was passing, nothing around him was vanishing. But, his darkening brain wondered, if That had been real all the time—

  But then, in a flash of light on the very verge of darkness, Khal Kan saw the truth that neither he nor the other had ever imagined....

  Henry Stevens lay dead upon his bed in the neat bedroom of his little suburban cottage. And in the room, his sobbing wife was trying to tell her story to the physician and the psychiatrist.

  "It was all so sudden," she sobbed. "I awoke, and found that Herry was clenching his fists as though in a convulsion and was shouting—something about Jotan being safe now. And then—he was dead—"

  The physician was soothing her as he led her to another room. When he came back, his face was keen as he looked at Doctor Thorn.

  "You heard her story?" he said to the psychiatrist. "I telephoned you because I understood he'd been consulting you. I can't understand this thing at all."

  He pointed to Henry's motionless figure. "The man had nothing organically wrong with him, as I happen to know. Yet he died in his sleep—as though from terrible mental shock."

  "You've hit it, Doctor," nodded Doctor Thorn thoughtfully. "If my guess is right, he was dreaming, and when his dream-self was killed, Henry Stevens died, also."

  He went on to tell the physician of the case.

  The practitioner's face became incredulous as he heard.

  "The poor devil!" he ejaculated. "He had that dream and dream-life all his life long, and when his dream-self died, he died too by mental suggestion."

  "I am not sure that that other life of his, that world of Thar, was a dream," Doctor Thorn replied soberly.

  "Oh, come, Doctor," protested the other. "If Henry Stevens and Earth were real, and we know they were, Thar and Khal Kan must have been only his dream."

  "I wonder," replied the psychiatrist. "Did you ever hear of mental rapport? Cases where two people's minds are so tuned that one experiences the other's feelings and thoughts, when his own mind is relaxed and quiescent? There have been a good many such provable cases.

  "Suppose," Thorn went on, "that Henry Stevens was a unique case of that. Suppose that his mind happened to be in rapport, from the time of his birth, with the mind of another man—another man, who was not of Earth but of some world far across the universe from ours? Suppose that each man's subconscious was able to experience the other man's thoughts and feelings, when his own consciousness was relaxed and sleeping? So that each man, all his life, seemed each night to dream the other man's life?"

  "Good Lord!" exclaimed the practitioner. "If that were true, both Henry Stevens and Khal Kan were real, on far-separated worlds?"

  Doctor Thorn nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, and the two men would be so much in rapport that the death of one would kill the other. It's only a theory, and we can never know if it's true. Probably he knows, now—"

  Henry Stevens, lying there, seemed to be smiling at their speculations. But it was not his own smile that lay upon his face. It was the reckless, gay, triumphant smile of Khal Kan.

  * * *

  Contents

  MONSTERS OF MARS

  By Edmond Hamilton

  Three Martian-duped Earth-men swing open the gates of space that for so long had barred the greedy hordes of the Red Planet.

  Allan Randall stared at the man before him. "And that's why you sent for me, Milton?" he finally asked.

  The other's face was unsmiling. "That's why I sent for you, Allan," he said quietly. "To go to Mars with us to-night!"

  There was a moment's silence, in which Randall's eyes moved as though uncomprehendingly from the face of Milton to those of the two men beside him. The four sat together at the end of a roughly furnished and electric-lit living-room, and in that momentary silence there came in to them from the outside night the distant pounding of the Atlantic upon the beach. It was Randall who first spoke again.

  "To Mars!" he repeated. "Have you gone crazy, Milton--or is this some joke you've put up with Lanier and Nelson here?"

  Milton shook his head gravely. "It is not a joke, Allan. Lanier and I are actually going to flash out over the gulf to the planet Mars to-night. Nelson must stay here, and since we wanted three to go I wired you as the most likely of my friends to make the venture."

  "But good God!" Randall exploded, rising. "You, Milton, as a physicist ought to know better. Space-ships and projectiles and all that are but fictionists' dreams."

  "We are not going in either space-ship or projectile," said Milton calmly. And then as he saw his friend's bewilderment he rose and led the way to a door at the room's end, the other three following him into the room beyond.

  * * * * *

  It was a long laboratory of unusual size in which Randall found himself, one in which every variety of physical and electrical apparatus seemed represented. Three huge dynamo-motor arrangements took up the room's far end, and from them a tangle of wiring led through square black condensers and transformers to a battery of great tubes. Most remarkable, though, was the object at the room's center.

  It was like a great double cube of dull metal, being in effect two metal cubes each twelve feet square, supported a few feet above the floor by insulated standards. One side of each cube was open, exposing the hollow interiors of the two cubical chambers. Other wiring led from the big electronic tubes and from the dynamos to the sides of the two cubes.

  The four men gazed at the enigmatic thing for a time in silence. Milton's strong, capable face showed only in its steady eyes what feelings were his, but Lanier's younger countenance was alight with excitement; and so too to some degree was that of Nelson. Randall simply stared at the thing, until Milton nodded toward it.

  "That," he said, "is what will flash us out to Mars to-night."

  Randall could only turn his stare upon the other, and Lanier chuckled. "Can't take it in yet, Randall? Wel
l, neither could I when the idea was first sprung on us."

  * * * * *

  Milton nodded to seats behind them, and as the half-dazed Randall sank into one the physicist faced him earnestly.

  "Randall, there isn't much time now, but I am going to tell you what I have been doing in the last two years on this God-forsaken Maine coast. I have been for those two years in unbroken communication by radio with beings on the planet Mars!

  "It was when I still held my physics professorship back at the university that I got first onto the track of the thing. I was studying the variation of static vibrations, and in so doing caught steady signals--not static--at an unprecedentedly high wave-length. They were dots and dashes of varying length in an entirely unintelligible code, the same arrangement of them being sent out apparently every few hours.

  "I began to study them and soon ascertained that they could be sent out by no station on earth. The signals seemed to be growing louder each day, and it suddenly occurred to me that Mars was approaching opposition with earth! I was startled, and kept careful watch. On the day that Mars was closest the earth the signals were loudest. Thereafter, as the red planet receded, they grew weaker. The signals were from some being or beings on Mars!

  "At first I was going to give the news to the world, but saw in time that I could not. There was not sufficient proof, and a premature statement would only wreck my own scientific reputation. So I decided to study the signals farther until I had irrefutable proof, and to answer them if possible. I came up here and had this place built, and the aerial towers and other equipment I wanted set up. Lanier and Nelson came with me from the university, and we began our work.

  * * * * *

  "Our chief object was to answer those signals, but it proved heartbreaking work at first. We could not produce a radio wave of great enough length to pierce out through earth's insulating layer and across the gulf to Mars. We used all the power of our great windmill-dynamo hook-ups, but for long could not make it. Every few hours like clockwork the Martian signals came through. Then at last we heard them repeating one of our own signals. We had been heard!