Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The same day!

  Mechanically he pushed himself free of the tube and dog-paddled to the rocks. A couple of people were in sight, strolling or sunbathing. The same people. He remembered them now. It was the same hour. Maybe the same minute.

  His mind felt blank. He pulled himself up onto the rock and sat staring stupidly. The grab at his ankle, the strange place, the old man, the flood, the tests and the doors, one after another, all had no ties to his reality right now. He felt that in a little while he would convince himself that the whole thing had been a dream—but never quite convince himself entirely. To the end of his life he would carry the doubt, and the wonder . . .

  Kelsey entered the water again. He swam out and groped down with his feet. The tube entrance was still where he had left it. Was it always here? Ridiculous. Swimmers and boaters and fishermen would run into it all the time. He ducked under water and opened his eyes and tried to see the—place down there, from the outside, but there was nothing visible except the mouth of the tube, and a few yards of the tube itself in the green murkiness. He gripped the lip of the tube opening, a few feet underwater, and stared downward inside. He could see quite a way.

  He came up for air. The thing, the system, whatever it was, whoever controlled it, had released him, hadn’t it? He had studied and struggled his way out. What more did he want? Revenge? Maybe. He wanted something. He somehow believed that if he reported this to someone it would all be gone when they came to look for it.

  He remembered the final, numberless, unnecessary door he had seen down there. He looked around with longing at his familiar world, drew a deep breath, and went under water.

  GOING down, Kelsey got the same queer sensation at the bend in the tube—as if he was being pulled in a hurry from one place to another. He ignored it and went on.

  The room at the foot of the ladder was just as he remembered it. He faced one way and sighted through a line of open doors, through which he had worked his way to freedom. He faced the other way, toward the final door, unnumbered and unlatched. _ Kelsey stood quietly for a moment with his hand on the door; then pushed gently. The door swung open. Nothing else happened. Light was dim on the other side. He stepped through and found himself facing a thick-looking translucent wall. He could dimly discern an unfamiliar shape moving in the vagueness beyond it.

  “And so the final test is passed,” said a man’s voice from a speaker over Kelsey’s head, making him jump. “The will to open the unnecessary door is yours.”

  Kelsey backed warily away, and stood holding the door open.

  “All right—what’s it all about?” he demanded. “Who are you?”

  “I am an alien here. My shape is not yours. To see me now might disturb you.”

  It was quiet except for Kelsey’s breathing. He found he believed what he had just been told. Outer space. Jokes about little green men. Not funny now.

  “What do you want?” he finally asked. “Why did you put me through all that?”

  “I want to go home,” said the voice simply and eagerly. “I can do things that seem to you very wonderful, but one thing I cannot do without the willing help of another intelligent mind. That is to drive my ship through the great distances, to make timelike the great intervals, to get home—neither to die of age myself on the way, or to find my world old and my people gone when I arrive . . . can you understand? I must pass many stars to get home.”

  “You want help, why don’t you just ask?”

  “YOUR societies must be left to themselves now, for a long time to come, not bothered from outside. This is very important. I must deal only with an individual.

  “You have the ability to help me, proven by my tests. I have violated your rights and subjected you to strange pressures, but I assure you you were never in real danger here. I ask your forgiveness; my need for help is great.”

  Something suggested to Kelsey that he turn around and scramble up the ladder as fast as he could. Somehow he didn’t. “How come you need help?”

  “There has been an accident—I am the only one of my kind left alive in this ship. I will explain it in detail if you wish.”

  “What happened to that old man?” Kelsey demanded suddenly.

  “I created his apparent body from a material sensitive to mental forces, using specifications in your own mind. He appeared to you as a being you knew to be intelligent, yet one far from what you think of as your own kind. Still you took what you believed to be a grave risk in order to protect his life. If you elect to go with me, you will gain knowledge that is not well entrusted to one who holds the lives of other beings in contempt. The old man was your first test. He never existed as a person.”

  “You expect me to believe that—”

  “Watch.”

  An opening dilated in a wall. An amorphous gray lump of stuff flowed out like a huge fat worm onto the floor. It rose, coloring and shaping itself into rags and chains and a smiling Oriental face. It nodded at Kelsey cheerfully; the rags and chains became the rich robe of a mandarin.

  “I can speak through the mouth of this image, if you wish,” the figure said.

  “Better than TV,” said Kelsey, sounding idiotic to himself. “Listen, how do you expect me to help you?”

  “You can, if you are willing. Your mind is good, do not be afraid to let it reach out for things. The work on the trip will not be hard. There will be much time for fun, and I can promise you will not be bored. In four years you can be back on Earth, if you wish, though there is a planet in my home system with people very much like yours which . . .”

  “Four years!” But what’s the difference, Kelsey thought, I’m not going anyway.

  “I regret so long a time. But I and my people will not be ungrateful; there will be compensations . . .”

  “Wait a minute.” Kelsey backed toward the ladder, the mandarin following him with cheerful eyes. “If you’re from—where you say—how come you know so much about us here on Earth? Don’t tell me you got it all out of my mind, all those tests. I didn’t know all that stuff to begin with.”

  The mandarin melted down to a gray puddle and began to flow away. “You are not the first being I have seized, tested, and interviewed on this planet,” said the voice from the speaker. “More than nine hundred others preceded you. By now I know you people well enough to test you for ability to give the help I need. You are not the first to be suitable. But I hope you will be the first to accept. I have been hopping this ship from one large body of water to another for several of your years, keeping it hidden from the mass of your people, whom I do not wish to disturb, trying to find one who can and will help me.”

  KELSEY put a hand on the ladder. Why hadn’t he just stayed on shore once he got away? But now he had to keep asking questions. “What happens to the people who don’t pass your tests? Or who don’t want to go with you?” There was a little silence. Then the voice from the speaker said: “I am sorry. I forget now in my eagerness that you do not know us, and in the light of your experience you are right to be suspicious.

  “I do not mistreat them further. They are set free—as you are now—to return to their normal lives at very nearly the point where I interrupted them. I try to improve their health as some payment for my violation of their constitutional rights.”

  “You mean, if I had just walked away up there—?”

  “I would have bothered you no more. In a very few minutes you would have forgotten the entire incident.”

  “Thanks,” said Kelsey. He turned and went two steps up the ladder quickly, then turned again. “How did you give me all those tests in a few minutes?”

  “If you come with me, you can learn that—and many other things.”

  “I see,” Kelsey muttered. Four years out of a guy’s life . . . but what am I thinking of? I better get out of here before he changes his mind, and locks me in.

  He went up the ladder quickly. Tomorrow would be Tuesday. He would go to the post office, and sort mail. He would do more than that, damn it. He wo
uld go to some of the colleges and see what kind of evening classes they had going.

  But hadn’t the alien said he would forget all about this ship a few minutes after he left it? Maybe he would simply slide back into his old life, and never know the difference. Well, he asked himself angrily, would that be so bad? Besides, a lot of people would miss me if I just took off for four years.

  Who, really?

  He believed the alien, somehow. If the guy had been lying he would have named a shorter time than four years.

  Kelsey reached the top of the tube, and paused with head and shoulders out of water. Miles to the southwest, out of his sight now behind rocks and park and distant skyscrapers, was the Main Post Office, where he might retire in about twenty years. It was really a big place when you were standing near it, or inside it sorting mail. From here it was nothing, a small hidden box, blind and selfcontained under the reach of all the sky.

  “I’M ready. Can we move the ship now? Just by thinking about it?”

  “Yes, we can, as we are working with the machines. Relax. Now hold this pattern in your mind.” A thing indescribable in Earthman’s words came to Kelsey’s consciousness. “Think about it until I come back with another.”

  “Got it.”

  At about midnight, each of the higher-frequency radars working in North America cast on its scope a burst of noise. An alert was called, but nothing further out of the ordinary was observed.

  And no one on Earth attributed the event to the making timelike of a great interval.

  END

  THE LONG WAY HOME

  It’s a long way home from outer space—especially if you have to walk it!

  WHEN Marty first saw the thing it was nearly dead ahead, half a million miles away, a tiny green blip that repeated itself every five seconds on the screen of his distant search radar.

  He was four billion miles from Sol and heading out, working his way slowly through a small swarm of rock chunks that swung in a slow sun-orbit out there beyond Pluto, looking for valuable minerals in a concentration that would make mining profitable.

  The thing on his radar screen looked quite small and therefore not too promising. But, as it was almost in his path, no great effort would be required to investigate. For all he knew, it might be solid germanium. And nothing better was in sight at the moment.

  Marty leaned back in the control seat and said: “We’ve got one coming up, baby.” He had no need to address himself any more exactly. Only one other human was aboard the Clementine, or, to his knowledge, within the better part of a couple of billion miles.

  Laura’s voice answered through a speaker, from the kitchen two decks below.

  “Oh, close? Have we got time for breakfast?”

  Marty studied the radar. “About five hours if we maintain speed. Hope it won’t be a waste of energy to decelerate and look the thing over.” He gave Clem’s main computer the problem of finding the most economical engine use to approach his find and reach zero velocity relative to it.

  “Come and eat!”

  “All right.” He and the computer studied the blip together for a few seconds. Then the man, not considering it anything of particular importance, left the control room to have breakfast with his bride of three months. As he walked downstairs in the steadily-maintained artificial gravity, he heard the engines starting.

  TEN hours later he examined his new find much more closely, with a rapidly focusing alertness that balanced between an explorer’s caution and a prospector’s elation at a possibly huge strike.

  The incredible shape of X, becoming apparent as the Clem drew within a few hundred miles, was what had Marty on the edge of his chair. It was a needle thirty miles long, as near as his radar could measure, and about a hundred yards thick—dimensions that matched exactly nothing Marty could expect to find anywhere in space.

  It was obviously no random chunk of rock. And it was no spaceship that he had ever seen or heard of. One end of it pointed in the direction of Sol, causing him to suggest to Laura the idea of a miniature comet, complete with tail. She took him seriously at first, then remembered some facts about comets and swatted him playfully. “Oh, you!” she said.

  Another, more real possibility quickly became obvious, with sobering effect. The ancient fear of the Alien that had haunted Earthmen through almost three thousand years of intermittent space exploration, that had never been realized, now peered into the snug control room through the green radar eye.

  Aliens were always good for a joke when spacemen met and talked. But they turned out to be not particularly amusing when you were possibly confronting them, several billion miles from Earth. Especially, thought Marty, in a ship built for robot mining, ore refining, and hauling, not for diplomatic contacts or heroics. And with the only human assistance a girl on her first space trip, Marty hardly felt up to speaking for the human race in such a situation.

  It took a minute to set the autopilot so that any sudden move by X would trigger alarms and such evasive tactics as Clem could manage. He then set a robot librarian to searching his microfilm files for any reference to a spaceship having X’s incredible dimensions.

  There was a chance—how good a chance he found hard to estimate, when any explanation looked somewhat wild—that X was a derelict, the wrecked hull of some ship dead for a decade, or a century, or a thousand years. By laws of salvage, such a find would belong to him if he towed it into port. The value might be very high or very low. But the prospect was certainly intriguing.

  Marty brought Clem to a stop relative to X, and noticed that his velocity relative to Sol now also hung at zero. “I wonder,” he muttered. “Space anchor . . .?”

  The space anchor had been in use for thousands of years. It was a device that enabled a ship to fasten itself to a particular point in the gravitational field of a massive body such as a sun. If X was anchored, it did not prove that there was still life aboard her; once “dropped,” an anchor could hold as long as a hull could last.

  Laura brought sandwiches and a hot drink to him in the control room.

  “If we call the Navy and they bring it in we won’t get anything out of it,” he told her between bites. “That’s assuming it’s—not alien.”

  “Could there be someone alive on it?” She was staring into the screen. Her face was solemn but, he thought, not frightened.

  “If it’s human, you mean? No. I know there hasn’t been any ship remotely like that used in recent years. Way, way back the Old Empire built some that were even bigger, but none I ever heard of with this crazy shape . . .”

  The robot librarian indicated that it had drawn a blank. “See?” said Marty. “And I’ve even got most of the ancient types in there.”

  There was silence for a little while. The evening’s recorded music started somewhere in the background.

  “What would you do if I weren’t along?” Laura asked him.

  He did not answer directly, but said something he had been considering. “I don’t know the psychology of our hypothetical aliens. But it seems to me that if you set out exploring new solar systems, you do as Earthmen have always done—go with the best you have in the way of speed and weapons. Therefore if X is alien I don’t think Clem would stand a chance, trying to fight or run.” He paused, frowned at the image of X. “That damned shape—it’s just not right for anything.”

  “We could call the Navy—not that I’m saying we should, darling,” she added hastily. “You decide, and I’ll never complain either way. I’m just trying to help you think it out.”

  He looked at her, believed it about there never being any complaints and squeezed her hand. Anything more seemed superfluous.

  “If I was alone,” he said, “I’d jump into a suit, go look that thing over, haul it back to Ganymede and sell it for a unique whatever-it-is. Maybe I’d make enough money to marry you in real style, and trade in Clem for a first-rate ship—or maybe even terraform an asteroid and keep a couple of robot prospectors. I don’t know, though. Maybe we’d better
call the Navy.”

  She stood up and laughed at him gently. “We’re married enough already, and we had all the style I wanted. Besides, I don’t think either of us would be happy sitting on an asteroid very long. How long do you think it will take you to look it over?”

  At the airlock door she had misgivings: “Oh, it is safe enough, isn’t it? Marty, be careful and come back soon.” She kissed him before he closed his helmet.

  They had moved Clem to within a few miles of X. Marty mounted his spacebike and approached it slowly, from the side.

  The vast length of X blotted out a thin strip of stars to his right and left, as if it were the distant shore of some vast island in a placid Terran sea, and the starclouds below him were watery reflections of the ones above. But space was too black to permit such an illusion to endure.

  The tiny FM radar on his bike showed him within three hundred yards of X. He killed his forward speed with a gentle application of retrojets and turned on a spotlight. Bright metal gleamed smoothly back at him as he swung the beam from side to side. Then he stopped it where a dark concavity showed up.

  “Lifeboat berth . . . empty,” he said aloud, looking through the bike’s little telescope.

  “Then it is a derelict? We’re all right?” asked Laura’s voice in his helmet.

  “Looks that way, yeah, I guess there’s no doubt of it. I’ll go in for a closer look now.” He eased the bike forward. X was evidently just some rare type of ship that neither he nor the compilers of the standard reference works in his library had ever heard of. Which sounded a little foolish to him, but . . .

  At ten yards distance he killed speed again, set the bike on automatic stay-clear, made sure a line from it was fast to his belt and launched himself out of the saddle gently, headfirst toward X.

  The armored hands of his suit touched down first, easily and expertly. In a moment he was standing upright on the hull, held in place by magnetic boots. He looked around. He detected no response to his arrival.