Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  Towards that dark, waiting craft the two they had watched were even now stealing, tense with the weight of their daring and their crime. In a moment they would reach her, enter her, actuate machinery that was miraculous in its complex simplicity, and be gone then on the wings it gave them into the concealing embrace of universal space.

  "You see, my friend Sliss," Negu Mah said finally, "Nanlo is beautiful, but there is nothing within. Her beauty deceived me. I thought that where such loveliness existed, there must be a soul to animate it. I was wrong. She is like an imitation gem--beautiful on the surface, paste within. Yet the mistake was mine, and I did not blame her. I indulged her, and still hoped that something real would bloom within her."

  He drained the molkai in his mug, one great gulp, and slumped back.

  "The young man, too, Hugh Neils. I thought he would be a companion for her. But he too is weak. Yet they say they love each other. They swear--we heard them--that they want only each other and their love for all time."

  Sliss blinked, twice, and Negu Mah nodded.

  "Yes," he said. "If they carry out their plans as we heard them, that feeling will soon go. The sale of the Vulcan, even as stolen property, would give them many credits. After that--luxury, self-indulgence. And their natures are too weak to withstand the ravages of such things. So I have been troubled to know what to do.

  "You see, my friend from Venus, though I would have let Nanlo go had she asked me, my own honor is at stake when she seeks to deal me an injury by slipping away in the night, and stealing from me the Vulcan. She is doing evil, and must be punished. The young man, too--indulgent as I am, I can not let him dishonor me thus without paying any penalty."

  Sliss' eye membranes shut, questioningly.

  "Yet," the uranium merchant went on, "I have a fondness for Nanlo. I will not prevent her from doing as she has chosen to do, for the intent would still be there, and knowing it as I do, all between us is over. I can not aid her to fulfill her plans, either, for that is to injure her and myself too. But there is another course. I have chosen that."

  He gestured with one plump hand toward the silhouetted ship.

  "I believe they have entered the Vulcan," he announced. "I saw light as the entrance port opened then."

  The amphibian's great, frog head nodded agreement.

  "So," Negu Mah continued, "I have decided to exercise what indulgence I can in the face of the injury they would do me. They shall have their chance."

  He fell silent again. Sliss leaned forward in his tub. Both of them watched intently. A flare of greenish light had sprung up beneath the black pillar that was the Vulcan. For just an instant the freighter stood there, green radiance expanding around her. Then she leaped into the sky.

  With her leap, she seemed to suck the radiance along. It became a great cone of glowing light that, arrow-like, raced away upward. For a long instant the black length of the ship, and the greenish fan of flame, were outlined against the scarlet background of Jupiter. Then the freighter rocket, flinging herself upward at three gravities or better, passed the edge of the planet and vanished.

  Negu Mah sat very quiet for some moments. But at last he stirred again. Sliss' eyes turned toward him, immobile.

  "Sometimes love transforms the weak," the uranium merchant said slowly. "Like fire giving temper to soft metal. Sometimes a mutual love will endure for all eternity, and the two who share it will gain from it a soul they did not have before. Nanlo and Hugh Neils have this chance. Both said they wanted only the other, and their love, for all eternity. To gain this, both were willing to cheat, to steal, to dishonor me and themselves.

  "So, Sliss, my understanding friend, they have paid the price, they shall have what they ask for.

  "As the man, Hugh Neils, said, there is fuel and food in the holds of the Vulcan to run the motors and last the lifetime of a man--or a man and a woman. Indeed, two lifetimes, or three, for I was aware of their plans, and secretly I placed aboard the craft many additional supplies. Fuel, and food, and books, and tools. And one additional thing the two who flee now there in space have not counted upon.

  "Into the controls of the Vulcan one of my engineers has placed a small device. After two hundred hours, or when they are well beyond Jupiter, this device will swing the Vulcan straight toward Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. In that position the controls will lock. And for twenty years, a generation, it will be impossible either to alter the course of the Vulcan or to shut her blast motors off.

  "At the end of that time the last tank of reserve fuel will be exhausted, and they will cease automatically. Then once more the Vulcan may be controlled by those aboard. They may switch the motors onto the tanks of fuel in the cargo holds, and continue onwards. If they were celestial navigators, they might try to turn, and seek earth again. But they are not navigators, and the sun will be but a tiny spark in the limitless darkness, one with a million others, not to be told apart. They will know that only Proxima Centauri in all space may the Vulcan hope to reach in their lifetime, or perhaps even in that of their descendants, for a message to that effect they will find presently.

  "So it may be that they will continue onward of their own choice. If they make no choice, momentum will carry them onward, perhaps forever.

  "But in any case, Nanlo and Hugh Neils will have exactly what they have asked for--each other, for all eternity. If truly that was what they wanted, a great destiny may be theirs. A lifetime of travel can bring them to the stars. They or their descendants can be the first humans to bridge the gap of nothingness that has thus far daunted the stoutest hearts."

  As they watched, the green dart of light dwindled and was gone. And quite invisible at last in the arms of outer darkness, the Vulcan sped its two passengers onward toward the stars.

  JOHN WOOD CAMPBELL

  1910 - 1971

  John W. Campbell's editorship of Astounding Science Fiction, where he nurtured some of the genre's greatest talents, helped him shape modern science fiction more than any other individual.

  A devotee of the science fiction magazines from their inception, Campbell sold his first stories while still a teenager, beginning with "Invaders from the Infinite" to Amazing Stories. In the early 1930s he quickly built a reputation as E.E. "Doc" Smith's chief rival in writing galactic epics of super-science. The climax of his popularity and fiction-writing career came with "Who Goes There?" (1938), a classic science fiction horror story about an Antarctic research station menaced by a shape-changing alien invader. The story was later filmed, without the shape-changing, as The Thing(1951), and later, also as The Thing (1982), with the basic premise restored.

  In September 1937, Campbell was appointed editor of Astounding Stories, a post he would retain until his death (the magazine was retitled Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 and Analog in 1960). Campbell brought to his editorial post a wealth of ideas and a determination to raise the standards of writing and thinking in magazine science fiction. New writers were encouraged and fed with ideas, with remarkable success.

  By 1939, Campbell had discovered Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and A.E. van Vogt (though the two latter writers had already been publishing for some time in other genres). L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Clifford D. Simak and Jack WIlliamson, already established science fiction writers, soon became part of Campbell's "stable," as well, and Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore became regular contributors beginning in 1942. These were the authors at the core of Campbell's "Golden Age of Science Fiction" — a period corresponding roughly to World War II — when Astounding Science Fiction dominated the genre in a way no magazine before or since has matched.

  Between 1952 and 1964, Campbell won eight Hugo awards for Best Editor; the magazine won seven Hugo awards under his editorship. His death in 1971 was marked by an unprecedented wave of commemorative activity: two awards were founded bearing his name, and a memorial anthology was published: Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology.

  The Last Evolutio
n, by John Wood Campbell

  I am the last of my type existing today in all the Solar System. I, too, am the last existing who, in memory, sees the struggle for this System, and in memory I am still close to the Center of Rulers, for mine was the ruling type then. But I will pass soon, and with me will pass the last of my kind, a poor inefficient type, but yet the creators of those who are now, and will be, long after I pass forever.

  So I am setting down my record on the mentatype.

  It was 2538 years After the Year of the Son of Man. For six centuries mankind had been developing machines. The Ear-apparatus was discovered as early as seven hundred years before. The Eye came later, the Brain came much later. But by 2500, the machines had been developed to think, and act and work with perfect independence. Man lived on the products of the machine, and the machines lived to themselves very happily, and contentedly. Machines are designed to help and cooperate. It was easy to do the simple duties they needed to do that men might live well. And men had created them. Most of mankind were quite useless, for they lived in a world where no productive work was necessary. But games, athletic contests, adventure--these were the things they sought for their pleasure. Some of the poorer types of man gave themselves up wholly to pleasure and idleness--and to emotions. But man was a sturdy race, which had fought for existence through a million years, and the training of a million years does not slough quickly from any form of life, so their energies were bent to mock battles now, since real ones no longer existed.

  Up to the year 2100, the numbers of mankind had increased rapidly and continuously, but from that time on, there was a steady decrease. By 2500, their number was a scant two millions, out of a population that once totaled many hundreds of millions, and was close to ten billions in 2100.

  Some few of these remaining two millions devoted themselves to the adventure of discovery and exploration of places unseen, of other worlds and other planets. But fewer still devoted themselves to the highest adventure, the unseen places of the mind. Machines--with their irrefutable logic, their cold preciseness of figures, their tireless, utterly exact observation, their absolute knowledge of mathematics--they could elaborate any idea, however simple its beginning, and reach the conclusion. From any three facts they even then could have built in mind all the Universe. Machines had imagination of the ideal sort. They had the ability to construct a necessary future result from a present fact. But Man had imagination of a different kind, theirs was the illogical, brilliant imagination that sees the future result vaguely, without knowing the why, nor the how, and imagination that outstrips the machine in its preciseness. Man might reach the conclusion more swiftly, but the machine always reached the conclusion eventually, and it was always the correct conclusion. By leaps and bounds man advanced. By steady, irresistible steps the machine marched forward.

  Together, man and the machine were striding through science irresistibly.

  Then came the Outsiders. Whence they came, neither machine nor man ever learned, save only that they came from beyond the outermost planet, from some other sun. Sirius--Alpha Centauri--perhaps! First a thin scoutline of a hundred great ships, mighty torpedoes of the void a thousand kilads[1] in length, they came.

  And one machine returning from Mars to Earth was instrumental in its first discovery. The transport-machine's brain ceased to radiate its sensations, and the control in old Chicago knew immediately that some unperceived body had destroyed it. An investigation machine was instantly dispatched from Deimos, and it maintained an acceleration of one thousand units.[2] They sighted ten huge ships, one of which was already grappling the smaller transport-machine. The entire fore-section had been blasted away.

  The investigation machine, scarcely three inches in diameter, crept into the shattered hull and investigated. It was quickly evident that the damage was caused by a fusing ray.

  Strange life-forms were crawling about the ship, protected by flexible, transparent suits. Their bodies were short, and squat, four-limbed and evidently powerful. They, like insects, were equipped with a thick, durable exoskeleton, horny, brownish coating that covered arms and legs and head. Their eyes projected slightly, protected by horny protruding walls--eyes that were capable of movement in every direction--and there were three of them, set at equal distances apart.

  The tiny investigation machine hurled itself violently at one of the beings, crashing against the transparent covering, flexing it, and striking the being inside with terrific force. Hurled from his position, he fell end over end across the weightless ship, but despite the blow, he was not hurt.

  The investigator passed to the power room ahead of the Outsiders, who were anxiously trying to learn the reason for their companion's plight.

  Directed by the Center of Rulers, the investigator sought the power room, and relayed the control signals from the Rulers' brains. The ship-brain had been destroyed, but the controls were still readily workable. Quickly they were shot home, and the enormous plungers shut. A combination was arranged so that the machine, as well as the investigator and the Outsiders, were destroyed. A second investigator, which had started when the plan was decided on, had now arrived. The Outsider's ship nearest the transport-machine had been badly damaged, and the investigator entered the broken side.

  * * * *

  The scenes were, of course, remembered by the memory-minds back on Earth tuned with that of the investigator. The investigator flashed down corridors, searching quickly for the apparatus room. It was soon seen that with them the machine was practically unintelligent, very few machines of even slight intelligence being used.

  Then it became evident by the excited action of the men of the ship, that the presence of the investigator had been detected. Perhaps it was the control impulses, or the signal impulses it emitted. They searched for the tiny bit of metal and crystal for some time before they found it. And in the meantime it was plain that the power these Outsiders used was not, as was ours of the time, the power of blasting atoms, but the greater power of disintegrating matter. The findings of this tiny investigating machine were very important.

  Finally they succeeded in locating the investigator, and one of the Outsiders appeared armed with a peculiar projector. A bluish beam snapped out, and the tiny machine went blank.

  The fleet was surrounded by thousands of the tiny machines by this time, and the Outsiders were badly confused by their presence, as it became difficult to locate them in the confusion of signal impulses. However, they started at once for Earth.

  The science-investigators had been present toward the last, and I am there now, in memory with my two friends, long since departed. They were the greatest human science-investigators--Roal, 25374 and Trest, 35429. Roal had quickly assured us that these Outsiders had come for invasion. There had been no wars on the planets before that time in the direct memory of the machines, and it was difficult that these who were conceived and built for cooperation, helpfulness utterly dependent on cooperation, unable to exist independently as were humans, that these life-forms should care to destroy, merely that they might possess. It would have been easier to divide the works and the products. But--life alone can understand life, so Roal was believed.

  From investigations, machines were prepared that were capable of producing considerable destruction. Torpedoes, being our principal weapon, were equipped with such atomic explosives as had been developed for blasting, a highly effective induction-heat ray developed for furnaces being installed in some small machines made for the purpose in the few hours we had before the enemy reached Earth.

  In common with all life-forms, they were able to withstand only very meager earth-acceleration. A range of perhaps four units was their limit, and it took several hours to reach the planet.

  I still believe the reception was a warm one. Our machines met them beyond the orbit of Luna, and the directed torpedoes sailed at the hundred great ships. They were thrown aside by a magnetic field surrounding the ship, but were redirected instantly, and continued to approach. However, some b
eams reached out, and destroyed them by instant volatilization. But, they attacked at such numbers that fully half the fleet was destroyed by their explosions before the induction beam fleet arrived. These beams were, to our amazement, quite useless, being instantly absorbed by a force-screen, and the remaining ships sailed on undisturbed, our torpedoes being exhausted. Several investigator machines sent out for the purpose soon discovered the secret of the force-screen, and while being destroyed, were able to send back signals up to the moment of annihilation.

  A few investigators thrown into the heat beam of the enemy reported it identical with ours, explaining why they had been prepared for this form of attack.

  Signals were being radiated from the remaining fifty, along a beam. Several investigators were sent along these beams, speeding back at great acceleration.

  Then the enemy reached Earth. Instantly they settled over the Colorado settlement, the Sahara colony, and the Gobi colony. Enormous, diffused beams were set to work, and we saw, through the machine-screens, that all humans within these ranges were being killed instantly by the faintly greenish beams. Despite the fact that any life-form killed normally can be revived, unless affected by dissolution common to living tissue, these could not be brought to life again. The important cell communication channels--nerves--had been literally burned out. The complicated system of nerves, called the brain, situated in the uppermost extremity of the human life-form, had been utterly destroyed.

  Every form of life, microscopic, even sub-microscopic, was annihilated. Trees, grass, every living thing was gone from that territory. Only the machines remained, for they, working entirely without the vital chemical forces necessary to life, were uninjured. But neither plant nor animal was left.

  The pale green rays swept on.

  In an hour, three more colonies of humans had been destroyed.