Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  “If we ever land,” said Brian, “Earth is done for—finished! The dust would spread until there was nothing left but one great glowing sterile desert stretching from pole to pole. You saw what it was like back there. There was a civilization there once that makes us look like cavemen. Where is it now?”

  “I don’t give a damn where it is now,” snapped Kurt. Then with an effort he controlled his voice. “You’re leading up to something that’s just plain stupid. Be reasonable. Once we get home they’ll take care of us. Any guys that had brains enough to cook up a ship that would reach as far into space as this one has, are smart enough to be able to handle anything we bring back.”

  “Smart enough!” Brian slammed his fist down on the workbench so hard that his instruments jumped. “The Centaurians worked with forces I can’t even understand, and they couldn’t save themselves. You saw what was left. Great shining cities rearing up out of swirling clouds of green dust—cities full of massive machinery ready to whirr into motion at the touch of a button—” Slowly, then, he finished, “and not a solitary spark of organic life left on the whole planet! One boneyard in the galaxy is enough, Kurt.”

  The pilot’s voice was raw. “What the hell do you want us to do, hang a bell out in front of the ship and wander through space until our supplies run out, jangling the damn thing and yelling, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ ?”

  “Not quite,” replied Brian evenly. “If we stay on course until we reach radio contact point, we will be able to transmit the data we’ve picked up on to Earth. Once we’ve done that, the sensible thing to do would be to put the hyper-drive on emergency power, throw the converters out of phase, and wait for them to blow. A quick clean sunburst and then it would be all over.”

  Kurt stood silent for a moment and then said in a slow and quiet voice, “I don’t mind taking chances. I wouldn’t have signed on for this flight if I had. But I told you before that I can’t understand guys who commit suicide. I’m not going to toss away fifteen years of my life for nobody, not even you. Doc, we’re going in.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” said Brian. “Even if I have miscalculated, we can’t take a chance. I’m going back now to check on Duncan.” He paused at the door, turned, and said sternly, “This ship will not be taken past radio contact point. That’s an order!”

  SHE WENT out Kurt stood for a moment staring at the controls, thinking. Then he went slowly and impassively over to his locker, took out a holstered blaster, and strapped it to his side. Pulling the gun out, he checked it carefully and cocked it. Then he stood waiting by the controls. Long slow minutes passed and then at last Brian returned.

  The biologist stopped suddenly as he came through the door and saw the weapon. “What’s that for, Kurt?” he asked.

  “This?” Kurt flipped the gun into the air and caught it deftly. “This is for you, Doc.”

  “This is no time for joking!”

  “I’m not kidding, Doc.” Kurt said. “There isn’t any use in us arguing. Right now you’ve got a bee in your bonnet that says I’m not going to take this tub in for a landing, and I’ve got one in mine that says that I am. And my bee—” he waved the pistol “—has a sting. Look, Doc,” he grew almost gentle, “I don’t like to give it to a guy without giving him a chance. You just give me the go-ahead signal and I’ll put junior here back in his holster where he belongs.”

  “You know what my answer is, Kurt,” said Brian steadily.

  “Yeah,” said Kurt sadly, “I was afraid of that. I hate to do this, Doc, but it’s just one of those things a guy has to do sometimes whether he wants to or not. If you’d like to say a prayer or smoke a cigarette or something before I go ahead, it’s all right with me.”

  “There is something I want to say, Kurt, before you—go ahead.” The biologist’s tones were as steady as the pilot’s now, “Do you mind?”

  “Course not, Doc. Get it off your chest.”

  “When we took off for Alpha Centauri eight months ago,” said Brian, choosing his words carefully, “we were the third expedition to try the jump. The first ship exploded on takeoff, the second had her main drive go out just beyond Pluto; but still when the Arcturus was completed, hundreds of men fought for a chance to go out with her. We six were chosen. Did you ever ask yourself why we came, why we always come?” Kurt shrugged. “It’s an itch, Kurt, a God-given itch that will be man’s salvation.”

  “Climb off the pulpit,” said the pilot wearily. “I’m giving you a chance to change your mind, not preach a sermon.”

  “Listen, Kurt!” The words came quickly now, alive with urgency. “I’m not pleading for my own life, you know that! But we’ve got something inside us. You can laugh at it. You can even ignore it. But it sent you and men like you blasting out into space. First the Moon, then to Mars, to Venus, and on and on until every planet in our system became part of the heritage of man. And now we’re the first to go racing out light years to become masters of the stars themselves. We’ve just started. Can’t you see that? After all the dark centuries we’re at last beginning to find our way. This heritage of the past, this promise for the future, can not be sacrificed for any man.” He paused, then: “Living doesn’t mean much to you, Kurt. The life you’ve lead shows that. You can’t murder a whole planet for just a few more years of it.”

  “That was a pretty speech,” said the pilot. “But it doesn’t mean a thing. What happened before my time is none of my business. What comes after, I won’t be around to see. What did your blessed humanity ever give me?” His mouth twisted in a snarl. “They drafted me when I was eighteen. By the time I was twenty I was as fine a space killer as the rocket schools could turn out. Guys like you sat back in their labs cooking up new ways to pass out death, and guys like me got medals for doing the job. Sure we reached out and settled the planets. And now—instead of nations, we have worlds at war.

  “Listen, Doc, I had a family once. They got it when the Martians blotted out St. Louis. That’s when I signed up again. I had a girl once, too. She was going to school at Stanford. We were going to get married as soon as I could get leave. A space torpedo that was heading down for Frisco got off course and left a big gouged-out place where the college had been.

  “You guys had your chance. You could have stopped it—but you muffed it. Now I’ve got my chance and I’m taking it.”

  He stopped, gulped, and tried to recapture his calm.

  Brian’s eyes were warm with sympathy. “You’ve had a rough go, Kurt, and I know why you feel as you do.” He gave a weary sigh. “As the twig is bent—” His voice trailed off. “But you’ve got to give them a chance.”

  “Chance?” Kurt smiled humorlessly. “Why sure, Doc, I intended to all along. I’ll pass along your formula for the shots. That way they’ll have fifteen years—just like I have. If they can work out an answer by then maybe they’ll have had enough of a scare thrown into them to get together for once. If they don’t—” He shrugged.

  “They won’t be able to find it,” said Brian desperately. “They don’t know enough.”

  “It’s no go, Doc,” answered Kurt. “You’ve had your say and I’ve had mine. I’m sorry it has to be like this.”

  His face was expressionless as his finger tightened on the trigger. A sudden white hot blast roared through the cabin and the old biologist was slammed back against the wall. He hung there for a moment as if suspended in time and then slowly crumpled to the floor. The control room seemed suddenly very quiet, a quiet that was broken as the aft hatch clanged open and Duncan came rushing in. He stood frozen for a moment, staring unbelievingly at the tableau, and then moved quickly to Brian and knelt beside him. There was no heartbeat under his hand.

  “What did you do it for?” Duncan didn’t look at Kurt as he spoke. Instead he kept staring down at Brian’s body as if he couldn’t yet believe what he saw.

  “He wasn’t going to let us go home. The crazy fool wanted to overload the main drive and blow us to hell. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t l
isten to reason. What else could I do?”

  Duncan’s breath sobbed in his throat. “You didn’t give him a chance. You blasted him without even giving him a chance.”

  The reply was icy. “I gave him a chance all right but he came up with the wrong answer. Now he’s got a hole in him. Who do you want to go with, me—or him?”

  Duncan looked into the deep coldness of Kurt’s eyes and began to stammer, “I—I—”

  “Think it over carefully, Dune,” said Kurt. “I’m offering you the twenty best years of your life on a silver platter. You’ve got a lot of living stored up inside you and it would be a shame to waste it.”

  “But Doc said that if we landed—”

  Kurt brushed his objections aside with a brusque gesture. “When the heat’s on, kid, they’ll produce. They’ll have to. Doc just had his wind up.”

  Duncan pointed shakely to the body on the floor. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “That?” Kurt shrugged. “Nothing to it. The airlock is still there isn’t it? When we land we tell them Doc cracked up and went the way Shirey did.”

  “Easy, isn’t it?” There was a new note in Duncan’s voice that made Kurt look at him sharply. As he watched the boy seemed to grow bigger. He was still uncertain but somehow Kurt sensed that he was no longer afraid. When he continued his voice was steady.

  “So you’re the guy that always takes a chance! The great Kurt Keeler, veteran of half a dozen wars. ‘Take-a-Chance’ Keeler the papers used to call you. You’re offering me a way out, but what about Earth? You give me a stacked deck and her a bullet in the back. What kind of a gamble do you call that? Why don’t you give those people down there a decent chance?”

  Kurt laughed harshly. “A chance? That’s a hot one. A chance for what? The system is suffering from a worse disease than anything that’s floating around in this ship. There isn’t a planet down there that doesn’t have its atomic labs running full-blast cooking up bigger and better ones. Why should I knock myself out so that bunch of carrion rats can go on ripping each other’s throats out?” He checked himself, regaining control. “There’s been too much talking around here. What will it be?”

  “The Doc came in to see me after I broke down out here,” said Duncan softly. “He talked to me like a father would to a scared kid. After he quieted me down he told me that we couldn’t go back to Earth, and then he told me why. When he was finished I wasn’t scared any longer because I knew what I had to do.”

  Kurt’s blaster slowly and deliberately centered on the boy’s chest. “Which was?”

  “Blow up the ship.” There was an uneasy silence. “But Doc’s dead now—” His voice trailed off.

  Kurt relaxed and slipped his gun back in its holster.

  “I knew you’d see the light.” He bent over Brian’s body. “Here, grab his feet. We’ll dump him out the airlock and—” He broke off as a warning buzzer suddenly sounded from the communication panel. He went swiftly to the controls and slipped into the pilot’s seat.

  “Radio contact point. We’ll take care of him later.”

  There was a blast of static as he switched on the speaker. Duncan’s eyes shifted from the still body of the scientist to Kurt’s back and then to the controls of the hyper-drive. He seemed trying to nerve himself to action. He made an indecisive step towards Kurt, hesitated, and then with sudden sure swiftness slid up behind him and smashed him behind the ear with one hammering fist. Kurt jerked and sprawled forward across the controls.

  The young navigator moved quickly over to the controls of the hyper-space drive. His hands trembling but resolute, he slowly turned the twin control handles past maximum into the area of sudden death. Red danger lights began to blink and the massive warp generators in the rear of the ship began to howl in a rising crescendo. Frozen, fascinated, he watched as the needle on the field tension indicator crept slowly toward the red danger area. One second! Two seconds! Three. It crossed! Sweat stood out on his forehead as he reached for the lever marked PHASE CONTROL.

  Behind him a head shook and two glazed eyes cleared to a look of sudden murderous resolution. There was a blur of movement and Kurt’s blaster leapt into his hand and thudded twice. Duncan was slammed against the bulkhead. His hand still stretching futilely for the phase control, he crumpled to the deck. He was dead when he hit.

  Kurt looked down at him with a dawning amazement.

  “The crazy kid! And I thought he’d lick my boots for a chance to get back to Earth. He knew he didn’t have a chance in a hundred and still—”

  He looked at the flashing light on the communication panel and then down at the body again. “A chance in a hundred.”

  Suddenly he threw back his shoulders and smashed his fist into the palm of his left hand. The words shouted through the room. “You’ve earned it. It’s a deal!”

  He went back to the communication panel. As he reached it, an unintelligible voice came through in a burst of static. He twisted a tuning dial and a bored monotonous voice came through.

  “Spaceport Chicago calling Spaceship Arcturus. Spaceport Chicago calling Spaceship Arcturus. Over.”

  “Hello, Chicago,” said Kurt. “This is the Arcturus. Keeler speaking. Looking for somebody?”

  “Spaceport Chicago calling—” It broke off in a whoop. “The Arcturus! Colonel! Colonel Rudd! She’s back. The Arcturus is back!”

  A sound of running feet and excited voices came over the speaker. Kurt sat down before the panel.

  “Give me that mike!” The voice was harsh, breathless. “Keeler?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kurt’s voice was emotionless.

  “You made it?”

  “We made it, sir. Four light years out and four back. Doc’s hunch was right. We found three planets swinging around that yellow sun. Cities too—cities and machines. No people though. Alpha Centauri is plumb out of people. But man what weapons. There’s a heat beam that can curl up a man twenty miles away like an ant under a blow torch—a supersonic projector that can churn blood and bone into a frothy pink jello in a tenth of a second.”

  Rudd broke in urgently. “Cut it!”

  “What?”

  “I said cut it. Switch on your scrambler—sub-level 16. We’re in trouble down here.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Plenty of it! The Martian Federation pulled a sneak attack. Jet atomics coming in from space so fast that our perimeter defenses are saturated. Pittsburgh’s gone up already and London damn near got it. We’ve nailed Marsport but the lice have their launching racks tucked away back in the astroid belt where we can’t find them. Get your scrambler on, and fast! If they get a cross bearing on your transmitter they’ll have their fighters out after you in no time. We’re so jammed up down here that we can’t spare you much in the way of cover. If the stuff you’ve brought back is as hot as you say it is, we need it and we need it bad.”

  Kurt dropped all pretence of military respect. His voice was savage as he answered.

  “Scrambler, hell! If you want what I brought back, you can have it, but I’ve got a bit of talking to do first. Doc Brian was a guy who loved something he called ‘humanity’—and when the chips were down Dune Carr did too. What they picked up on Arcturus they meant for everybody to have.”

  “Kurt, the enemy is listening!”

  “Let ’em listen. I’m going to do a little censorship, right now.” He pulled Brian’s notes to him and leafed through them rapidly. “Pity though. I’ve got stuff here that would make your eyes shine like a kid seeing his first Christmas tree.” He tore several sheets out of the notebook and pulled out his pocket lighter and flicked it on. Rapidly he set fire to sheet after sheet and dropped them into the metal basket at his side.

  “What’s left, like I said, belongs to everybody. Ready Mars? Ready Venus?”

  There was a note of desperation in Rudd’s voice. “What’s got into you, man?”

  “That’s a good question,” said Kurt quietly. “I’m not sure that I know the answer. Ready Earth?”


  “Don’t be a fool, Kurt. Get off the air! You can’t turn against your own planet. You’re from Earth!”

  “So were the Martians not too many generations ago,” said Kurt softly.

  There were the harsh tones of command in Rudd’s voice as he snapped, “Keeler, I’m giving you a direct order to get off the air.”

  “Mister,” drawled Kurt, “You can takes those shiny comets off your shoulder straps and stuff them where they’ll do the most good.” Rudd sputtered like a misfiring jet. “Why—”

  “Shut up,” said Kurt. Doc left a stack of notes behind and I’ve got a job of reading to do.”

  “You’ll face a general court-martial for this, Keeler,” snapped Rudd. “By all that’s holy, I’ll see you in a Lunar prison pit if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

  “Listen, Colonel,” said Kurt, “if you can find your swivel chair you might as well take a load off your feet. This is going to take a long time. Now pipe down, here it comes.” He shuffled the notes and began to read in a mechanical voice. “23 July. While preparing for landing on Planet A of Alpha Centauri the following atmospheric pressure readings were taken. At forty thousand feet, 1.54 pounds per square inch. At thirty thousand feet, 2.78 pounds per square inch. At twenty thousand feet, 5.27 pounds per square inch. At ten thousand feet, 7.98 pounds per square inch. Landing was made on a low plateau, longitude 37 degrees, 28 minutes West, latitude 39 degrees, 54 minutes North, as reckoned on the Van Dusan Astronomical Projection. Upon landing an analysis was made of the atmosphere . . .”

  He read on with a savage satisfaction that the toneless voice could not altogether hide, finishing after the long minutes had worn away:

  “But eventually tissue destruction would reach the point where death would be inevitable. I am further convinced that the life structure of the organism is so complex that . . .”

  He broke off and his voice returned to normal. “That’s as far as Doc got before his—accident. He intended to finish off something like this.” He attempted to mimic Brian’s careful English. “The life structure is so complex that I believe it would be extremely difficult to develop a curative agent within the estimated twenty-year margin between first contact and complete destruction of all terrestrial life. Therefore, action must be taken to insure that the Arcturus and what remains of her crew do not return to Earth.”