Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction

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Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction Page 43

by Sam Moskowitz


  With a surprisingly light impact he crashed his ship against Damon's, and without pausing to see the results, turned to the rack where the spacesuits hung. It was while getting into the suit that he noticed for the first time what had happened to his wings. The great shimmering pinions that had carried him over the glowing seas of Norahn's world were colorless—limp.

  Out in the void, he kicked himself across to the other ship. He didn't head for the entrance lock; Damon would be expecting that move. Instead, Esterling drew himself, hand over hand, to the emergency escape hatch in the bow. He levered it open.

  Beale was waiting for him.

  Esterling looked to see that the bow compartment was airtight, the door sealed. Norahn was in this ship, and he had to be careful. But the valve was right. Beale fired. The bullet went through Esterling's suit and shoulder as he lurched aside. But it was only a flesh wound. He plugged the tear in the suit by bunching the fabric together with one hand, and with the other he reached back and opened the escape hatch.

  Beale was not wearing an air-helmet.

  He managed one more shot before his breath was wrenched out of his lungs, but the bullet went wild, spattering against metal. The blasting gust of wind racing out of the hatch pulled Beale with it, smashing him against Esterling. The scientist's finger clawed frantically at the other's suit.

  Beale slide down, his eyes glaring, his tongue protruding. Esterling looked at the dead man without emotion.

  He closed the hatch behind him, opened the door to the rest of the ship, and quickly removed the encumbering suit and helmet. Already fresh air had replaced the vacuum. Esterling picked up Beale's gun and stepped across the threshold. Four strides took him to another door. He thrust it open.

  He was facing Damon. In a corner of the control cabin lay Norahn, bound. Her wings were—withered.

  Damon fired. The bullet struck Esterling somewhere. He took a step forward. Norahn was crying, very softly, like a hurt child.

  Damon whispered, "Get back. Stay where you are. I'll—" He thrust the gun forward, his finger contracting on the trigger. Esterling threw his own weapon straight at the other's face as he sprang. His right hand found Damon's gun-wrist His left touched the corded muscles of a throat.

  Norahn was crying bitterly, hopelessly—

  "I killed him," my father said. "With my hands. But he died only one death." Breakers crashed beneath us in Thunder Fjord. The sky had grown light. Freya, the gerfalcon, hooded and asleep, stirred on Nils Esterling's shoulder. I looked out at the dark sea. "You couldn't go back?"

  "No. Those wings would never grow again. Only on the Black Planet could they ever have grown. Once withered—" he made a hopeless gesture—"Norahn and I were earth-bound. It was the legendary curse that fell on any of her folk who left that world. And—and she had been born to flight."

  The sun's rim loomed on the horizon. Nils stared up into the burning rays.

  "She wouldn't let me take her back. The Black Planet is for those with wings. Not for the earthbound. I brought her to Earth, Arn. I brought her here. She died when you were born. Scarcely a year. . . . We had happiness, but it was bittersweet. For we had known flight."

  Nils unhooded the gerfalcon. Freya moved, ruffled her feathers, blinking a golden eye.

  "Flight," my father said; "To stop flying is to die. Norahn died in a year. And for over forty years I have been chained here, remembering. Arn—" He slipped something from his arm and dropped it into my hand—"this is yours now. You're going into space. Your heritage is out there, beyond the orbit of Pluto, where the isles of the winged folk drift on the bright tides of Norahn's world. It's your world as well. In you are the seeds of flight"

  He looked at the gerfalcon. "I have no words to tell you of your heritage, Arn. You will never know, till you have wings. And then—"

  Nils Esterling stood up, casting the gerfalcon free. Freya screamed harshly. Her wings beat the air. She circled, mounted, climbing the winds.

  My father's gaze brooded on me as I slipped the golden bracelet on my arm. He dropped back into the chair, as though exhausted.

  "That's all, I suppose," he said wearily. "It's time for you to go. And—I'll say good-by."

  I left him there. He did not watch me go. Once I turned, far down the path above Thunder Fjord, and Nils Esterling had not moved. He was looking up at Freya, wheeling in the blue.

  The next time I looked, the outthrust of the crag hid the Hall. All I could see was the empty sky, and the gerfalcon circling there on splendid wings.

  THE STRANGE FLIGHT OF RICHARD CLAYTON

  by

  Robert Bloch

  Richard Clayton braced himself so that he stood like a diver waiting to plunge from a high board into the blue. In truth he was a diver. A silver spaceship was his board, and he meant to plunge not down, but up into the blue sky. Nor was it a matter of twenty or thirty feet he meant to go—instead, he was plunging millions of miles.

  With a deep breath, the pudgy, goateed scientist raised his hands to the cold steel lever, closed his eyes, jerked. The switch moved downward.

  For a moment nothing happened.

  Then a sudden jerk threw Clayton to the floor. The Future was moving!

  The pinions of a bird beating as it soars into the sky—the wings of a moth thrumming in flight — the quivering behind leaping muscles; of these things the shock was made.

  The spaceship Future vibrated madly. It rocked from side to side, and a humming shook the steel walls. Richard Clayton lay dazed as a high-pitched droning arose within the vessel. He rose to his feet, rubbing a bruised forehead, and lurched to his tiny bunk. The ship was moving, yet the terrible vibration did not abate. He glanced at the controls and then swore softly.

  "Good God! The panel is shattered!"

  It was true. The instrument board had been broken by the shock. The cracked glass had fallen to the floor, and the dials swung aimlessly on the bare face of the panel.

  Clayton sat there in despair. This was a major tragedy. His thoughts flashed back thirty years to the time when he, a boy of ten, had been inspired by Lindberg's flight. He recalled his studies; how he had utilized the money of his millionaire father to perfect a flying machine which would cross Space itself.

  For years Richard Clayton had worked and dreamed and planned. He studied the Russians and their rockets, organized the Clayton Foundation and hired mechanics, mathematicians, astronomers, engineers to labor with him.

  Then there had been the discovery of atomic propulsion, and the building of the Future. The Future was a shell of steel and duraluminum, windowless and insulated by a guarded process. In the tiny cabin were oxygen tanks, stores of food tablets, energizing chemicals, air-conditioning arrangements—and space for a man to walk six paces.

  It was a small steel cell; but in it Richard Clayton meant to realize his ambitions. Aided in his soaring by rockets to get him past the gravitational pull of Earth, then flying by means of the atomic-discharge propulsion, Clayton meant to reach Mars and return.

  It would take ten years to reach Mars; ten years to return, for the grounding of the vessel would set off additional rocket-discharges. A thousand miles an hour—not an imaginative "speed of light" journey, but a slow, grim voyage, scientifically accurate. The panels were set, and Clayton had no need to guide his vessel. It was automatic.

  "But now what?" Clayton said, staring at the shattered glass. He had lost touch with the outer world; He would be unable to read his progress on the board, unable to judge time and distance and direction. He would sit here for ten, twenty years—all alone in a tiny cabin. There had been no room for books or paper or games to amuse him. He was a prisoner in the black void of Space.

  The Earth had already faded far below him; soon it would be a ball of burning green fire smaller than the ball of red fire ahead—the fire of Mars.

  Crowds had swarmed the field to watch him take off; his assistant Jerry Chase had controlled them. Clayton pictured them watching his shining steel cylinder emer
ging from the gaseous smoke of the rockets and rushing like a bullet into the sky. Then his cylinder would have faded away into the blue and the crowds would leave for home and forget.

  But he remained, here in the ship—for ten, for twenty years.

  Yes, he remained, but when would the vibration stop? The shuddering of the walls and floor about him was awful to endure; he and the experts had not counted on this problem. Tremors wrenched through his aching head. What if they didn't cease, if they endured through the entire voyage? How long could he keep from going mad?

  He could think. Clayton lay on his bunk and remembered—reviewed every tiny detail of his life from birth to the present. And soon he had exhausted all memory in a pitifully short time. Then he felt the horrible throbbing all about him.

  "I can exercise," he said aloud, and paced the floor; six steps forward, six back. And he tired of that. Sighing. Clayton went to the food-stores in the cabinet and downed his capsules. "I can't even spend any time eating," he wryly observed. "A swallow and it's over."

  The throbbing erased the grin from his face. It was maddening. He lay down once more in the lurching bunk; switched on oxygen in the close air. He would sleep, then; sleep if this damned thrumming would permit. He endured the horrid clanking that groaned all through the silence; switching off the light. His thoughts turned to his strange position; a prisoner in Space. Outside the burning planets wheeled, and stars whizzed in the inky blackness of spatial Nothingness. Here he lay safe and snug in a vibrating chamber; safe from the freezing cold. If only the awful jarring would stop!

  Still, it had its compensations. There would be no newspapers on the voyage to torment him with accounts of man's inhumanity to man; no silly radio or television programs to annoy him. Only this cursed, omnipresent vibration....

  Clayton slept, hurtling through Space.

  It was not daylight when he awake. There was no daylight and no night. There was simply himself and the ship in Space. And the vibration was steady, nerve-wracking in its insistent beating against the brain. Clatyon's legs trembled as he reached the cabinet and ate his pills.

  Then, he sat down and began to endure. A terrific feeling of loneliness was beginning to assail him. He was so utterly detached here—cut off from everything. There was nothing to do. It was worse than being a prisoner in solitary confinement; at least they have larger cells, the sight of the sun, a breath of fresh air, and the glimpse of an occasional face.

  Clayton had thought himself a misanthrope, a recluse. Now he longed for the sight of another's face. As the hours passed he got queer ideas. He wanted to see Life, in some form—he would have given a fortune for the company of even an insect in his soaring dungeon. The sound of a human voice would be heaven. He was so alone.

  Nothing to do but endure the jerking, pace the floor, eat his pills, try to sleep. Nothing to think about. Clayton began to long for the time when his nails needed cutting; he could stretch out the task for hours.

  He examined his clothes intently, stared for hours in the little mirror at his bearded face. He memorized his body, scrutinized every article in the cabin of the Future. And still he was not tired enough to sleep again. He had a throbbing headache constantly. At length he managed to close his eyes and drift off into another slumber, broken by shocks which startled him into waking.

  When finally he arose and switched on the light, together with more oxygen, he made a horrible discovery.

  He had lost his time-sense.

  "Time is relative," they had always told him. Now he realized the truth. He had nothing to measure time by—no watch, no glimpse of the sun or moon or stars, and no regular activities. How long had he been on this voyage? Try as he might, he could not remember.

  Had he eaten every six hours? Or every ten? Or every twenty? Had he slept once each day? Once every three or four days? How often had he walked the floor?

  With no instruments to place himself he was at a total loss. He ate his pills in a bemused fashion, trying to think above the shuddering which filled his senses.

  This was awful. If he lost track of Time he might soon lose consciousness of identity itself. He would go mad here in the spaceship as it plunged through the void to planets beyond. Alone, tormented in a tiny cell, he had to cling to something. What was Time?

  He no longer wanted to think about it. He no longer wanted to think about anything. He had to forget the world he left, or memory would drive him frantic.

  "I'm afraid," he whispered. "Afraid of being alone in the darkness. I may have passed the moon. I may be a million miles away from Earth by now—or ten million."

  Then Clayton realized that he was talking to himself. That way was madness. But he couldn't stop, any more than he could stop the horrible jarring vibration all around him.

  "I'm afraid," he whispered in a voice that sounded hollow in the tiny humming room. "I'm afraid. What time is it?"

  He fell asleep, still whispering, and Time rushed on.

  Clayton awoke with fresh courage. He had lost his grip, he reasoned. Outside pressure, however equalized, had affected his nerves. The oxygen might have made him giddy, and the pill diet was bad. But now the weakness had passed. He smiled, walked the floor.

  Then the thoughts came again. What day was it? How many weeks since he had started? Maybe it was months already; a year, two years. Everything of Earth seemed far away; almost part of a dream. He now felt closer to Mars than to Earth; he began to anticipate now instead of looking back.

  For a while everything had been mechanical. He switched light on and off when needed,, ate pills by habit, paced the floor without thinking, unconsciously tended the air system, slept without knowing when or why.

  Richard Clayton gradually forgot about his body and the surroundings. The lurching buzz in his brain became a part of him; an aching part which told that he was whizzing through Space in a silver bullet. But it meant nothing more, for Clayton no longer talked to himself. He forgot himself and dreamed only of Mars ahead. Every throb of the vessel hummed, “Mars—Mars—Mars."

  A wonderful thing happened. He landed. The ship nosed down, trembling. It eased gently onto the gassy sward of the red planet. For a long time Clayton had felt the pull of alien gravity, knew that automatic adjustments of his vessel were diminishing the atomic discharges and using the natural gravitational pull of Mars itself.

  Now the ship landed, and Clayton had opened the door. He broke the seals and stepped out. He bounded lightly to the purple grass. His body felt free, buoyant. There was fresh air, and the sunlight seemed stronger, more intense, although clouds veiled the glowing globe.

  Far away stood the forests, the green forests with the purple growth on the lushly-rearing trees. Clayton left the ship and approached the cool grove. The first tree had boughs that bent to the ground in two limbs.

  Limbs—limbs they were! Two green arms reached out. Clawing branches grasped him and lifted him upward. Cold coils, slimy as a serpent's, held him tightly as he was pressed against the dark tree-trunk. And now he was staring into the purple growth set in the leaves.

  The purple growths were—heads.

  Evil, purple faces stared at him with rotting eyes like dead toadstools. Each face was wrinkled like a purple cauliflower, but beneath the pulpy mass was a great mouth. Every purple face had a purple mouth and each purple mouth opened to drip blood. Now the tree-arms pressed him closer to the cold, writhing trunk, and one of the purple faces—a woman's face—was moving up to kiss him.

  The kiss of a vampire! Blood shone scarlet on the moving sensuous lips that bore down on his own. He struggled, but the limbs held him fast and the kiss came, cold as death. The icy flame of it seared through his being and his senses drowned.

  Then Clayton awoke, and knew it was a dream. His body was bathed with moisture. It made him aware of his body. He tottered to the mirror.

  A single glance sent him reeling back in horror. Was this too a part of his dream?

  Gazing into the mirror, Clayton saw reflected the fac
e of an aging man. The features were heavily bearded, and they were lined and wrinkled, the once puffy cheeks were sunken. The eyes were the worst—Clayton did not recognize his own eyes any more. Red and deep-set in bony sockets, they burned out in a wild stare of horror. He touched his face, saw the blue-veined hand rise in the mirror and run through graying hair.

  Partial time-sense returned. He had been here for years. Years! He was growing old!

  Of course the unnatural life would age him more rapidly, but still a great interval must have passed. Clayton knew that he must soon reach the end of his journey. He wanted to reach it before he had any more dreams. From now on, sanity and physical reserve must battle against the unseen enemy of Time. He staggered back to his bunk, as trembling like a metallic flying monster, the Future rushed on in the blackness of interstellar Space.

  They were hammering outside the vessel now; their iron arms were breaking in the door. The black metal monsters lumbered in with iron tread. Their stern, steel-cut faces were expressionless as they grasped Clayton on either side and pulled him out. Across the iron platform they dragged him, walking stiffly with clicking feet that clanged against the metal. The great still shafts rose in silvery spires all about, and into the iron tower they took him. Up the stairs—clang, clang, clang, pounded the great metal feet.

  And the iron stairs wound round endlessly; yet still they toiled. Their faces were set, and iron does not sweat. They never tired, though Clayton was a panting wreck ere they reached the dome and threw him before the Presence in the tower room. The metallic voice buzzed, mechanically, like a broken phonograph record.

  Of course the unnatural life would age him more rapidly, but still a great interval must have passed. Clayton knew that he must soon reach the end of his journey. He wanted to reach it before he had any more dreams. From now on, sanity and physical reserve must battle against the unseen enemy of Time. He staggered back to his bunk, as trembling like a metallic flying monster, theFuture rushed on in the blackness of interstellar Space.

 

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