Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  Anthos said, “I’m in.”

  “Great,” said Jennings. “Now, here’s the plan. We go back into our tunnel in half an hour. The coal is almost exhausted, and the tunnel is due to be sealed off in another month. We’ve found that five kilometers down the tunnel it reaches almost to a bend in a sealed tunnel from the old workings, and we’ve cut a small tunnel to it and stored explosives and food and equipment and some air tanks and even an air compressor. The tunnel has a lot of white damp in it, but we think we can get all of us through it okay. And at the other end we got a small tunnel to the surface.”

  Anthos looked at him and said, “So you go up to the surface and die.”

  “No. It opens into the damnedest valley you ever saw, kind of sealed off from the rest of the planet’s surface. We can live there. It won’t be easy, but we can stay alive and work to make the valley more livable. We figure in five years we can convert the valley to a place even better than Earth. That’s why we need all the skills of all these people.” Jennings waved at the group around him. “See what we do? We blow up the tunnel we’re working in, right to the surface so it fills with white damp. But we’re in the abandoned tunnel, which we’ve blown shut. The guards will just take a look in the working tunnel, and when they find it filled with white damp they’ll figure we’re all dead and just seal it off and forget about us. Life’s cheap here. What do the guards care for a few dozen prisoners? So we go on to our valley and make it livable.”

  Anthos’ hand shook as he smoothed his mustache, but he nodded and said, “You need me to monitor the atmosphere, and things like that, I suppose. You have the makings for a gas chromatograph?”

  Jennings, noting the shaking hand, put his own hand on Anthos’ shoulder and said, “We’ve got a good supply of equipment. We’ll make out.” He looked around and said, “In fifteen minutes we move out. Take everything you can stuff in your clothes.”

  The group scattered, leaving Anthos standing alone. He felt very much alone as he looked for the first time at the dome that served as living quarters for the prisoners. It was dark and smelly, and quiet, with a tang in the air that he knew was a trace of the white damp, seeping into the dome from outside. Bunks with webbing for mattresses formed a circle around the outer perimeter of the dome, sticking straight out from the walls. Everything was smudged gray to black from the ubiquitous coal dust. He put his hands in his pockets, and as he felt how empty they were and realized he had absolutely nothing in the world except the dirty clothes he stood in, depression welled up inside him so strong he began to gasp. In an instant Jennings was at his side, arm around him again, saying nothing. Anthos forced himself to breathe normally. He said to Jennings, “How do you stand the noise level in here?”

  “You get used to it. Okay. Time to go.” The group went out the lock to the sealed vehicle which took them to the lock at the mouth of the workings. They entered and rode for an hour to the end of the tunnel and got to work with pick and shovel. The guards got back on the tram and left. What happened then was a nightmare of unreality for Anthos.

  With practiced speed the group moved a mile back down the tunnel and planted a series of explosives. They littered the floor with unusable junk from the mining gear, even including a blown air tank. They opened the small side tunnel and planted a charge in it. Climbing over the charge, they all crawled into the side tunnel, panting from the exertion, choking on the foul air, taking turns breathing from the tanks. Dimly, Anthos heard the roar of the explosion and cowered from the wave of coal particles and rock dust that engulfed them and threatened to suffocate them all. In the sealed tunnel the dust was better but the white damp was worse. The group shouldered all the equipment they could carry, and took turns pulling and dragging the air compressor. Every hour they stopped, fueled the compressor with powdered coal, recharged the air tanks, and went on. The buzzing in Anthos’ ears grew louder until he could no longer hear the harsh panting from his companions. Everything grew blurred and his muscles began to twitch and refuse to obey his will. He reached the point where he could barely stand. He put a hand on the cold wall to steady himself. He felt someone ease him to the floor of the tunnel and hold the facepiece of an air tank to his nose. Slowly his twitching muscles stilled and his breathing became normal. In five minutes he was able to sit up and look around. Jennings said to him, “The others are opening the tunnel to the valley.”

  Anthos found his voice and said, “At least we’re out of prison.”

  “We’ll miss it, but we’ll manage. We’ll miss it. But we’ll get back there a few years from now.”

  Anthos had started to turn away, but then Jennings’ words sank in. He turned back. “What?”

  “Oh, yeah. I didn’t mention it before. Once we get the valley in shape, we’ll take over the whole planet. Not many guards. With the matter transmitter out of commission it will take Earth fifty years to get a ship here. We’ll be ready for them by then.” Anthos heaved himself to his feet, indignant protests forming in his mind, but a call from the darkness said, “Tunnel’s through. Let’s go.”

  Jennings patted Anthos on the shoulder, saw that he was able to walk, and went into the small mouth of the tunnel and worked his way up. Anthos had to follow, and then he stepped out onto the surface and looked around.

  He was standing near one edge of a giant, natural saucer measuring some six kilometers in diameter. A ring of mountains enclosed the saucer, and the shaft through which he had just emerged lay near the base of the south rim. Scattered around the rim of mountains were spots of orange light, marking the raw throats of active volcanoes. Plumes of steam and smoke poured out of fissures all over the floor of the valley. The entire valley was filled with a light haze that almost obscured the sun overhead. Yet Anthos knew that without the haze the valley would be unlivable under the unfiltered, harsh radiation of the sun. And he could breathe. He could stand on the surface of Hel and breathe. When he inhaled deeply, he coughed, for there was the barest trace of white damp in the air. But he could breathe. He looked at the floor of the valley more carefully. A great, clear lake lay in the center, measuring perhaps three kilometers in diameter. It was fed by a wide, rushing stream that sprang from the rocks halfway up the east rim. And bordering both the stream and the lake was a broad belt of greenery. Anthos was too far away to see the nature of the green things growing, but some of it stood higher than the rest and looked very much like trees.

  Jennings said to all of them, “Well, there it is. May not be much but at least it’s livable. And we’ll make it much better. We’ve got almost all the raw materials we will ever need, right here. So let’s not waste time. We’ll break up into groups. One group will find us temporary places to live. Another will go back and finish bringing all the stuff we hid in the tunnel. Another’ll start looking for anything here we can eat. Another. . . .” Jennings went on, and then picked people for the groups. Ten minutes after they arrived in the valley they scattered to start their work. They worked until they could no longer stand, and then they rested. They worked harder than they had ever worked as prisoners mining coal.

  The days blended into weeks and months, and in four years they accomplished what they had thought would take them five.

  Jennings called them together in their outdoors meeting place and said, “Well, I think we are ready to move on to the next step. The valley is in good, livable shape now, and except for one critical trace compound, we are more than self-sufficient. And we can get new supplies of that compound when we take over the main camp. We’re ready to move.”

  Anthos said, “I’ll take the group that handles the demolitions. I want to make certain that no one gets hurt. That all right with you, Colonel?”

  “Wouldn’t want it any other way.” Jennings smiled at Anthos, smiled at the changes four years had made in him. Anthos was lean as a slat, broad as a board, all sinew and whipcord. His mustache had grown greater and rattier than ever, and his large, liquid brown eyes missed nothing as they snapped over the landscape. Anthos
, the gas chromatographer, had evolved into Jennings’ second-in-command. Jennings continued, “Set it up, Petro. Do it tomorrow.”

  The operation went smoothly. The guards were not very alert and were easily enticed out of the transmitter building. After the explosion, Anthos’ men quickly went in and carefully fused all remaining components. Then, from a safe distance, Anthos explained that all of them, guards and prisoners alike, were totally marooned, and that the only salvation for any of them was to join Jennings’ group in the valley. Wisely, Anthos told them not to make up their minds now, but that he would be back the next day for their answer; Anthos wanted it to sink in that there would be no more supplies coming from Earth, that the only Earth-type atmosphere existed in the valley, that even the air in the domes would slowly go bad.

  When Anthos returned the next day, everybody was ready to join him in the trip to the valley. The guards were huddled with their weapons in one group, and the prisoners were in a separate group. Anthos collected the weapons and made it clear that they were all in this together, guards and prisoners alike. It took three days to get all the people from the site of the prison domes to the valley. The guards were moved last, and Anthos stayed with them. He watched their faces as they came up out of the tunnel into the valley and looked around. Then he took them to the meeting place where Jennings was waiting to talk to them. They sat down, hundreds of them. From where they sat, they had a fine view of the valley.

  Jennings waved out over the valley and said, so all of them could hear, “There it is. Almost perfect Earthside conditions.” The haze and smoke in the valley were so thick the rays of the sun could no longer penetrate. Long streaks of yellow flames licked along the surfaces of exposed cold veins, burning, pouring dense clouds of smoke into the air. Jennings said, “Just inhale. Good sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides, plenty of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. When we first got here, the sky was blue—think of that!—you could hardly breathe for the oxygen in the air. Why, that white damp was like the Earth’s atmosphere seven hundred years ago, before our forefathers changed it. The sun shone right through here most of the time. Can you imagine what it was like? Look at the lake down there—it was as blue as the sky! Fortunately we found some phosphate deposits, so we loaded the lake with them. Just look at it now—rich, green, nutritious water.” The lake was jelly-thick with algae, and bubbles of marsh gas could be seen breaking the surface here and there. Jennings said, “We even have fish in there, but we only began to extract mercury two months ago, and we haven’t yet been able to bring the mercury content of the carp up to the point where they are edible. Another few months. Feel the temperature? We’re up to one hundred degrees F. now and going up all the time. It’ll soon be normal; there’s plenty of carbon dioxide in the air now, and we have a greenhouse effect. We’ve only got one immediate problem. We can’t yet make a critical dietary compound, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethame. But it is nonbiodegradable, and there is an enormous amount in the sewage deposits of the prison camp, so we’ll go back and extract the DDT and use it as a food supplement until we can make it. Like it so far?”

  Guards and prisoners alike nodded and clapped. Jennings held up his hand for silence. “The best is yet to come. What we’ve done here we can do to the rest of the planet. We’ve done some exploring, and there are extensive oil pools available. We can flood the streams, rivers, lakes and oceans with oil to kill off most of the harmful oxygen-producing organisms. We’ll burn open coal veins to cut off the harmful sun rays and give us carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and the sulfur compounds we need in the air. By eliminating the native flora and fauna we ought to be able to reclaim huge portions of the planet, or maybe even the whole thing. We’ll spray with DDT so the plants and animals will take it up and become nutritious. It won’t take too long to get a proper greenhouse effect working for the whole planet. We’ll make a second Earth here. Are you with us?”

  A roar of approval went up, cheers, whistles, shouting. On and on it went. A guard leaped from his seat in the front row, went up to Jennings and shook his hand and turned to the assembled crowd. They slowly quieted as they saw he wanted to say something. He shouted, “Four months ago, just four months ago, I came to Hel from Earth. And I want to tell you now that this place,” he waved his hand out toward the valley, “makes me feel more at home than any place I’ve been since I left New York City. I say we make the whole planet livable.”

  The cheers were deafening.

  EARLY BIRD

  I

  WHEN the leader of a scout patrol fell ill two hours before takeoff and Kurt Dixon was given command, he was delighted. More than a year had passed since the Imperial Space Marines had mopped up the remnants of the old Galactic Protectorate, and in spite of his pleasure at his newly awarded oak leaves, he was tired of being a glorified office boy in the Inspector General’s office while the Kierians were raiding the Empire’s trade routes with impunity. After a few hours in space, however, his relief began to dwindle when he found there was no way to turn off Zelda’s voice box.

  Zelda was the prototype of a new kind of command computer, the result of a base psychologist’s bright idea that giving the ship’s cybernetic control center a human personality tailored to the pilot’s idea of an ideal companion would relieve the lonely tedium of being cooped up for weeks on end in a tiny one-man scout. Unfortunately for Kurt, however, his predecessor, Flight Leader Osaki, had a taste for domineering women, and the computer had been programmed accordingly. There hadn’t been time for replacement with a conventional model before the flight had to scramble.

  Kierian raids on Empire shipping had only begun six months before, but already the Empire was in serious trouble. Kierians bred like fruit flies, looked like mutated maggots, and ate people. Nobody knew where they came from when they came raiding in. Nobody knew where they went when they left with their loot. All that was known was that they had a weapon that was invincible and that any attempt to track down a raiding party to the Kierian base was as futile as it was suicidal. Ships that tried it never came back.

  But this time it looked as if the Empire’s luck might have changed. Kurt whistled happily as he slowly closed in on what seemed to be a damaged Kierian destroyer, waiting for the other scouts of his flight to catch up with him.

  Zzzzzt!

  The alien’s fogger beam hit him square on for the third time. This close it should have slammed him into immediate unconsciousness, but all it did was produce an annoying buzz-saw keening in his neural network.

  Flick! Six red dots appeared on his battle screen as the rest of his flight warped out of hyperspace a hundred miles to his rear.

  An anxious voice came over his intercom. “Kurt! You fogged?”

  “Nope. Come up and join the picnic, children. Looks like us early birds are just about to have us some worms for breakfast.”

  “He hits you with his fogger, you’re going to be the breakfast. Get the hell out of there while you still have a chance!”

  Kurt laughed. “This one ain’t got much in the way of teeth. Looks like he’s had some sort of an engine-room breakdown because his fogger strength is down a good ninety percent. He’s beamed me several times, and all he’s been able to do so far is give me a slight hangover.”

  “Then throw a couple of torps into him before he can rev up enough to star hop.”

  “Uh, uh! We’re after bigger game. I’ve got a solid tracer lock on him and I’ve a hunch, crippled as he seems to be, that he’s going to run for home. If he does, and we can hang on to him, we may be able to find the home base of those bastards. If just one of us can get back with the coordinates, the heavies can come in and chuck a few planet-busters. Hook on to me and follow along. I think he’s just about to jump.”

  Flic!

  As the tight-arrow formation jumped back into normal space, alarm gongs began clanging in each of the tiny ships. Kurt stared at the image on his battle screen and let out a low whistle. They’d come out within fifty miles of the Kierian base! And it
wasn’t a planet. It was a mother ship, a ship so big that the largest Imperial space cruiser would have looked like a gnat alongside it. And from it, like hornets from a disturbed nest, poured squadron after squadron of Kierian destroyers.

  “Bird leader to fledglings! Red alert! Red alert! Scramble random 360. One of us has to stay clear long enough to get enough warper revs to jump. Zelda will take over if I get fogged! I . . .” The flight leader’s voice trailed off as a narrow cone of jarring vibration flicked across his ship, triggering off a neural spasm that hammered him down into unconsciousness. The other scouts broke formation like a flight of frightened quail and zigzagged away from the Kierian attackers, twisting in a desperate attempt to escape the slashing fogger beams. One by one the other pilots were slammed into unconsciousness. Putting the other ships on slave circuit, Zelda threw the flight on emergency drive. Needles emerged from control seats and pumped anti-G drugs into the comatose pilots.

  A quick calculation indicated that they couldn’t make a subspace jump from their present position. They were so close to the giant sun that its gravitational field would damp the warper nodes. The only thing to do was to run and find a place to hide until the pilots recovered consciousness. Then, while the others supplied a diversion, there was a chance that one might be able to break clear. The computer doubted that the Imperial battle fleet would have much of a chance against something as formidable as the Kierian mother ship, but that was something for fleet command to decide. Her job was to save the flight. There were five planets in the system, but only the nearest to the sun, a cloud-smothered giant, was close enough to offer possible sanctuary.

  Setting a corkscrew evasion course and ignoring the fogger beams that lanced at her from the pursuing ships, she streaked for the protective cloud cover of the planet, programming the computers of the six ships that followed her on slave circuit to set them down at widely separated, randomly selected points. Kierian tracer beams would be useless once the flight was within the violent and wildly fluctuating magnetic field of the giant planet.