Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  But there was a chance—a tiny but appalling chance—that the things had developed some drastically new form of attack since their last breakthrough, and that they already were in control of the situation.

  In which case, neither Grimp nor anyone else on Noorhut would be doing any more growing up after tomorrow.

  Each of the eleven hundred and seventeen planets that had been lost to the Halpa so far still traced a fiery, forbidding orbit through space—torn back from the invaders only at the cost of depriving it, by humanity’s own weapons, of the natural conditions that any known form of life could tolerate.

  The possibility that that might also be Noorhut’s future had loomed as an ugly enormity before her for the past four years. But of the nearly half a hundred worlds which the Halpa were found to be investigating, through their detector-globes, as possible invasion points for this assault period, Noorhut finally had been selected by Headquarters as the one where local conditions were most suited to meet them successfully. That meant in a manner that must include the destruction of their only real invasion weapon, the fabulous and mysterious Halpa Transmitter. Capable as they undoubtedly were, they had shown in the past that they were able or willing to employ only one of those instruments for each period of attack. Destroying the transmitter meant, therefore, that humanity would gain a few more centuries to figure out a way to get back at the Halpa before a new invasion attempt was made.

  ~ * ~

  SO ON all planets but Noorhut, the detector-globes shrewdly had been encouraged to send back reports of a dangerously alert and well-armed population. On Noorhut, however, they had been soothed along… and just as her home planet had been chosen as the most favorable point of encounter, so was Erisa Wannattel herself selected as the agent most suited to represent humanity’s forces under the conditions that existed there.

  Grandma sighed gently and reminded herself again that Headquarters was as unlikely to miscalculate the overall probability of success as it was to select the wrong person to achieve it. There was only the tiniest, the most theoretical, of chances that something might go wrong, and that she would end her long career with the blundering murder of her own home world—

  But there was that chance. It meant the lives of people whose ancestors she had known, an entire world she loved and hoped to retire to some day. Worse yet, it meant relying on a small, helpless, untrained Child—who might, after all, not be the instrument she should have chosen. “There seem to be more down there every minute!” the pony was saying.

  Grandma drew a deep breath.

  “Must be several thousand by now,” she acknowledged. “It’s getting near breakthrough time, all right—but that’s only the advance forces.” She added, “Do you notice anything like a glow of light down there, toward the center?”

  The pony stared a moment. “Yes,” it said. “But I would have thought that was way under the red for you. Can you see it?”

  “No,” said Grandma. “I get a kind of feeling, like heat. That’s the transmitter beginning to come through. I think we’ve got them!”

  The pony shifted its bulk slowly from side to side.

  “Yes,” it said resignedly, “or they’ve got us.”

  “Don’t think about that,” Grandma ordered sharply and clamped one more mental lock shut on the foggy, dark terrors that were curling and writhing under her conscious thoughts, trying to emerge and paralyze her actions.

  She had opened her black bag and was unhurriedly fitting together something composed of a few pieces of wood and wire, and a rather heavy, stiff spring…

  “Just be ready,” she added.

  “I’ve been ready for an hour,” said the pony, shuffling its feet.

  “I mean Grimp,” she explained, looking down at the sleeping boy intently. “A child is more perceptive than an adult, and his time sense is sharper because he lives at a much faster rate.”

  “Then his time sense should be faster, too,” the pony said.

  “It’s like slow-motion film,” Grandma told him. “The faster the camera goes, the more pictures it takes and the slower the action. A child is like that. Our time sense speeds up as we grow older and our life processes slow down. You might say we take fewer pictures than a child does.”

  “Makes sense,” the pony agreed. “But what does it lead to?”

  “Grimp,” said Grandma, her face very close to the boy’s, “is going to feel the critical moment of the breakthrough and let us know. He’ll tell by the static tension in the air, the way a child becomes cranky when an electrical storm is getting ready to happen. We can’t respond like that… even trained perceptives like his … and not, certainly, in awareness of fractions of a second.”

  The pony stared at Grimp with new respect. “He can?”

  ~ * ~

  GRANDMA took in a breath that sounded like the fluttering of agitated strips of paper. “I hope so,” she said. “It can’t be just any child, though all of them are more sensitive than any adult. It has to be a hyper-sensitive child.”

  “Then you’re not sure he is.”

  “No,” Grandma confessed reluctantly. “I can’t be sure until it’s too late.”

  They did no more talking after that. All the valley had become quiet about them. But slowly the hollow below was filling up with a black, stirring, slithering tide. Bits of it fluttered up now and then like strips of black smoke, hovered a few yards above the mass, and settled again.

  Suddenly, down in the center of the hollow, there was something else.

  The rhinocerine pony had seen it first, Grandma Wannattel realized. It had been staring in that direction for almost a minute before she grew able to distinguish something that might have been a group of graceful miniature spires. Semi-transparent in the darkness, four small domes showed at the corners, with a larger one in the center. The central one was about twenty feet high and very slender.

  The whole structure began to solidify swiftly…

  The Halpa Transmitter’s appearance of crystalline slightness was perhaps the most mind-chilling thing about it. For it brought instantly a jarring sense of what must be black distance beyond all distances, reaching back unimaginably to its place of origin. In that unknown somewhere, a prodigiously talented and determined race of beings had labored for human centuries to prepare and point some stupendous gun… and were able then to bridge the vast interval with nothing more substantial than this dark sliver of glass that had come to rest suddenly in the valley of the Wend.

  But, of course, the Transmitter was all that was needed; its deadly poison lay in a sluggish, almost inert mass about it. Within minutes from now, it would waken to life, as similar transmitters had wakened on other nights on those lost and burning worlds. And in much less than minutes after that, the Halpa invaders would be hurled by their slender machine to every surface section of Noorhut—no longer inert, but quickened into a ravening, almost indestructible form of vampiric life, dividing and sub-dividing in its incredibly swift cycle of reproduction, fastening to feed anew, growing again—

  Spreading, at that stage, much more swiftly than it could be exterminated by anything but the ultimate weapons!

  The pony stirred suddenly, and she felt the wave of panic rolling up in it.

  “It’s the Transmitter, all right.”

  Grandma’s thought reached it quickly. “We’ve had two descriptions of it before. But we can’t be sure it’s here until it begins to charge itself. Then it lights up—first at the edges, and then at the center. Once the central spire lights up, it will be energized too much to let them pull it back again. At least, they couldn’t pull it back after that last time they were observed.” She touched the sleeping boy anxiously. “Grimp will have to tell us when that exact instant is.”

  The pony had been told all that before. But as it listened, it was quieting down again.

  “And you’re to go on sleeping!” Grandma Wannattel’s thought instructed Grimp next. “Your perception and time sense are to be alert, but you’ll sleep
on and remember nothing until I wake you.”

  ~ * ~

  LIGHT surged suddenly up in the Transmitter—first into the four outer spires, and a moment later into the big central one, in a sullen red glow. It lit the hollow with a smoky glare. The pony took two startled steps backward.

  “Don’t fail us, Grimp!” whispered Grandma’s thought.

  She reached again into her black bag and took out a small plastic ball. It reflected the light from the hollow in dull crimson gleamings. She let it slip down carefully inside the shaftlike frame of the gadget she had put together of wood and wire. It clicked into place there against one end of the compressed spring.

  But she didn’t take her eyes off the boy. He was stirring restlessly, his breathing growing quicker and more difficult. His little hands twitched from time to time, though he remained asleep.

  “Watch the Halpa,” she tensely told the pony. “I don’t know if Grimp will sense the moment exactly. I’m not sure we can handle it then, but…”

  Down below, they lay now in a blanket fifteen feet thick over the wet ground, like big, black, water-sogged leaves swept up in circular piles about the edges of the hollow. The tops and sides of the piles were fluttering and shivering and beginning to slide down toward the Transmitter. She felt tension growing, but she couldn’t trust her own age-dulled perception. If the child failed, all Noorhut would fall to the Halpa.

  Grimp twisted in Grandma’s arms abruptly, like a caught and fighting werret, and a strangled cry that was almost a sob came from him.

  It was what Grandma had been waiting for. She raised the wooden catapult to her shoulder. The pony shook its blunt-horned head violently from side to side, made a loud bawling noise, surged forward and plunged down the steep slope of the hollow in a thundering rush.

  Grandma aimed carefully and let go.

  There was no explosion. The blanket of dead-leaf creatures was lifting into the air ahead of the pony’s ground-shaking approach in a weightless, silent swirl of darkness, which instantly blotted both the glowing Transmitter and the pony’s shape from sight. The pony roared once as the blackness closed over it. A second later, there was a crash like the shattering of a hundred-foot mirror. At approximately the same moment, Grandma’s plastic ball exploded somewhere in the center of the swirling storm of lethal life.

  Cascading fountains of white fire filled the whole of the hollow. Within the fire, a dense mass of shapes fluttered and writhed frenziedly like burning rags. From down where the fire boiled fiercest rose continued sounds of brittle substances suffering enormous violence. The pony was trampling the Transmitter, making sure of its destruction.

  “Better get out of it!” Grandma shouted anxiously. “What’s left of that will all melt now, anyway!”

  She didn’t know whether it heard her or not, but a few seconds later, it came pounding up the side of the hollow again. Blazing from nose to rump, it tramped past Grandma, plunged through the meadow behind her, shedding white sheets of fire that exploded the marsh grass in its tracks, and hurled itself headlong into the pond it had selected previously. There was a great splash, accompanied by sharp hissing noises. Pond and pony vanished together under billowing clouds of steam.

  “That was pretty hot!” its thought came to Grandma.

  “Hot as anything that ever came out of a volcano!” she affirmed. “If you’d played around in it much longer, you’d have provided the village with roasts for a year.”

  “I’ll just stay here for a while, till I’ve cooled off a bit,” said the pony. “And I’d like to forget that last remark of yours, too. Civilized cannibals, that’s what people are!”

  ~ * ~

  GRANDMA found something strangling her then, and discovered it was the lortel’s tail. She unwound it carefully. But the lortel promptly reanchored itself with all four hands in her hair. She decided to leave it there. It seemed badly upset.

  Grimp, however, relaxed suddenly and slept on. It was going to take a little maneuvering to get him back into the village undetected before morning, but she would figure that out by and by. A steady flow of cool night air was being drawn past them into the hollow now, and rising out of it again in boiling, vertical columns of invisible heat. At the bottom of the deluxe blaze she’d lit down there, things still seemed to be moving about—but very slowly. The Halpa were tough organisms, all right, though not nearly so tough, when you heated them up with a really good incendiary, as the natives of Treebel.

  She would have to make a final check of the hollow around dawn, of course, when the ground should have cooled off enough to permit it—but her century’s phase of the Halpa War did seem to be over. The defensive part of it, at any rate.

  Wet munching sounds from the pond indicated the pony felt comfortable enough by now to take an interest in the parboiled vegetation it found floating about it.

  “You picked the right child, after all,” the pony’s thought remarked to her.

  “Yes, Grimp worked out fine,” Grandma said a little proudly.

  “I was pretty worried for a while.”

  “I won’t say I was exactly easy myself. I thought Grimp was reacting slowly and I was getting ready to hurl the incendiary.”

  “But you didn’t,” the pony pointed out, chewing loudly.

  “No. I suspected my perception might be too fast. It turned out to be almost two minutes off.”

  The rhinocerine pony stopped munching and she felt the shiver of fear that went through its mind. “As much as that? You’d have caught the Transmitter before it was matter. Nothing would have happened… except the Halpa would have swarmed through when the Transmitter materialized. We couldn’t have stopped them.”

  “Grimp had the crisis down to the micro-second,” she said happily. “Why fret about what might have happened?”

  “You’re right, of course,” the pony agreed, but its enormous appetite seemed suddenly to have disappeared.

  Grandma settled down carefully to sleep in the long marsh grass without disturbing Grimp’s position too much. She appeared calm, but her sleep was more of a faint than untroubled slumber.

  ~ * ~

  BY SUNRISE, Grandma Wannattel’s patent-medicine trailer was nine miles from the village and rolling steadily southward up the valley road through the woods. As usual, she was departing under an official cloud.

  Grimp and the policeman had showed up early to warn her. The Guardian was making use of the night’s various unprecedented disturbances to press through a vote on a Public Menace charge against Grandma in the village. Since everybody still felt rather excited and upset, he had a good chance just now of getting a majority.

  Grimp had accompanied her far enough to explain that this state of affairs wasn’t going to be permanent. He had it all worked out: Runny’s new immunity to hay-fever had brought him and the pretty Vellit to a fresh understanding overnight; they were going to get married five weeks from now. As a married man, Runny would then be eligible for the post of Village Guardian at the harvest elections. Between Grimp’s cousins and Vellit’s cousins, Runny’s backers would just about control the vote. So when Grandma got around to visiting the valley again next summer, she needn’t worry any more about police interference or official disapproval…

  Grandma had nodded approvingly. That was about the kind of neighborhood politics she’d begun to play herself at Grimp’s age. She was pretty sure by now that Grimp was the one who eventually would become her successor as guardian of Noorhut, as well as of the star-system to which Noorhut belonged, and perhaps of a good many other star-systems besides. With careful schooling, he ought to be just about ready for the job by the time she was willing, finally, to retire.

  An hour after he had started back to the farm, looking suddenly a little forlorn, the trailer swung off the valley road into a narrow forest path. Here the pony lengthened its stride, and less than five minutes later they entered a curving ravine, at the far end of which lay something that Grimp would have recognized instantly as a small spaceship fro
m his one visit to the nearest port city.

  A large round door opened soundlessly in its side as they approached. The pony came to a stop. Grandma got down from the driver’s seat and unhitched it. The pony walked into the airlock, and the trailer picked its wheels off the ground and floated in behind it. Grandma Wannattel walked in last, and the lock closed quietly.

  The ship lay still a moment longer. Then it was suddenly gone. Dead leaves went dancing for a while about the ravine, disturbed by the breeze of its departure.

  In a place very far away—so far that neither Grimp nor his parents nor anyone in the village except the schoolteacher had ever heard of it—a set of instruments began signaling for attention. Somebody answered them.