Adventures in Time and Space

by Raymond J Healy

  What were the space ships inside those hangars like? Had he not been a bit too cocky in his assurance that he could navigate one? They might operate by entirely different principles from those he was familiar with‌—‌like the air-car he was in, for instance. He might stand like a child before an atomic engine in the presence of their motivating device.

  As he hesitated, a preposterous idea invaded his mind. He rejected it at once, but it returned, and soon, as he faced it, he began to glow with the possibilities. Why not try for the Mutrantian ship? He was at least thoroughly familiar with it, and its operation was automatic in flight and foolproof. The one great problem was the matter of size. The ship had been made to a scale ten times that of the Earthmen’s, and that meant that such a comparative midget as he might face extraordinary difficulties making the trip in it.

  In the cool stillness five thousand feet in the air Allison laughed. He had the answer for that. It would be the Titan ship, by all means. He much preferred it, now.

  But first he had to get it, and that might not be so easy. Especially if one of the Titans was inside. He lowered the elevating lever and dropped cleanly down.

  At three thousand feet, even at one, no guard or other field attendant showed. The port looked deserted. “I can make a pretty good guess why,” Allison told himself with a grin. “Big reception over in town. Thousands getting ready for the appearance of one Doctor Arthur Allison, pick of Earth!

  “Earth’s dumb-bells!” he corrected.

  He lowered still more; hovered motionless fifty feet over the mammoth length of silver. A fifth of a mile, it lay stretched out. It was three hundred feet in the beam.

  He set his ship in a glide down and around the gently curving flank. The ground rose to meet him; the side turned sheer. He saw that the midship port was open. A gangway from the field reached up and touched its lower lip.

  There was still no sign of any one about. He lowered his car to the yawning forty-foot-wide cavern; peered; turned his ship and nosed through. Beyond the port lock, seventy feet within, he sunk to a landing and stepped out.

  He was within, but not safe. There might be a Mutrantian, or a guard. He would have to reconnoiter.

  For ten minutes he disappeared into the dark bowels of the ship, and when he emerged he was dragging the limp form of a man, whom he placed on the top of the gangway. There had been a guard.

  A few seconds later he had returned to his car and ascended the forward wall. Faintly, he saw what he wanted. Hovering motionless, he reached out and pushed hard on two buttons the size of saucers. Behind him the two massive lock doors knifed closed, enveloping him within pitchy darkness.

  Then, with extreme of caution, foot by foot, he directed his car ahead. After a little he turned right, toward where a dim light came from the control room, far up in the nose of the ship. More rapidly now he proceeded, through the long, longitudinal passageway and into the Gargantuan reach of wanly lighted control room. He climbed higher, and aimed for the panel of huge disks that were the control buttons.

  Hovering by their side, he reached out and pushed at three he knew. The floor started rapidly to rise. The ship was lifting. With all the skill he had, he met the floor.

  V

  Allison did not gloat at his luck in getting off, for it was far from certain that he would be able to win clear. Thousands of people would see the ship rise, and that would bring quick action. He had no idea what the offensive weapons of the natives might be. At the worse, they might bring him down with some destroying ray; but he counted on their not doing that. He was supposed to be a valuable property, and they unquestionably would want to take him alive. He could afford to chance their powers.

  In his comparatively diminutive size, and faced by the danger of quick discovery, it had been impossible to investigate the stores of the ship before taking off, but in this he did not take so great a chance as may be thought. There were, primarily, only the factors of air, temperature, food, water, starting power, and navigation, and in all of these the probabilities were in his favor.

  He was so tiny that there should be enough air in the craft to last him for a long trip even if the air-renewers were idle. The temperature was maintained automatically. As for food and water, the ship would at least have the “iron rations” and reserve tanks of water which interplanetary flying regulations required ships at all times to carry against emergency.

  That the ship had the necessary starting power was already proved by the fact that she had lifted and her acceleration was being maintained. She was of the more recent type that utilized solar rays in transit, and there was therefore no concern over energy once she had got out into the airless void where the sun’s rays shone always burning hot. Navigation was all but automatic and would not concern him until he was sure he was out of the atmosphere.

  His immediate concern was light, and to get it he would use the unusual tool provided to his hand‌—‌the air-car. It would be a space ship within a space ship. It would serve him for the transportation. He laughed at his audacity in having thought of it.

  Carefully he took off, and rose into the dangerous dimness that enveloped him on all sides. One error with the controls and he might dash into a wall, or the ceiling, and the end of his career as a scientist-adventurer would be a hundred-foot fall to the floor of what would turn out to be his coffin. He knew about where the switch was, but the multiplied height and the darkness made finding it critical. It was necessary to control his air-car with one hand while he felt with the other over the surface of the wall.

  It took a little time, but eventually he found it. Using all his strength, he turned it on.

  At sight of the vast control room under full light he got a new sense of his audacity‌—‌and his insignificance. Around him stretched a chamber three hundred feet long, and fully two thirds that in width and height. He had lived with the Mutrantians, and so had experience with interiors multiplied in size, but these dimensions for the control room of a space ship took his breath away. The chart table alone reached thirty feet up from the floor. Only an air-car would so much as enable him to get around.

  He decided to investigate the food situation while the ship was getting out of the atmosphere. Carefully turning his car, the ethnologist glided down to within ten feet of the floor, and from that height skimmed back through the doorway into the corridor, where he came to a stop amidships, on the port side, in front of the galley door.

  Here, for the first time, he had trouble. The door was closed, and there was the job of opening it. He found the handle, a curved, thick, iron bar more than a yard long, without difficulty, but all the strength of his right arm would not serve to lift it. He rested a moment and thought it over. Any tools he might find up in the tool locker would be far too heavy for him to work with from the car, so he decided to use the car itself.

  Delicately maneuvering, he got the knobbed end of the handle hooked over the footboard of his car. Then, ready, he raised the elevator control of the car and at the same time directed its nose hard inward. The handle lifted and the door opened.

  “Problem and solution,” he thought, pleased, pushing the door back with the nose of his craft as elephants were used to push circus freight cars around. Allison prided himself on his capacity to solve problems.

  Inside, there was again the need of finding the light switch, and this time, the room being in pitch darkness, he had far more trouble; but at length he found it and turned it on. No fresh provisions were in evidence anywhere, so he skimmed across to the row of gigantic lockers where canned food and water should be found.

  Every locker was closed, so once more Allison used the car to pry up one of the handles, this time pulling, instead of pushing. He found this harder‌—‌and more dangerous. For as the door started slowly to open under the force he was exerting, the end of the handle slipped off the floor board and he suddenly found himself hurtling at dizzying speed into the opposite wall. Only in the nick of time did he cut his controls and zoom, to lose m
omentum at the ceiling.

  “Phew!” he exclaimed. He realized that he was getting dull and tired. He could not have come out of that long period of enforced unconsciousness with much reserve of strength.

  He glided down to the locker and looked in. There were the cans, just as in the Earthmen’s ships‌—‌rows and rows of giant tin containers, stacked a hundred feet to the ceiling. Synthetic food tablets, all of one kind, from the labels in English.

  With more care he opened the locker adjoining and found there similar cans of water. He felt considerably relieved. He was certain, at least, to eat and drink.

  He now flew back to the main cabin for the one last thing to be done. The ship until then had been flying outward blindly; it remained for him to set it on its course for Earth. He climbed his little craft over to the great chart table to the forward end of the room where were the banks of dials and the rows of colored buttons whereby the ship was controlled.

  A glance at a dial half as large as his ship showed a negligible amount of air outside, so he advanced thirty feet to hover like a humming bird in front of a green button with a large 3 on its face, and, feeling a little sentimental, reached out and pushed it in. Farther on he pushed in another, which would give him the ship’s maximum acceleration. Then he glided to a landing on the immense flat top of the chart table and sat down. The rest was up to the ship’s automatic navigator.

  It was equal to the job. Its ultra-sensitive receivers picked up and identified every major planetary body in the solar system and sent the information through an overlapping labyrinth of seventy-two circuits where every navigation factor of location, spacial relation, planetary gravital pulls, ship’s speed and acceleration and deceleration, planetary speeds and orbits, ship’s destination, and so forth, were second by second electrically arranged and coordinated into the necessary resultant course; and it put the ship on that course, and corrected infinitesimal strayings, and would without attention start deceleration at the proper time, and bring the ship gently to ground in a place reserved for it in Earth’s great space port at New York. All that Allison had to do, therefore, was set the buttons for destination and acceleration.

  The ethnologist was tired and lay down where he was. He had done all that was possible. If his enemies followed and took steps to destroy him, it was too bad, but there was nothing he could do about it. This was a private ship and was equipped with no defensive screens or ray batteries.

  At that, death was preferable to life with his normal instincts so altered by their devilish ingenuity that he would be a happy slave to them for the rest of his days. A man had an inalienable right to his own personality, and as a free citizen of the Federation of Earth he was never going to submit to having his taken away. Miss Brown wasn’t so bad, but what if they were to marry him to one of those chinless damsels? What of his career in ethnology, so brilliantly started?

  Well, the outcome was now in the hands of the gods.

  He was surprised at how fatigued he was. He was hungry and thirsty, too, but he’d have to attend to that later; he hadn’t strength just now to undertake the task of getting stuff out of those gigantic tins; or even to go back in the darkness of the stern and seek out one of the mammoth beds that would be there. He would sleep where he was.

  He did sleep, a bearded doll on the chart table thirty feet up off the floor. He was almost the length of the sharp-pointed dividers a dozen yards away, and against the ruler that lay by his side he measured exactly six inches.

  Allison awoke stiff and aching but refreshed, and in high good humor. He seemed to have slept for some time and was not yet burned to a cinder by a heat-ray, or dissolved into nothingness by a disintegrator; the solar motors of the ship were whining faintly but evenly; and before him stretched an adventure such as no man had ever had before.

  He was going home. He was going to arrive safely. And he was going to descend spectacularly, in the greatest space ship ever built, with a story that would set three thousand million tongues awagging, and with a marvelous little air-car whose motive power was a mystery that all the physichemists of Earth would pounce happily on until they had its secret unraveled for Earth’s own use.

  And on the way he would have the pleasure of meeting, with his wits, all the bizarre problems which his discrepancy to the size of the ship would bring.

  Buoyantly he jumped into his air-car and guided it to the galley; a drink first, and then food. But the water tins were twelve feet high, of tough, thick metal, sealed tight, and must have weighed, each one, several tons. Here was his first problem. The best solution lay in melting his way in with a hand heat-ray. He found one, a cylinder eight feet long and two thick, in one of the control-room tool lockers, after he had lifted up its lid with the help of his car.

  With lengths of rope he found there, and again aided by the lifting power of his car, he got the heat-ray out of the box and into the middle of the galley floor. Next problem: how to get it aimed at the top edge of the bottom tin in one of the stacks. He flew back to the tool box and brought back, slung underneath, a seven-foot file. Then, changing the ropes to the heat-my again, he lifted it to rest on the file; and after many trials, and getting out of his car each time to sight along the cylinder, he got it at approximately the angle he wanted.

  He had taken pains to leave the push-button switch facing upward, and now he vaulted to a seat on the rear end of the cylinder and worked his way up to it. When he got there he pushed to his feet and stepped on it with all his weight.

  A thin pinkish beam speared out, and a glow appeared on the side of the tin, a little lower than he had wanted. In seconds the metal melted, and before Allison could remove his foot a geyser of steam and scalding water shot out, spattering the floor in all directions. Some of it hit his arm, burning him painfully even through the sleeve, and causing him to lose his balance and slip to the floor.

  The heat over there was terrific, but when the water in the tin had cooled, he would be able to get a drink. He smiled, a little grimly. Opening that tin had taken three hours.

  While it was cooling he repeated the process on a tin of synthetic food in the locker adjoining, this time stepping briefly on and off the button several times, until he saw that the hole had been made.

  This took another hour. And still he couldn’t approach the lockers. He wiped his forehead and sat down to wait. He was exhausted with his exertions and faint from lack of food. It was not quite the lark he had anticipated, pitting his wits against the problems that arose from his comparative lack of size.

  The little air-car might have meant the difference between life and death. He had called on it heavily for many hours, and had no means of knowing how much longer it would function without its energy giving out. Hereafter, he decided, he would use it as little as possible.

  He lay back, and before he knew it was asleep. When he awoke he found the tins cooled, and ate and dank, and then slept some more. And when he awoke for the third time the long, deadly monotonous routine of his journey began.

  There was nothing to do. The navigation of the ship was entirely automatic, so Allison could have no concern in that. The two tins he had opened had provided him with food and water that would last many times the probable duration of his trip back home. It was highly concentrated, predigested stuff, so that no time could be expended in its preparation. He had no duties. There were nowhere any books which might afford an opportunity for reading or translation.

  Even the solar engine, the automatic navigator, and other machinery were locked inaccessibly in the spaces above the ceiling and below the floor, so he could not watch and study them. Had he dared to use the air-car as much as he wanted, he might in time have opened almost every door, locker, and cubby in the space ship; but many of them, including the radio cubby, were locked, and a few others stubborn, so their contents, if any, could not be reached. Only too well had the big ship been cleaned and all accessories put away after the Mutrantian’s arrival at that land of mystery.

  Men ca
n spend their time sleeping, eating, working, and in recreation. Allison slept all he could; stretched out his meals of sandy, tasteless food tablets as long as he could. He made a bed under the chart table out of one of the coarse sheets from a Mutrantian bunk.

  He started a complicated mechanism which would enable him to hang suspended before the eyepiece of the telescope which gave vision of the outside, and from there manipulate its controls, some of them thirty feet away‌—‌to stop when it became apparent that it would take far longer than the duration of his journey to finish it. And also he, for four or five hours each day, continued his monograph on the Mutrantian Titans by scratching the words laboriously on the floor of the control room with the points of the hundred-pound dividers left on the chart table.

  For the rest of the time he prowled about the floor of the ship, investigating every corner like a rat without a hole. A toy man in those spaces, he skulked about; ran, to keep in condition; paced up and down, integrating ethnological data stored in his memory. And dreamed of the day when the ship would alight on the welcome bosom of Earth, and he’d be freed of the intolerable burden of life under the handicap of surroundings so colossal.

  Days passed so, and weeks. The ship had long since been decelerating. The desire to get back into normal surroundings became an obsession in his mind. To sit at a table again! Friendly faces on the other side! Food, real food! And books, and work, and the theater, and human voices, and spring beds, and tools that would fit the hand, and things that he could lift! Mobility!

  Sometimes he thought of the crowded events of the few short hours in the strange civilization left behind. Jones. The beautiful girl of the numbers. She had really loved him. He hoped she had not got in trouble.