The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  She wasted no time. Before he could rise, she was beside him, rolling back his sleeve. There was the coldness of an antiseptic and then the faint bite of a needle. “You’ll be all right in a minute,” she said coolly. “I’d have come sooner, but all these rumors have kept me busy. I’ve been expecting this; your chart shows you’re a depressive with an irregular cycle.” Her precise smile was calculated to make it seem no more than mention of a bit of common gossip. “Come on now, Captain. Things aren’t all black.”

  Now that the drug had ended his chance to wallow in the mood of his ill-fortune, he was almost glad. But her words touched it off again. The jinx was more than a mood. He was the only man of his age in the Service who rated less than sector commander. Everything he undertook went wrong, and seldom through his own failure. There had been the training ship that blew up, the girl who died from mutational weaknesses, the mislaid citation papers—and the whole affair leading to this foredoomed command.

  “Optimism!” he said bitterly. “You should head an expedition that you know is bound to fail—because you head it!”

  She snorted. “Superstition! Sure, you had a run of misfortune, Derek. But your real trouble came when you started to believe that jinx nonsense. You’re so sure of bad luck now that it’s sapped all your initiative. Look at you. You’ve been eyeing me for months, wanting me and being afraid to make a pass because something might go wrong!”

  There was too much truth in it, and he could feel the blood rush to his face. She stood studying his reaction clinically, as if using it to gauge the progress of the anti-depressant. Then suddenly she laughed easily and dropped to the opposite chair. “Maybe you should try sometime, Derek—but not now. I’m having my hands full with the men’s rumors. Look, why not tell me the truth about this expedition? After all, we’re almost ready to cut speed.”

  The drug was beginning to work now, killing some of his gloom. He was still convinced of his jinx, but he could think of other things. Now he considered her question, surprised that she hadn’t already been briefed. “How much of the background and history of the war do they teach on Terra?” he asked. Some of the distant worlds had queer legends that would make explanation difficult.

  She frowned impatiently for a second. Then she apparently decided to humor him and began sketching her knowledge in. Aside from her provincial belief that men had originated on Terra, it was accurate enough. Wherever men had started, the race had seemingly discovered space travel two thousand years before and somehow had almost immediately stumbled onto some form of faster-than-light travel. They had spread over the cosmos at a fantastic rate, using up vast quantities of some power element known as uranium.

  Thirteen hundred years ago, dwindling supplies of that had split them into two competing empires. An unthinkably violent war had blasted systems of suns to novas, had used the last of the uranium, and had left their culture in ruins. Except for misleading hints that it had involved negation of time, the superdrive had been lost. It had taken centuries to find new power in the fusion of boron. It had taken longer to discover how to eliminate space around the ship, leaving only a subfractional connection with the universe and using the “suction” resulting from imbalance to drive them. Then men began spreading again.

  Fifty years ago, they had run into the other empire—an empire technically ahead of them and filled with hate that had been nursed for thirteen centuries. The enemy gave no quarter and began savagely wiping them out, planet by planet. For a time, the Federation had seemingly been doomed. But lately, under the drive of necessity, they had begun to match the enemy science. In a few more years…

  “In a few years—or months—there won’t be a Federation, unless this mission succeeds,” he cut into her routine optimism. He fished around in a drawer to locate one of the mission briefing sheets he’d helped prepare. For a second, his lips twisted as he saw the dull, official words.

  The Waraok, on its way to rendezvous with the Fifth Fleet, had cut its space-denial drive to make a fix in one of the old sun-blasted sectors at 9-17/2.47:23 Federation time. At 9-17/2.47:26 they were less than a quarter million miles from one of the planets of Sirius.

  Something had thrown them more than two hundred thousand light-years instantaneously! And unless they could wipe out the enemy base or find the secret and its countersecret, that something could as easily throw boron bombs into every Federation sun! With that threat, even such harebrained schemes as this mission had to be tried.

  The Sepelora and eleven other ships were hastily stocked with every possible instrument, staffed with technicians, and blasted off on a course that would bring them out of superspeed at points around the recorded original fix of the Waraok. Their instruments would be recording and their space-denial transmitters signaling as they emerged, while a fleet of battleships followed. If they ran into the mysterious weapon and were lucky, the instruments might determine its nature. Otherwise, the locations of their last signals might pin-point the enemy base for bombing. Then they could only hope it was an experimental station and the only one the enemy had.

  Siryl had glanced over the paper. Now she crumpled it in sudden disgust. “They gave us this guff back on Terra! Derek, you don’t expect me or the men to believe such nonsense? Instantaneous teleportation! Could you believe it?”

  He stared at her, his first thrust of anger giving place to bitterness that drove away the last physical effects of the drug. “I should be able to,” he told her. “I was captain of the Waraok when it happened!”

  It had been his first command of a battleship—and his last chance at promotion; the loss of plans he had been carrying had cost the Federation a major defeat, even though it had been no fault of his. Such miracles weren’t beyond the power of his jinx.

  She snorted incredulously. “Captain, even I know that a single photon would have infinite energy against a ship at infinite speed! You couldn’t keep it out without a perfect space-denial—which means ceasing to exist. This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan’s we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!”

  Legends indicated that people had once had such abilities to some extent, but there was obviously no use in reminding her of that. He swore hotly. “I tell you, I was there!”

  “Hypnotic implantation! Propaganda based on old superstition! You’d better look in your safe for sealed orders, Captain Der—”

  Red lights erupted on the control board. The alarm system went wild, with every gong clamoring. A blare of light struck in through the viewing panel and the big radar let out a whine, with a picture and coordinates forming to show a body of planetary size less than ten thousand miles below. Needlessly, the green letters on the board blazed out the fact that the superdrive was off.

  Derek silenced the gongs and began hitting his switches, trying to get information. Nobody answered. Crews were normally lax during superspeed cruising, but at least one man should have been on watch near the space-denial generators; the others should be reporting to their stations on the double. He cut into the intercom and began yelling for immediate reports.

  The door of the cabin jerked open, but it was only the chubby figure of Ferad, scared white. Then another figure burst through the door, and Derek recognized the physicist, Kayel. The little man’s weak chin seemed buried in his throat and his huge Adam’s apple was bobbing horribly. He jerked one hand up, clutched around a crooked pipe he affected, and motioned tautly backward. “Gone!” he screamed. “All gone!”

  Derek cursed, shoved him aside, and headed through the door. He leaped across the precabin, yanked another door open—and stopped.

  Five feet ahead, the deck ended. Where the cabins, storage hatches, rec rooms, galleys, and parts of the machine shops and engine rooms had been, there was nothing! Or rather, there was only an empty hull with a single keri-bird from Sirius, squawking and beating its wings wildly in air that held the warm, wet sce
nt of growing Sirian flowers!

  Beside him, Derek heard a sharp gasp from Siryl and felt her fingers bite into his arm. Ferad stood frozen and Kayel was gasping for breath, trying to light his pipe against chattering teeth. He met Derek’s gaze, glanced at Siryl, and somehow steadied himself.

  “It—it just went! I was back there—” His finger pointed toward the remains of the engine room and the beginning of the rocket chambers. “Gone! Without cutting the hull! Completely impossible!”

  Derek could appreciate their shock, but after years of living with his jinx, he was practically immune. There were advantages to everything, even to regular bad luck. “What about the denial drive? Can we fix it?”

  “No.” Kayel had hesitated, but his negative was definite. “Most of it’s all right, but we’d need tools we don’t have now.”

  Derek nodded. “All right, see what our remaining instruments show; if we<-get back, the Federation will need those readings; Ferad, get back to the rockets. Somehow, we’ve got to make a landing on that planet under us. And Siryl, if you’re done shouting superstition at me…”

  Then he grinned thinly. She was staring at the yawning emptiness with unbelieving eyes, slowly crossing herself.

  Eighty men and tons of ship were gone, with only a Sirian bird and the perfume of flowers in their place. Among the missing were the pilot, navigator, and engineer. Derek hadn’t handled a rocket landing for twenty years, and he didn’t even have figures on the atmosphere and gravity of the world below. His grin vanished and he groaned to himself as he headed back to the control cabin.

  2

  The planet was closer when Kayel reported back with word that the instruments all showed exactly nothing. He was working with the spectroprobe, trying to get data for Derek, when Siryl came in with coffee as a peace offering. “Some of the supplies are all right,” she reported. “Enough for—for four!”

  “Thanks.” Derek tasted the coffee and found it vile. But at least it was hot and wet. “Better take some back to Ferad if you can find the way. Tell him if he doesn’t report at once, I’ll skin his fat carcass.”

  Kayel gulped and accepted coffee from her as if he’d never seen a woman serve food before. He probably hadn’t on Terra, judging by what she’d done to the coffee.

  Derek interrupted the physicist’s stumbling compliments. “Find anything yet, Kayel?”

  Siryl threw him a dirty look and went out, again on parade drill. Kayel nodded, turning back reluctantly. “One of the blasted systems, all right, sir. Spectrum looks as if the sun got a light dose, though.”

  Probably one of the last suns the first war had ruined, Derek thought; men had been running low on high-numbered atoms by then. If the blast had been mild, it might even have missed the planet. In that case, they might find machinery in some of the ruined cities.

  Kayel shook his head. “Planet was hit, all right. A lot of helium in the atmosphere shows that. Funny, though. A couple hundred miles of air with plenty of free oxygen—about like Terra.” He sucked on his pipe, squinting through heavy lenses at the charts he had prepared. “Umm. Density against height… must have about gravity one. Damn. Shouldn’t be free oxygen in that quantity!”

  Derek muttered unhappily. The Slpelora wasn’t equipped with full-sized vanes, and an atmosphere and high gravity would make landing harder. Still, if they got down it would be handy. And while the ancient solar explosion would have ruined their hope for tools, it meant there was no danger from savages or beasts left over from the old days; some of the distant worlds had turned wild.

  Ferad reported finally, complaining at the impossible job of readying the rockets by himself.

  “Put Siryl to work with you,” Derek ordered. “They’ll be ready in five minutes or we’ll miss perigee.”

  Their intrinsic momentum, left from their speed before cutting on the space-denial generators after takeoff, was carrying them down toward the planet hi an ellipse that would approach within some six hundred miles.

  Surprisingly, Ferad reported the rockets ready and valves trimmed within the time limit. The ship groaned as the rockets went on and Derek watched his indicators grimly, expecting the worst. With so much of her interior bracing removed, she was badly weakened and completely unbalanced. With his luck, anything could happen. Usually, he managed to get out of one mess before getting into another, but there had been that time during inspection…

  The Sepelora hit the atmosphere badly. There had been no time for full correction with the side rockets, and the gyroscopes were gone with the missing section.

  One of the weakened girders let go with a snap that jarred his teeth.and the ship wobbled before straightening out. Derek knocked the sweat out of his eyes and tried to remember all that he’d been taught back in rocketry school. But all that came back was the instructor’s long lecture on why accident prones should be kicked out at once.

  The ship righted, however, though it was close, and settled into a long, fast glide, with her hull pyrometers well into the red-hot zone but safe. A protective shield had slipped over the viewing panel, but the radar still gave them a view of the ground. They came down to twenty miles above the surface, then to fifteen.

  Kayel let out a surprised whinny and pointed the stem of his pipe excitedly at the screen. Derek could see nothing, but the little man watched intently as something seemed to vanish. “A city! Straight lines—streets!”

  “Ruins, probably,” Derek commented. Maybe they were in luck and the solar explosion had only touched the planet, without burning it enough to destroy buildings and major tools. After thirteen hundred years, some would be ruined; but the ancients had built things to last on the outer planets.

  There was a thin layer of clouds that the ship cut through. Now the going was rougher. Without full vanes, the Sepelora had all the lift of a stone, and the glide was growing steeper asymptotically, though her temperature was finally dropping. Derek got her tail down and began using controlled blasts.

  Three miles above the surface, she was falling almost straight down, going too fast and swaying badly. Correcting for the unbalanced weight was harder than he had expected.

  Then he was only a mile up. With a groan, he cut on more power, hoping no other girders snapped. It was going to be a close shave, with scant seconds left.

  Kayel jerked up, screaming and pointing to the screen. Derek’s eyes followed the motion before he could pull them back. Something that might have been rows of buildings showed there. But he couldn’t worry about ruins; the blast would flatten them, anyhow.

  “Derek! People! They’re moving!” Kayel’s voice was screeching in his ears.

  He thrust the obvious hysteria of the other from his thoughts. The last glance had ruined his timing. Now the surface was zooming up. The Sepelora wobbled, pv-ershot, and then slowly came upright. Derek’s eyes jerked to catch a quick glimpse of the screen. For a second, his hands froze. Along the regular rows that must be streets, things were scurrying madly out of his path!

  There was no time to think. Conditioning against killing others, no matter what the risk, took over. His fingers bit into the side controls, and the Sepelora twisted under him, beginning to topple. For a second, the full side blasts tossed the ship backward. Then she dropped, just as he cut power in a final conditioned reflex.

  Kayel had fainted. Derek stared at him and down at his own hands. The ship was still. There had been no shock. He tried to figure it out; in theory, the various forces could counterbalance to cause a dead halt at just the moment of touching surface. But the chances were so remote that no pilot could have estimated them. It was as if all the years of his incredibly consistent jinx had come to a balance in one impossible piece of blind good luck.

  Kayel came to slowly, blinking. His fingers groped up to find his glasses still on his nose. “My pipe!” he squeaked, and ducked down for it. Then he straightened, staring at Derek. “We’re alive!”

  “No thanks to you,” Derek said curtly. He flipped a switch and the shield over the
viewing panel began sliding up, just as Siryl and Ferad came in. They looked exhausted, but less shaken than Kayel—probably because they hadn’t known what was going on. “Don’t start cheering yet. There are people here—and there shouldn’t be on any sun-grazed planet we haven’t recolonized. With my luck, I’ve probably landed us right hi the middle of an enemy colony!”

  “Luck!” Siryl snorted. Then she reddened faintly at his look, but went on stubbornly. “The enemy are compulsive troglodytes—they don’t build surface dwellings. And look at that,”

  The shield had come up enough to show fields around them, apparently corn and potatoes. Beyond, the edge of the town could be seen, built in low structures of crude stone and thatching.

  “An agricultural culture,” Siryl guessed quickly. “Look—there’s one! See, coming through the field. We’re in luck. Primitive agricultural societies are usually peaceful.”

  Several people were filing toward the ship, showing no sign of fear. They were dressed in rough pants with serapes or blankets thrown over their shoulders. The men wore beards with hair to their shoulders, all of a uniform brown except for the graybeard in front. The women were distinguished only by thick plaits around their heads. They were a healthy looking bunch.

  The graybeard moved to the viewing panel, waving at them with some bit of what seemed to be stone in his hand. His motions indicated that they were to come out. Derek shrugged faintly and nodded. He headed toward the door.

  Siryl caught his arm. “Where are you going?” “Out. You said they were peaceful.” “Usually peaceful,” she qualified hastily. “But—” “Unless they’re superstitious about sky devils, eh? I’m still going out.” He headed down the nearest passage that would lead to a lock. There was nothing else to do. Their few weapons were gone, along with their tools and the big space-decoupled signaling transmitter. The Sepelora was only a converted freighter and her hull was too thin to withstand any concerted attack by even primitive agriculturists. If the worst had to happen, it was better to get it over with at once.