Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  After another pause he said in his ordinary manner, “But Doc not being around to say it, and Dune not being able to back him up, I, being what remains of her crew, held a meeting with myself. It was parliamentary as all hell. I suggested that ‘what remains of her crew not return to Earth be amended by striking out the word ‘not’, and somehow the amendment was unanimously accepted. I trust all this meets with your approval, Colonel?”

  “All right, Keeler, you’ve asked for it,” said Rudd grimly. “You’ll be intercepted by our jets before you get inside the orbit of the moon. And when you are, may God have mercy on your soul.”

  There was a strange softness in Kurt’s reply: “You know, Colonel, I never thought much about God, but if there is one, I’ve got a hunch He’s grown tired of us. I don’t think he wants us around any more.” His voice changed suddenly, bitterly. “Asked for it. Yeah, I guess I did. I could have slipped in at night, landed back in the bush somewhere, and you wouldn’t have known about it until the dust started biting into you!”

  He looked out the port, out to the distant soft glowing pearl that was Earth and to the thronging immensity of the stars beyond, to the remote shimmer of the spiral nebulae, universe beyond universe, the undying frontier, world without end. His voice strengthened. “But two men died tonight that could have kept on living for a long time, died so that Man might have a chance. You’re getting it so make the most of it. It’s your last one.”

  The defiance in his voice strengthened as if something of the shining cold immensity beyond the ports had flowed into him, as if he were suddenly a god walking between the stars.

  “Listen down there. This is it. This is the big showdown and I’m dealing. I’m the Almighty IT and I’ll play tag with your space fleets from here around the Milky Way. You, Mars! You, Venus! You, Earth! Are you still snarling at each other? Get down on your knees and start praying to the God that made you. And send up your squadrons along with your prayers. Come and get me, because I’m coming in!”

  He paused a moment, waiting for an answer, but there was only the dry whisper of static. He looked out to the stars, and down to the blue phosphorescence of his hands, and his voice grew flat and mechanical. “Spaceship Arcturus ending transmission. Approximate position, seven hundred and eighty thousand miles out. Estimated time of arrival, twenty-nine hours and thirty minutes.

  “Over . . . and out.”

  • • • THE END

  INVASION REPORT

  Earth’s only defense against the aliens was a weaponless ship and a grim little crew—very grim and very little!

  COLONEL William Faust of the Solar Guard had no business being where he was at the moment.

  He took his wide leather belt in another notch and eyed himself critically. First, gleaming space boots, then flaring breeches of midnight black and finally, a soft, snug-fitting, high-collared tunic with the insignia of the Guard which was a crimson lightning flash running diagonally across the front.

  On Vega III, the light cruiser Andros of the Imperial Legion hurtled up through the thin atmosphere . . .

  The Colonel’s hands caressed the smooth butts of the snub-nosed weapons that hung at each hip and then slid away to hang carelessly at his sides. He turned his back to the hatch that led into the control room of the Glorious, took two casual steps and then, without warning, spun around as his hands went streaking for his guns. A split-second later, he stood catlike, poised on the balls of his feet, both guns trained steadily on the glaring image of himself that was reflected in the mirror surface of the port.

  On Vega III, the light cruiser Andros of the Imperial Legion hurtled up through the thin atmosphere on a mission of interstellar conquest . . .

  “Faster than ever,” said the warlike figure with stern satisfaction and then, holstering his weapons and adjusting his dress helmet to a jaunty angle, he threw open the hatch that led into the control room of the Glorious and entered with a measured military stride.

  Somebody barked “Attention!” and ten sets of heels clicked together. Captain Shirey stepped forward and saluted. “All present and accounted for, sir.”

  THE owners of the ten sets of heels had no more business being where they were than did their Colonel. The starship Glorious had GOVERNMENT PROPERTY—KEEP OUT painted in foot-high letters on one side of her main entrance port and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED on the other—warnings that had been blithely ignored by the guard when the headlights of the battered old flyer that had brought them out blinked out the three shorts and three longs that activated the landing lock.

  For a few years after her return from Alpha Centauri, a small maintenance crew had been kept on the Glorious. But, as existence became more and more peaceful and settled and Man slowly adjusted to the idea that there was no longer any place to go, these were withdrawn until, finally, the last watchman was removed as being an unnecessary charge against the public funds.

  There was talk, for a while, of mounting a warper on her and turning her into a museum, but nobody was really interested except the youngsters—and youngsters don’t have votes—so it was finally decided to leave her circling in her lonely orbit as a perpetual monument to the men who had taken her out for the first and last time.

  “At ease!” As his command relaxed, Colonel Faust stepped out of role.

  “Look here, gang,” he said, “we’ve worked through those old operational manuals of my grandfather’s until we know them backward. I figure it’s about time we put some of what we know to work. What would you think of the idea of turning on the big vision screen?”

  Captain Shirey looked at him dubiously. “To run the scanners, you’ve got to have power—and that means turning on the main pile.”

  “So what, Wimpy? All we have to do is just like the manuals say. We’ve done it a dozen times in dry runs.”

  The other still looked doubtful. “If you make a mistake when you’re just pretending, nothing blows up. And anyway, just being up here would get us in enough trouble, if anybody caught us. If we start turning things on and maybe break something, then we’d really catch it. Why can’t we just keep on pretending the same way we have been?”

  “Because,” said his commander patiently, “you can only learn so much by pretending—and we’ve learned all we can that way. We’ve got to get some practice done on the real thing if we’re going to be ready when the invaders come. There won’t be any pretending then, not when you got to stand back and watch your own sister being dragged off to be a slave. You just think about that for a while.”

  WIMPY dutifully began to think about it but, somehow, the only reaction he could get to the idea of his sister being stolen was one of relief rather than regret. “They take old Emily, they’ll be sorry,” he said finally.

  Bill started to nod agreement, then caught himself. “Look,” he said, “four times now we’ve sneaked out my father’s old flyer while he was out of town and slipped up here—and all we’ve done is pretend. We got to start really running things if we’re going to get trained right. The invaders come in and who else is going to stop them? Those pooping little police boats with a ten-mile ceiling and maybe one medium paralyzer on them?” Wimpy still looked doubtful. “You let me do the worrying,” said Bill. “I got more right to be here than most people.”

  Halfway between Earth and Venus there was a sudden shimmer as the Vegan ship slipped out of warp into normal space. It hung motionless for a minute as the alien commander checked his instruments and his armament.

  Looking at it one way, William Faust did have more right than most to be on board the Glorious. In his room at home, under his bed, was his great-grandfather’s space-chest. In it lay the worn diary that recorded the first high hopes when the Glorious took off, then the boredom, then the bitterness and disillusionment that came when Alpha Centauri was found to be a barren and lifeless system.

  Bill Faust knew it almost by heart, that chronicle of the young man who went out on the first—and last—starship ever to be constructed, of the m
iddle-aged man who arrived, of the old man who returned to find space-flight a thing of the past and the reports of the expedition that had consumed his life used as final proof of the DeWitt hypothesis that there could be no life on other systems.

  There had been a time when those whose dreams were strong enough to stand the shock of crossing over into what adults called “the real world” had some place to go, once they reached the other side. For these, being young was a time of waiting and training for the day when new strength could be tested against whatever lay beyond the safe frontiers. First, seas and continents, then the upper air and the pushing of limits toward the Moon, the planets, until, these once conquered, young eyes turned toward the beckoning beacons of the distant stars themselves.

  There had been such a time, but it existed no longer. With the coming of the warpers—those strange contraptions that could so twist the fabric of space that Man and his materials could instantaneously be moved from any place where there was a transmitter to any other where there was a receiver—Mars and Venus were nearer than the corner drugstore. Once they had been set up, space-flight died. There was no point in spending months traveling from one planet to another, when one could do it in a fraction of a second, merely by stepping in one door and out the other.

  THE one star that could be reached had been reached.

  The Glorious had returned to slam shut the last gateway to adventure. As for the other stars, they were distant lonely things that hung so far out of reach, only astronomers any longer viewed them with more than casual interest. The great mathematicians and physicists had proved so conclusively that a faster-than-light drive was impossible, nobody bothered to check their figures any longer.

  Life was snug and easy and pleasant—and, above all, sensible. Only the youngsters still dreamed of danger and the search for strange things in far places. And, since the best of the psychologists said that a temporary sojourn into a world of make-believe was important to the growing process, the young ones were permitted to assume such strange warlike disguises as were necessary to take them into imaginary worlds of high adventure—providing, of course, that they weren’t too noisy about it and emerged in time for supper with clean hands and clean faces . . .

  “Check pile controls!” As usual, Colonel Faust had won his point.

  “All on full safety, sir,” said Second Lieutenant Randolph with a most unmilitary quaver in his voice. He was the most junior of the junior officers, a precocious nine-year-old who was four or five years younger than the rest of the Guardsmen and he had an unfortunate habit of bursting into tears during moments of stress. He was already sniffling slightly, when Bill came over to check the control positions against the diagram he’d memorized.

  With a curt nod of approval, Colonel Faust went over to his position at the coordination board and grasped the red handle of the master pile control.

  “Power on!”

  He pulled back slowly until the lever clicked into the normal operation slot. In the pile room of the Glorious, control rods slid smoothly back until they were checked by the safety catches. There was a faint hum of transformers as the long-neglected ship warmed to life.

  “Battle screen on!”

  A Guardsman frowned in concentration and slowly began to throw the switches that linked the great screen with the scanners set in the outer hull. There was a flicker and then a few tiny white spots blinked on to show meteors large enough to be detected. But, aside from these, there was nothing to show that the screen had been powered.

  Colonel Faust gave a grunt of satisfaction, rose to his feet and faced his Guardsmen.

  “Your attention, gentlemen,” he said in a tone of command.

  TEN grim-faced Guardsmen leaned forward expectantly as he pointed dramatically to the empty screen.

  “As you can see, the Plutonian fleet is approaching in a cone formation with their heaviest ships at the tip. These are carrying a deadly new weapon, the Q-ray. Our mission is to break through the cone and destroy the flagship, from which the Warlord of Pluto is personally directing the operations of his fleet. Earth expects every man to do his duty.” He paused and then barked, “Engage!”

  THE Guardsmen hunched at their positions as their imaginations suddenly populated the empty screen with a hurtling cone of enemy ships.

  Many were the fierce encounters in the next few hours, and close were the brushes with death. When the Glorious tore through the outer cone of Plutonian ships and came within range of the shimmering web of Q-rays, the Guardsmen reacted to the fiery touch in quite different fashions. Their Colonel had invented the new weapon on the spur of the moment and there had been no chance for agreement as to just what its effects would be.

  Bill remained seated at the coordination board, his face set in a mask of heroic and Promethian suffering. Wimpy, on the other hand, went threshing around on the control room floor, howling that his skin was coming off and that his bones were turning to limp and rubbery things. The rest of the Guards were so impressed by his performance that it wasn’t long before the whole contingent, Bill included, were writhing on the floor like wounded snakes.

  “The Warlord is making a run for it!” Colonel Faust’s voice rang through the general hubbub. “We’ve got to intercept him. Stations!”

  Deaf to all but the call of duty, the dying Guardsmen summoned up strength from some hidden reserve and crawled painfully back to their posts on the supposedly rotting stumps of what once had been arms and legs. Colonel Faust fought for five minutes before he was able to reach the master controls. A wavering cheer went up as they once more began to creep up on the ship of the tyrant. He fought back desperately, his great guns hammering shot after shot into the Glorious, but still the gallant ship drove on, her mighty drive tubes incandescent under the overload.

  “Prepare to ram!”

  As the Glorious went into her final dive, the game was suddenly terminated by a harsh clangor from the proximity alarm and a red dot jumped into being in the upper left corner of the vision screen. As it crawled toward the center, alarm after alarm went off until the control room was filled with a clanging din.

  “Shut those things off!” yelled Bill. Jimmie Ozaki, the Guardsman at the detection station, kicked over a series of switches and the noise suddenly stopped.

  “What is it?”

  Jimmie stared at the instruments in front of him, as if he’d never seen them before. “If I’m reading these things right, whatever it is would be about fifteen thousand miles out and coming in fast, I’d say. It just popped up out of no place. So I guess I’m not reading these things right.”

  Bill went over and made a quick check. “You are.”

  “Couldn’t be a meteor, could it?” asked Wimpy.

  Bill shook his head. “If it was, it would show up as a white dot. Red indicates radiation of some sort. The only thing I can figure out is that somebody is out there in a flyer.”

  “Ain’t no flyer can travel that fast,” objected Ozaki. “And how come it popped up like it did? Even if it were coasting along with its drive off, its mass would still have registered on the detectors.”

  Bill stared up at the screen uneasily. “Could be that the scanners are out of kilter somehow. You keep checking, Jimmie.”

  FIVE minutes later, it was reported as being only a hundred miles away and slowing rapidly. And then Jimmie Ozaki let out a sudden yell. “It’s hitting us with some sort of a high frequency beam. Looks as if it might be in the communication band.”

  “Try and tune it in, but don’t answer.”

  The Guardsman at the communication station leaned over his controls. A moment later a speaker came to life. A hissing stream of sibilants came from it, sounds like nothing that had ever been produced by human vocal apparatus. The message was repeated twice and then the speaker went silent. So did the Guardsmen.

  Bill was the first to speak. There was a nervous smile on his face when he did. “It must be a police boat,” he said in a strained voice. “They must of spotted us sn
eaking up here and they’re trying to throw a scare into us. We’re in for it, now.”

  “That’s no police boat, and you know it,” whispered Wimpy. “The flyers they got couldn’t go out that far, even if they wanted to.”

  “It’s moving in again.”

  Bill swung quickly to the detection station. “Can you pick that up on visual?”

  “I’ll try.”

  The detection screen blanked out for a minute, then lit up again to show a silver speck hanging in darkness.

  “Crank her up!”

  As power was thrown into the magnifiers, the strange ship swelled in size until it filled half the screen, a gleaming sphere that was like nothing that was recognizable.

  “Still think that’s a police boat?” said Wimpy in a strained voice.

  Bill didn’t answer. He watched in horrified fascination as the strange ship hurtled toward the Glorious. It looked as if it were on a collision course, but it suddenly began to decelerate and then, finally, curved into a path that put it in orbit around the Glorious.

  “How close now?”

  Ozaki, at the detection station, had trouble getting his eyes off the screen long enough to read his instruments.

  “Less than a mile,” he said finally.

  “What now?” squeaked somebody.

  Nobody had an immediate answer. The Guardsmen looked at each other and then at the suddenly strange control room, where everything now seemed to be constructed on a scale several sizes too large for them. It was a place for men, not for boys. They all turned to Bill and waited for him to say something.