Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "Let me go."

  "No."

  "I'm not dead," Nancy insisted. "You know I'm not dead. I won't press charges against you—just let me go free."

  "I told you it wasn't that simple. He wants them to think you're dead, and that's what they'll think."

  Nancy passed fingers across her eyes. "Who? Who are you talking about?"

  "Doc Candle. He won't let them know you're alive."

  Nancy rubbed her forehead with both hands. "Sam, you don't know what you're doing. You don't—know what you're getting yourself into. Just let me show myself to someone. They'll know I'm not dead. Really they will."

  "Okay," he said. "Let's find somebody."

  He led her toward a more nearly completed building, showing rectangles of light. They looked through the windows to see several men in uniforms bending over blueprints on a desk jury-rigged of sawhorses and planks.

  "Sam," Nancy said, "one of those men is Terry Elston. He's a Waraxe boy. I went to school with him. He'll know me. Let's go in…."

  "No," Collins said. "We don't go in."

  "But—" Nancy started to protest, but stopped. "Wait. He's coming out."

  Collins slid along the wall and stood behind the door. "Tell him who you are when he comes out. I'll stay here."

  They waited. After a few seconds, the door opened.

  Nancy stepped into the rectangle of light thrown on the concrete from the window.

  "Terry," she said. "Terry, it's me—Nancy Comstock."

  The blue-jawed young man in uniform frowned. "Who did you say you were? Have you got clearance from this area?"

  "It's me, Terry. Nancy. Nancy Comstock."

  Terry Elston stepped front and center. "That's not a very good joke. I knew Nancy. Hell of a way to die, killed by some maniac."

  "Terry, I'm Nancy. Don't you recognize me?"

  Elston squinted. "You look familiar. You look a little like Nancy. But you can't be her, because she's dead."

  "I'm here, and I tell you I'm not dead."

  "Nancy's dead," Elston repeated mechanically. "Say, what are you trying to pull?"

  "Terry, behind you. A maniac!"

  "Sure," Elston said. "Sure. There's a maniac behind me."

  Collins stepped forward and hit Elston behind the ear. He fell silently.

  Nancy stared down at him.

  "He refused to recognize me. He acted like I was crazy, pretending to be Nancy Comstock."

  "Come on along," Collins urged. "They'll probably shoot us on sight as trespassers."

  She looked around herself without comprehension.

  "Which way?"

  "This way."

  Collins did not say those words.

  They were said by the man with the gun in the uniform like the one worn by Elston. He motioned impatiently.

  "This way, this way."

  "No priority," Colonel Smith-Boerke said as he paced back and forth, gun in hand.

  From time to time he waved it threateningly at Collins and Nancy who sat on the couch in Smith-Boerke's office. They had been sitting for close to two hours. Collins now knew the Colonel did not intend to turn him over to the authorities. They were being held for reasons of Smith-Boerke's own.

  "They sneak the ship in here, plan for an unscheduled hop from an uncompleted base—the strictest security we've used in ten or fifteen years—and now they cancel it. This is bound to get leaked by somebody! They'll call it off. It'll never fly now."

  Collins sat quietly. He had been listening to this all evening. Smith-Boerke had been drinking, although it wasn't very obvious.

  Smith-Boerke turned to Collins.

  "I've been waiting for somebody like you. Just waiting for you to come along. And here you are, a wanted fugitive, completely in my power! Perfect, perfect."

  Collins nodded to himself. Of course, Colonel Smith-Boerke had been waiting for him. And Doc Candle had driven him right to him. It was inescapable. He had been intended to escape and turn up right here all along.

  "What do you want with me?"

  Smith-Boerke's flushed face brightened. "You want to become a hero? A hero so big that all these trumped-up charges against you will be dropped? It'll be romantic. Back to Lindbergh-to-Paris. Tell me, Collins, how would you like to be the first man to travel faster than light?"

  Collins knew there was no way out.

  "All right," he said.

  Smith-Boerke wiped a hand across his dry mouth.

  "Project Silver has to come off. My whole career depends on it. You don't have anything to do. Everything's cybernetic. Just ride along and prove a human being can survive. Nothing to it. No hyperdrives, none of that kind of stuff. We had an engine that could go half lightspeed and now we've made it twice as efficient and more. No superstitions about Einstein, I hope? No? Good."

  "I'll go," Collins said. "But what if I had said 'no'."

  Smith-Boerke put the gun away in a desk drawer.

  "Then you could have walked out of here, straight into the MP's."

  "Why didn't they come in here after me?"

  "They don't have security clearance for this building."

  "Don't leave me alone," Nancy said urgently. "I don't understand what's happening. I feel so helpless. I need help."

  "You're asking the wrong man," Collins said briefly.

  Collins felt safe when the airlock kissed shut its metal lips.

  It was not like the house, but yet he felt safe, surrounded by all the complicated, expensive electronic equipment. It was big, solid, sterilely gleaming.

  Another thing—he had reason to believe that Doc Candle's power could not reach him through metal.

  "But I'm not outside," Doc Candle said, "I'm in here, with you."

  Collins yelled and cursed, he tried to pull off the acceleration webbing and claw through the airlock. Nobody paid any attention to him. Count downs had been automated. Smith-Boerke was handling this one himself, and he cut off the Audio-In switch from the spaceship. Doc Candle said nothing else for a moment, and the spaceship, almost an entity itself, went on with its work.

  The faster-than-light spaceship took off.

  At first it was like any other rocket takeoff.

  The glow of its exhaust spread over the field of the spaceport, then over the hills and valleys, and then the town of Waraxe, spreading illumination even as far as Sam Collins' silent house.

  After a time of being sick, Collins lay back and accepted this too.

  "That's right, that's it," Doc Candle said. "Take it and die with it. That's the ticket."

  Collins' eyes settled on a gauge. Three quarters lightspeed. Climbing.

  Nothing strange, nothing untoward happened when you reached lightspeed. It was only an arbitrary number. All else was superstition. Forget it, forget it, forget it.

  Something was telling him that. At first he thought it was Doc Candle but then he knew it was the ship.

  Collins sat back and took it, and what he was taking was death. It was creeping over him, seeping into his feet, filling him like liquid does a sponge.

  Not will, but curiosity, caused him to turn his head.

  He saw Doc Candle.

  The old body was dying. He was in the emergency seat, broken, a ribbon of blood lacing his chin. But Doc Candle continued to laugh triumphantly in Collins' head.

  "Why? Why do you have to kill me?" Collins asked.

  "Because I am evil."

  "How do you know you're evil?"

  "They told me so!" Candle shouted back in the thundering silence of Death's approach. "They were always saying I was bad."

  They.

  Collins got a picture of something incredibly old and incredibly wise, but long unused to the young, clumsy gods. Something that could mar the molding of a godling and make it mortal.

  "But I'm not really so very bad," Doc Candle went on. "I had to destroy, but I picked someone who really didn't care if he were destroyed or not. An almost absolutely passive human being, Sam. You."

  Collins nodde
d.

  "And even then," said the superhuman alien from outer space, "I could not just destroy. I have created a work of art."

  "Work of art?"

  "Yes. I have taken your life and turned it into a horror story, Sam! A chilling, demonic, black-hearted horror!"

  Collins nodded again.

  LIGHTSPEED.

  There was finally something human within Sam Collins that he could not deny. He wanted to live. It wasn't true. He did care what happened.

  You do? said somebody.

  He does? asked somebody else, surprised, and suddenly he again got the image of wiser, older creatures, a little ashamed because of what they had done to the creature named Doc Candle.

  He does, chorused several voices, and Sam Collins cried aloud: "I do! I want to live!" They were just touching lightspeed; he felt it.

  This time it was not just a biological response. He really wanted help. He wanted to stay alive.

  From the older, wiser voices he got help, though he never knew how; he felt the ship move slipwise under him, and then a crash.

  And Doc Candle got help too, the only help even the older, wiser ones could give him.

  They pulled him out of the combined wreckage of the spaceship and his house. Both were demolished.

  It was strange how the spaceship Sam Collins was on crashed right into his house. Ed Michaels recalled a time in a tornado when Sy Baxter's car was picked up, lifted across town and dropped into his living room.

  When the men from the spaceport lifted away tons of rubble, they found him and said, "He's dead."

  No, I'm not, Collins thought. I'm alive.

  And then they saw that he really was alive, that he had come through it alive somehow, and nobody remembered anything like it since the airliner crash in '59.

  A while later, after they found Doc Candle's body and court-martialed Smith-Boerke, who took drugs, Nancy was nuzzling him on his hospital bed. It was nice, but he wasn't paying much attention.

  I'm free, Collins thought as the girl hugged him. Free! He kissed her.

  Well, he thought while she was kissing him back, as free as I want to be, anyway.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE PLANET WITH NO NIGHTMARE

  By Jim Harmon

  The creatures on the little planet were real bafflers. The first puzzler about them was that they died so easily. The second was that they didn't die at all.

  Tension eased away as the spaceship settled down on its metallic haunches and they savored a safe planetfall.

  Ekstrohm fingered loose the cinches of his deceleration couch. He sighed. An exploration camp would mean things would be simpler for him. He could hide his problem from the others more easily. Trying to keep secret what he did alone at night was very difficult under the close conditions on board a ship in space.

  Ryan hefted his bulk up and supported it on one elbow. He rubbed his eyes sleepily with one huge paw. "Ekstrohm, Nogol, you guys okay?"

  "Nothing wrong with me that couldn't be cured," Nogol said. He didn't say what would cure him; he had been explaining all during the trip what he needed to make him feel like himself. His small black eyes darted inside the olive oval of his face.

  "Ekstrohm?" Ryan insisted.

  "Okay."

  "Well, let's take a ground-level look at the country around here."

  The facsiport rolled open on the landscape. A range of bluffs hugged the horizon, the color of decaying moss. Above them, the sky was the black of space, or the almost equal black of the winter sky above Minneapolis, seen against neon-lit snow. That cold, empty sky was full of fire and light. It seemed almost a magnification of the Galaxy itself, of the Milky Way, blown up by some master photographer.

  This fiery swath was actually only a belt of minor planets, almost like the asteroid belt in the original Solar System. These planets were much bigger, nearly all capable of holding an atmosphere. But to the infuriation of scientists, for no known reason not all of them did. This would be the fifth mapping expedition to the planetoids of Yancy-6 in three generations. They lay months away from the nearest Earth star by jump drive, and no one knew what they were good for, although it was felt that they would probably be good for something if it could only be discovered--much like the continent of Antarctica in ancient history.

  "How can a planet with so many neighbors be so lonely?" Ryan asked. He was the captain, so he could ask questions like that.

  "Some can be lonely in a crowd," Nogol said elaborately.

  * * * * *

  "What will we need outside, Ryan?" Ekstrohm asked.

  "No helmets," the captain answered. "We can breathe out there, all right. It just won't be easy. This old world lost all of its helium and trace gases long ago. Nitrogen and oxygen are about it."

  "Ryan, look over there," Nogol said. "Animals. Ringing the ship. Think they're intelligent, maybe hostile?"

  "I think they're dead," Ekstrohm interjected quietly. "I get no readings from them at all. Sonic, electronic, galvanic--all blank. According to these needles, they're stone dead."

  "Ekstrohm, you and I will have a look," Ryan said. "You hold down the fort, Nogol. Take it easy."

  "Easy," Nogol confirmed. "I heard a story once about a rookie who got excited when the captain stepped outside and he couldn't get an encephalographic reading on him. Me, I know the mind of an officer works in a strange and unfathomable manner."

  "I'm not worried about you mis-reading the dials, Nogol, just about a lug like you reading them at all. Remember, when the little hand is straight up that's negative. Positive results start when it goes towards the hand you use to make your mark."

  "But I'm ambidextrous."

  Ryan told him what he could do then.

  Ekstrohm smiled, and followed the captain through the airlock with only a glance at the lapel gauge on his coverall. The strong negative field his suit set up would help to repel bacteria and insects.

  Actually, the types of infection that could attack a warm-blooded mammal were not infinite, and over the course of the last few hundred years adequate defenses had been found for all basic categories. He wasn't likely to come down with hot chills and puzzling striped fever.

  They ignored the ladder down to the planet surface and, with only a glance at the seismological gauge to judge surface resistance, dropped to the ground.

  It was day, but in the thin atmosphere contrasts were sharp between light and shadow. They walked from midnight to noon, noon to midnight, and came to the beast sprawled on its side.

  Ekstrohm nudged it with a boot. "Hey, this is pretty close to a wart-hog."

  "Uh-huh," Ryan admitted. "One of the best matches I've ever found. Well, it has to happen. Statistical average and all. Still, it sometimes gives you a creepy feeling to find a rabbit or a snapping turtle on some strange world. It makes you wonder if this exploration business isn't all some big joke, and somebody has been everywhere before you even started."

  * * * * *

  The surveyor looked sidewise at the captain. The big man seldom gave out with such thoughts. Ekstrohm cleared his throat. "What shall we do with this one? Dissect it?"

  Ryan nudged it with his toe, following Ekstrohm's example. "I don't know, Stormy. It sure as hell doesn't look like any dominant intelligent species to me. No hands, for one thing. Of course, that's not definite proof."

  "No, it isn't," Ekstrohm said.

  "I think we'd better let it lay until we get a clearer picture of the ecological setup around here. In the meantime, we might be thinking on the problem all these dead beasts represent. What killed them?"

  "It looks like we did, when we made blastdown."

  "But what about our landing was lethal to the creatures?"

  "Radiation?" Ekstrohm suggested. "The planet is very low in radiation from mineral deposits, and the atmosphere seems to shield out most of the solar output. Any little dose of radiation might knock off these critters."

  "I don't know about that. Maybe it would work the other
way. Maybe because they have had virtually no radioactive exposure and don't have any R's stored up, they could take a lot without harm."

  "Then maybe it was the shockwave we set up. Or maybe it's sheer xenophobia. They curl up and die at the sight of something strange and alien--like a spaceship."

  "Maybe," the captain admitted. "At this stage of the game anything could be possible. But there's one possibility I particularly don't like."

  "And that is?"

  "Suppose it was not us that killed these aliens. Suppose it is something right on the planet, native to it. I just hope it doesn't work on Earthmen too. These critters went real sudden."

  * * * * *

  Ekstrohm lay in his bunk and thought, the camp is quiet.

  The Earthmen made camp outside the spaceship. There was no reason to leave the comfortable quarters inside the ship, except that, faced with a possibility of sleeping on solid ground, they simply had to get out.

  The camp was a cluster of aluminum bubbles, ringed with a spy web to alert the Earthmen to the approach of any being.

  Each man had a bubble to himself, privacy after the long period of enforced intimacy on board the ship.

  Ekstrohm lay in his bunk and listened to the sounds of the night on Yancy-6 138. There was a keening of wind, and a cracking of the frozen ground. Insects there were on the world, but they were frozen solid during the night, only to revive and thaw in the morning sun.

  The bunk he lay on was much more uncomfortable than the acceleration couches on board. Yet he knew the others were sleeping more soundly, now that they had renewed their contact with the matter that had birthed them to send them riding high vacuum.

  Ekstrohm was not asleep.

  Now there could be an end to pretending.

  He threw off the light blanket and swung his feet off the bunk, to the floor. Ekstrohm stood up.

  There was no longer any need to hide. But what was there to do? What had changed for him?

  He no longer had to lie in his bunk all night, his eyes closed, pretending to sleep. In privacy he could walk around, leave the light on, read.

  It was small comfort for insomnia.

  Ekstrohm never slept. Some doctors had informed him he was mistaken about this. Actually, they said, he did sleep, but so shortly and fitfully that he forgot. Others admitted he was absolutely correct--he never slept. His body processes only slowed down enough for him to dispel fatigue poisons. Occasionally he fell into a waking, gritty-eyed stupor; but he never slept.