The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  Phineas squirmed. “No, but—”

  “Too bad.” Alexander sighed. “Really, I’d like to make things more to your satisfaction, but after all, no experience—afraid it wouldn’t do. Tell you what, we don’t like to be hasty hi our judgments; if you’ll just picture exactly the life you want—no need to describe ft, I’ll get it if you merely think it—maybe we can adjust things. Try hard now.”

  With faint hope, Phineas tried. Alexander’s voice droned out at him. “A little harder. No, that’s only a negative picture of what you’d like not to do. Ah…, van, no. I thought for a minute you had something, but it’s gone. I think you’re trying to picture abstractions, Mr. Potts, and you know one can’t do that; I get something very vague, but it makes no sense. There! That’s better.”

  He seemed to listen for a few seconds longer, and

  Phineas was convinced now it was all sham; he’d given up trying. What was the use? Vague jumbled thoughts were all he had left, and now Alexander’s voice broke in on them.

  “Really, Mr. Potts, I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for you. I get a very clear picture now, but it’s exactly the life we’d arranged for you, you see. Same room, same work. Apparently that’s the only life you know. Of course, if you want to improve we have a great many very fine schools located throughout the city.”

  Phineas jerked upright, the control over his temper barely on. “You mean—you mean, I’ve got to go on like that?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “But you distinctly said this was heaven.”

  “It is.”

  “And I tell you,” Phineas cried, forgetting all about controlling his temper, “that this is hell!”

  “Quite so, I never denied it. Now, Mr. Potts, I’d like to discuss this further, but others are waiting, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  Alexander looked up from his papers, and as he’ looked, Phineas found himself outside the door, shaken-and sick. The door remained open as the girl called Katy came up, looked at him in surprise, and went in. Then it closed, but still he stood there, unable to move, leaning against the wooden frame for support.

  There was a mutter of voices within, and his whirling thoughts seized on them for anchor. Katy’s voice first. “—seems to take it terribly hard, Mr. Alexander. Isn’t there something we can do?”

  Then the low voice of Alexander. “Nothing, Katy. It’s up to him now. I suggested the schools, but I’m afraid he’s another unfortunate. Probably even now he’s out there convincing himself that all this is merely illusion, made to try his soul and test his ability to remain unchanged. If that’s the case, well, poor devil, there isn’t much we can do, you know.”

  But Phineas wasn’t listening then. He clutched the words he’d heard savagely to his bosom and went stiffly out and back toward the office of G. R. Sloane across from the little room, No. 408. Of course he should have known. All this was merely illusion, made to try his soul. Illusion and test, no more.

  Let them try him, they would find him humble in his sufferings as always, not complaining, resisting firmly their temptations. Even though Sloane denied him the right to fast, still he would find some other way to do proper penance for his sins; though Callahan broke his back, though a thousand bees attacked him at once, still he would prevail.

  “Forgive and guide me to sin no more, but preserve me in righteousness all the days of my life,” he repeated, and turned into the building where there was more work and misery waiting for him. Sometime he’d be rewarded. Sometime.

  Back in his head a small shred of doubt sniggered gleefully.

  The Wings of Night

  “Damn all martians!” Fats Welch’s thin mouth bit out the words with all the malice of an offended member of a superior race. “Here we are, loaded down with as sweet a high-rate cargo of iridium as ever came out of the asteroids, just barely over the moon, and that injector starts mismetering again. If I ever see that bulbous Marshy—”

  “Yeah.” Slim Lane groped back with his right hand for the flexible-shaft wrench, found it, and began wriggling and grunting forward into the mess of machinery again. “Yeah. I know. You’ll make mince meat out of him. Did you ever figure that maybe you were making your own trouble? That maybe Martians are people after all? Lyro Bmachis told you it would take two days to make the overhaul of the injector control hookup, so you knocked him across the field, called his ancestors dirty dogs, and gave him just eight hours to finish repairs. Now you expect his rush job to be a labor of love for you—Oh, skip it, Fats, and give me the screwdriver.”

  What was the use? He’d been over it all with Fats a dozen times before, and it never got him anywhere. Fats was a good rocket man, but he couldn’t stretch his imagination far enough to forget the hogwash the Reconstruction Empire was dishing out about the Destiny of Man and the Divine Plan whereby humans were created to exploit all other races. Not that it would do Fats much good if he did. Slim knew the value of idealism—none better.

  He’d come out of college with a bad dose of it and an inherited fortune big enough for three men, filled with the old crusading spirit. He’d written and published books, made speeches, interviewed administrators, lobbied, joined and organized societies, and been called things that weren’t complimentary. Now he was pushing freight from Mars to Earth for a living, quarter owner of a space-worn freighter. And Fats, who’d come up from a tube cleaner without the help of ideals, owned the other three quarters.

  Fats watched him climb out of the hold. “Well?”

  “Nothing. I can’t fix it—don’t know enough about electronics. There’s something wrong with the relays that control the time interval, but the indicators don’t show where, and I’d hate to experiment out here.”

  “Make it to Earth—maybe?”

  Slim shook his head. “I doubt it, Fats. Better set us down on Luna somewhere, if you can handle her that far. Then maybe we can find out what’s wrong before we run out of air.”

  Fats had figured as much and was already braking (he ship down, working against the spasmodic flutter of die blasts, and swearing at the effects of even the moon’s weak gravity. But the screens showed that he was making progress toward the spot he’d chosen—a ·mall flat plain with an area in the center that seemed unusually clear of debris and pockmarks.

  “Wish they’d at least put up an emergency station out here,” he muttered.

  “They had one once,” Slim said. “But nobody ever goes to Luna, and there’s no reason for passenger ships to land there; takes less fuel for them to coast down on their fins through Earth’s atmosphere than to jet down fcere. Freighters like us don’t count, anyway. Funny fcow regular and flat that place is; we can’t be over a mile up, and I don’t see even a meteor scar.”

  “Luck’s with us, then. I’d hate to hit a baby crater and rip off a tube or poke a hole in the shell.” Fats glanced at the radio altimeter and fall indicator. “We’re gonna hit plenty hard. If—Hey, what the deuce!”

  Slim’s eyes flicked to the screen just in time to see the flat plain split into two halves and slide smoothly out from under them as they seemed about to touch it; then they were dropping slowly into a crater of some sort, seemingly bottomless and widening out rapidly; the roar of the tubes picked up suddenly. Above them, the over-screens showed a pair of translucent slides closing together again. His eyes stared at the height indicator, neither believing nor doubting.

  “Hundred and sixty miles down and trapped in! Tube sounds show air in some amount, at least, even up here. This crazy trap can’t be here. There’s no reason for it.”

  “Right now, who cares? We can’t go through that slide up there again, so we go down and find out, T guess. Damn, no telling what kind of landing field we’ll find when we reach bottom.” Fats’ lack of excess imagination came in handy in cases like this. He went about the business of jockeying down the enormous crater as if he were docking at York port, too busy with the uncertain blast to worry about what he might find at the bottom. Slim
gazed at him in wonder, then fell back to staring at the screen for some indication of the reason behind this obviously artificial trap.

  Lhin scratched idly through the pile of dirt and rotten shale, pried a thin scrap of reddened stone out from where his eyes had missed it the first time, and rose slowly to his feet. The Great Ones had been good to him, sending a rockslide just when the old beds were wearing thin and poor from repeated digging. His sensitive nostrils told him there was magnesium, ferrous matter, and sulphur in abundance, all more than welcome. Of course, he’d hoped there might be copper, even as little as the end of his finger, but of that there seemed to be no sign. And without copper—

  He shrugged the thought aside as he had done a thousand times before, and picked up his crude basket,

  now filled half with broken rock and half with the lichenlike growth that filled this end of the crater. One of his hands ground a bit of rottenstone together with shreds of lichen and he popped the mixture into his mouth. Grace to the Great Ones who had sent the slide; the pleasant flavor of magnesium tickled his tongue, and the lichens were full-flavored from the new richness of the soil around them. Now, with a trace of copper,’ there would have been nothing left to wish for.

  With a rueful twitch of his supple tail, Lhin grunted and turned back toward his cave, casting a cursory glance up at the roof of the cavern. Up there, long miles away, a bright glare lanced down, diffusing out as it pierced through the layers of air, showing that the long lunar day was nearing noon, when the sun would lance down directly through the small guarding gate. It was too high to see, but he knew of the covered opening where the sloping walls of the huge valley ended and the roof began. Through all the millennia of his race’s slow defeat, that great roof had stood, unsupported except for the walls that stretched out around in a circle of perhaps fifty miles in diameter, strong and more lasting than even the crater itself; the one abiding monument to the greatness that had been his people’s.

  He knew without having to think of it that the roof was artificial, built when the last thin air was deserting the moon, and the race had sought a final refuge here in the deepest crater, where oxygen could be trapped and kept from leaking away. In a vague way, he could sense the ages that had passed since then and wonder at the permanence of the domed roof, proof against all time.

  Once, as the whole space about him testified, his had been a mighty race. But time had worked on them, aging the race as it had individuals, removing the vigor of their youth and sending in the slow creepers of hopelessness. What good was existence here, cooped up in one small colony, away from their world? Their numbers had diminished and some of their skill had gone from them. Their machines had crumbled and vanished, unreplaced, and they had fallen back to the primitive, digging out the rocks of the crater walls and the lichens

  they had cultured to draw energy from the heat and radioactive phosphorescence of the valley instead of sunlight. Fewer young were planted each year, and of the few, a smaller percentage proved fertile, so that their original million fell to thousands, then to hundreds, and finally to a few grubbing individuals.

  Only then had they awakened to the danger of extinction, to find it too late. There had been three elders when Lhin was grown, his seed being the only fertile one. Now the elders were gone long years since, and Lhin had the-entire length and breadth of the crater to . himself. And life was a long series of sleeps and food forages, relieved only by the same thoughts that had been , in his mind while his dead world turned to the light and away more than a thousand times. Monotony had slowly killed off his race, but now that its work was nearly done, it” had ended. Lhin was content with his type of life; he was habituated, and immune to boredom.

  His feet had been moving slowly along with the turning of his thoughts, and he was out of the valley proper, near the door of the shelter carved into the rocky walls which he had chosen from the many as his home. He munched another mouthful of rock and lichen and let the diffused sunlight shine on him for a few minutes more, then turned into the cave. He needed no light, since the rock walls about had all been rendered radioactive in the dim youth of his race, and his eyes were adapted to wide ranges of light conditions. He passed quickly through the outer room, containing his woven lichen bed and few simple furnishings, and back into the combination nursery and workshop, an illogical but ever-present hope drawing him back to the far corner.

  But as always, it was reasonless. The box of rich earth, pulped to a fine loam and watered carefully, was barren of life. There was not even the beginning of a small red shoot to awaken him to hope for the future. His seed was infertile, and the time when all life would be extinct was growing near. Bitterly he turned his back on the nursery bed.

  So little lacking, yet so much! A few hundred molecules of copper salt to eat, and the seeds he grew would be fertile; or those same copper molecules added to the water would render the present seeds capable of growing into vigorous manhood—or womanhood; Lhin’s people carried both male and female elements within each member, and could grow the seeds that became their children either alone or with another. So long as one member of the race lived, as many as a hundred young a year could be reared in the carefully tended incubating soil—if the vital hormone containing copper could be made.

  But that, it seemed, was not to be. Lhin went over his laboriously constructed apparatus of hand-cut rock bowls and slender rods bound together into tubes, and his hearts were heavy within him. The slow fire of dried lichen and gummy tar burned still, and slowly, drop by drop, liquid oozed from the last tube into a bowl. But even in that there was no slightest odor of copper salts. Well, he had tried that and failed. The accumulation of years of refining had gone into the water that kept the nursery soil damp, and in it there had been too little of the needed mineral for life. Almost dispassionately he threw the permanent metal rolls of his race’s science back into their cylinders and began disassembling the chemical part of his workshop.

  That meant the other solution, harder, and filled with risks, but necessary now. Somewhere up near the roof, the records indicated, there was copper in small amounts, but well past the breathable concentration of air. That meant a helmet and tanks for compressed air, along with hooks and grapples to bridge the eroded sections of the old trail and steps leading up, instruments to detect the copper, and a pump to fill the tanks. Then he must carry tanks forward, cache them, and go up to make another cache, step by step, until his supply line would reach the top and—perhaps—he could find copper for a new beginning.

  He deliberately avoided thinking of the tune required and the chances of failure. His foot came down on the little bellows and blue flames licked up from his crude forge as he drew out the hunks of refined metal and began heating them to malleability. Even the shaping of it by hand to the patterns of the ancient records was almost impossible, and yet, somehow, he must accomplish it correctly. His race must not die!

  He was still working doggedly hours later when a high-pitched note shot through the cave. A meteor, coming into the fields around the sealing slides of the roof, and a large one! In all Lhin’s life there had been none big enough to activate the warning screens, and he had doubted that the mechanism, though meant to be ageless and draw sun power until the sun died, was still functioning. As he stood staring at the door senselessly, the whistling note came again.

  Now, unless he pressed his hand over the inductance grid, the automatic forces would come into play, twisting the meteor aside and beyond the roof. But he gave no thought to that as he dashed forward and slapped his fingers against the grille panel. It was for that he had chosen his rock house, once the quarters of the Watchers who let the few scouting rockets of the dim past ages in and out. A small glow from the grid indicated the meteor was through, and he dropped his hand, letting the slides close again.

  Then he waited impatiently for it to strike, moving out to the entrance. Perhaps the Great Ones were kind and were answering his prayers at last. Since he could find no copper here, they we
re sending a token from outer space to him, and who knew what fabulous amounts it might contain—perhaps even as much as he could hold in one hand! But why hadn’t it struck? He scanned the roof anxiously, numb with a fear that he had been too late and the forces had thrown it aside.

  No, there was a flare above—but surely not such as a meteor that size should make as it sliced down through the resisting air! A sharp stinging whine hit his ears finally, flickering off and on; and that was not the sound a meteor would logically make. He stared harder, wondering, and saw that it was settling downward slowly, not in a sudden rush, and that the flare struck down instead of fading out behind. That meant—could only mean—intelligent control. A rocket!

  Lhin’s mind spun under the shock, and crazy ideas of his ancestors’ return, of another unknown refuge, of the Great Ones’ personal visit slid into his thoughts. Basically, though, he was severely logical, and one by one he rejected them. This machine could not come from the barren moon, and that left only the fabled planet lying under the bottom of his world, or those that wandered around the sun in other orbits. Intelligence there?

  His mind slid over the records he had read, made when his ancestors had crossed space to those worlds, long before the refuge was built. They had been unable to colonize, due to the oppressive pull of gravity, but they had observed in detail. On the second planet were only squamous things that slid through the water and curious fronds on the little dry land; on his own primary, gigantic beasts covered the globe, along with growth rooted to the ground. No intelligence on those worlds. The fourth, though, was peopled by more familiar life, and like his own evolutionary forerunners, there was no division into animal and vegetable, but both were present in all. Ball-shaped blobs of life had already formed into packs, guided by instinct, with no means of communication. Yet, of the other worlds known, that seemed the most probable as a source of intelligence. If, by some miracle, they came from the third, he abandoned hope; the blood lust of that world was too plainly written in the records, where living mountainh’ke beasts tore at others through all the rolls of etched pictures. Half filled with dread, half with anticipation, he heard the ship land somewhere near, and started toward it, his tail curved tightly behind him.