Asteroid Man

by R. L. Fanthorpe

  He thought of how they must have pondered and reflected on the great mysteries of philosophy. How they must have considered the three elements of earth and air and fire. How they must have cogitated on the wildness of the sea, the unfathomable depths of the ocean, its uttermost reaches and outermost bounds. Poor little pigmies, he thought to himself. Pigmies with one advantage only, the advantage of a mind. Pigmies whose only salvation was the ability to say, "I am." He thought of René Descartes, and how much he had made of that one observation, "I think, therefore, I am." He had gone to prove the reality of the universe from that one supposition. A real pigmy, even among his fellow men. A little man with a mighty mind. He brought himself back swiftly and ruthlessly. In the beginning, he realized, men had speculated on the existence of the human soul and had found no real answer. And although man in the course of millennia had solved many problems, he had not solved that one. That was still the great uncertainty, the enormous enigma, the eternal question mark. A question which would, perhaps, never be answered. A mystery which would forever be unsolved. Masterson liked mysteries. He had first taken an interest in them when he had been absorbed by the fascinating hobby of genealogy. He had set off one vacation twenty years ago as a young student to trace back his own parentage. He had taken it back as far as the English registers would allow; then he had lost it. He had lost it because his family had sailed with the Mayflower. He checked again from the other side of the Atlantic, and found to his utter amazement that he could claim a pretty direct line of descent from the famous Western sheriff of the 19th century—"Bat" Masterson. He had taken a great pride in that discovery. It had meant more to him than discovering that he had been related to William the Conqueror, or Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar. For those figures, romantic as they were, had not held such personal qualities as the Western sheriff of a bygone age. From that moment he had found himself thinking more and more about his remote ancestor. He had read all he could find about the sheriff's life, about his appearance, his attributes, his courage; his strength and determination, his toughness, his tenacity; his ability to fight with or without a gun. He felt that in some small way he could understand just a little of the rather remote Oriental principal that prompted the Asiatic in his weird cult of ancestor worship.

  Greg Masterson, 23rd century space pilot, had realized that he had something to live up to. He had gone advenuring all over the system and beyond. He had been one of the few who had crossed the long weary miles to Proxima Centauri with its four satellite worlds. He had been among the few who had been there and returned. He could had spent many lifetimes on those four worlds. He still had a burning curiosity to find out the whole truth about our nearest stellar neighbor. But that was as far as man had gotten. He felt as the prehistoric Scott and Amundsen must have felt when they had reached the Antarctic, when they had crossed the icy waste and achieved their ambition. They had arrived at their destination, but knew very little of what lay beneath that ice. They knew nothing of the fantastic deposits of mineral wealth that rested there. They had been the pioneers, just as the pioneers had crossed the deserts to California, not dreaming of a Hollywood that was to be born centuries later, and that was still flourishing… Not dreaming of the wealth that would one day spring up from the land that had seemed so hard beneath their weary feet. So it was now with the Outworlds, as they were called. Men had gone and taken many years of suffering, hardship and privation to reach them; had reached them, and returned and resumed their own jobs as pilots, spacemen… and yet when all was said and done, they knew no more about them than the early men had known about the polar regions of earth. They were aware of their existence, but of nothing else. That was the limit of their knowledge.

  It was a strange business, he reflected, very strange.

  And now, from those apparently uncrossable wastes of interstellar space, something appeared to have come…

  He and the other pilots of the expedition knew why the survey had been put forward a month. He thought back grimly to an account he had read of the so-called World War II of 1939-1945. He remembered seeing some ancient films about it. One of them had been entitled "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing," a phrase that had been all too familiar to those who had lived through those troubled times. One of our asteroids is missing, he grinned to himself, only of course it wasn't missing! There was one too many. Greg Masterson wondered whether asteroids had a love life, whether those lumps of cold, hard rock had been quietly breeding there, in the depths of space, as though the things were alive; not in the sense that flesh and blood is alive, nor even as plants are alive, but in some weird way of their own. Can rock have a metabolism which we, creatures of flesh and blood, do not understand? He did not think it likely…

  There was, of course, rational explanations, he assured himself as he climbed aboard his ship and made final checks with his fellow pilots. They settled back on the anti-grav couches and blasted off.

  There was no real reason, no reason at all, why the asteroids shouldn't have increased their number. The most likely thing was that one orbit, rather more erratic and extended than the others, had just come into the field of vision. There was about ninety-nine to one in favor of that. They had always been notorious for erratic behavior, and after all, how long had first-class astronomic observation been going on? Certainly not more than three or four centuries at the outside. Was there any reason why one of those undisciplined bodies out there in the asteroid belt should not have decided to wander outside the range of the checking equipment for a mere four centuries? Good heaven, he told himself. What was four centuries in astronomical time? The mere ticking of a watch in the mechanism of celestial chronology. They were blasting into the early light of morning, while the earth behind them turned into a vast spinning globe, no longer flat, a huge spherical ball. A terrestrial sphere among the other spheres. Suddenly it didn't look like earth any more. It was just a receding globe behind the lightning-fast ships, streaking off, a tiny squadron of intrepid men. Tiny ants leaving their colony and going out into the great unknown. Mind you, this section wasn't as unknown as some of the other sections. They had blasted off this way before. In his analogy, he felt that it was like one of the paths leading to the ant colony, one of the paths that led to other ant hills where the ants were friendly. Paths which they were following through the media of their course computers, in the same way that ants relied upon their instincts to guide them along well-traveled ways. The journey, in the first stage, was comparatively uneventful, as uneventful as any journey through space can be. The breathtaking wonder of it was magnificent and glorious. There was freedom out here. They felt as though they had escaped from the toils of gravity. Oddly, he found himself thinking about the Three Little Fishes that Swam Over the Dam—here they were, five little fishes, swimming over the dam of gravity into the great deep space beyond. Swimming out into the unknown depths of space. It was just a routine survey, he kept telling himself. They would find either that one of the old faithfuls had collided with one of the others and split, or that one of the other bodies had wandered in. When they arrived they would find a mass of rock, dead and dull and uninteresting…

  Greg always tried to imagine that what was coming would be dull and uninteresting. That way he would sometimes get a pleasant surprise…

  He had decided long ago that blessed was the man who expected nothing, for he would not be disappointed.

  As a boy he had often imagined space being peopled with weird, exciting, interesting things, with spider men and monsters and inter-galactic intelligentsia, but when he had grown up and gone and looked for himself, he had found that reality was exceptionally quiet, exceptionally dull. Truth had not been stranger than fiction. In fact, by the standards of fiction, truth had been decidedly disappointing. He found space explanation as dull and boring as he had found geography at school…

  One planet was very much like another. Its gravity was different, its life forms were different, but they were not bizarre and weird as he had
hoped they would be. It was just an extension of everyday knowledge and everyday life; at least all the world he had seen, and he had seen all the worlds the solar system had boasted of. When he got out here, he was quite content to expect there would be nothing but another asteroid which had wandered in or one that had broken from a larger parent body and caused a temporary excitement, and that was all.

  Yet he could not quite subdue the lurking hope within him that there would be something different out there, something new, something frightening, something that tingled with adventure and excitement. They reached the belt. The five pilots had their work cut out, diving in and out, navigating and matching their velocity with the hurtling planetoids: those tiny, irregular-shaped objects, some smaller than their own ships, some as large as Scotland or Wales. Some were shaped like vast, rough-hewn eggs; some were triangular, some were cone-shaped. Some were almost square as though they had been hewn by the hand of galactic giants for some building that was never finished. He brought his survey equipment to bear.

  Dan Richards, his second-in-command, stood beside him at the panel. Dan was a short, stocky man of Celtic descent, with a crown of vivid red hair and strange, thoughtful eyes. He was more than a scientist. He was a philosopher and a metaphysicist; he enjoyed examining the universe. He was one of the youths who had not found geography dull at school. He enjoyed the world as it was, where people like Greg Masterson found nothing but dull routine and monotony. He was a man to whom God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world. Masterson sometimes envied him his attitude. Dan was peering intently through a spectroscope and ticking marks off on a chart. He was putting out radioactivity check units and listening to the dull, regular click of the geiger counter as it registered in a dismal level. All as usual. Dan ticked off another of the wandering bodies.

  "Perhaps it's not in this section, Chief," he said. "I've found nothing here that I can't identify, nothing that's behaving erratically." He held up the dimensional selector. "They're all much the same as usual." Then suddenly, "Listen! Listen to that geiger counter, Chief! There's something very seriously adrift here!"

  "How do you mean?"

  "The geiger counter's low-lever 'cluck' has risen to a staccato rattle, like a cosmic machine-gun."

  "Where the heck is that coming from?" said Greg.

  "Over here," said Dan. "This baby, as far as I can make out."

  "This baby" was a chunk of rock about fifteen miles square. It was rough and irregular and superficially bore a close resemblance to all its fellows in the group, yet there was something about it which was giving the geiger counter a heart attack.

  "We'd better get out of range," said Dan.

  "I think we had," said Masterson, and began punching buttons with silent efficiency. The ship veered but didn't alter course…

  Dan and Greg exchanged glances…

  "What the devil's happened now?" exclaimed Masterson. Blessed is the man who expecteth nothing for he shall not be disappointed, he thought to himself. Stars and stripes, the blasted thing must be magnetic.

  "Magnetic!" The word was torn from Masterson's lips, and then he remembered! It dawned upon him with a suddenness that was frightening in its very intensity.

  "If it is magnetic," he said softly, "it can't be magnetic in any way that we understand. These ships—"

  "Yes, of course! Of course!" repeated Dan. "They're protected against normal ferric magnetism. Yep."

  "Whatever that thing is that's pulling us, it's not acting by any magnetism that we understand. Some sort of attractor ray, maybe."

  "Do you mean a manufactured one?"

  "I don't know what to think. I only know that there's something out there that's pulling us toward the surface of that asteroid. Something that's stronger than our atomic rocket drive. Something that's attracting a ship that's supposed to be unattractable. Something that's gonna smash us up like matchwood, if we can't do something about it pretty soon."

  They managed to spin the ship round so that they were coming at it tail first.

  "I'm going to give it the lot," said the pilot. "Sparks!" The young radio engineer dashed quickly toward him.

  "Sir?"

  "Get a message through to the rest. Get a message back to earth. Tell them we're in the grip of some magnetic beam that we don't understand, some kind of hazy gravitational warp. I don't know what the heck it is, but it's pulling us toward this thing out here." He pointed through the observation panel. "Tell 'em it looks as if we've had ours. Tell 'em to get back to earth and report."

  "Right, sir," said Sparks. "You mean this is—?"

  "I don't mean anything! We may be able to pull out yet. Just get the message through, will you, son?"

  "Sir!" Sparks hurried back to his set. Dan and Greg exchanged quiet, meaningful glances.

  "It looks as if that survey message wasn't a false alarm after all!"

  "Is it any good blasting the thing?" asked Greg.

  "See if we can break out first."

  Greg threw the multi-million horse-power rocket engines with full force against the asteroid's attraction. They refused to fire.

  "Darn!" he exploded savagely. "What the blazes can that be?"

  "May just be a mechanical failure," volunteered Dan. Greg shook his head. "Not on your life, boy! Those engines are foolproof by the standards of our puny technology. There's something out there that's too tough for us, something that we can't handle."

  Sparks darted back into the cabin, his face as white as a sheet.

  "The other ships, sir."

  "Yes? Go on!"

  "They are also caught in the field; their engines are not responding. They're being dragged toward our sector."

  "Jumping Jupiter! Get through to earth if you possibly can! Just send them as SOS. Tell them this thing has got to be blasted; us along with it if necessary! Tell them to send up two hydro warheads. Blow the thing out of space! It may get us, but it won't get the earth. If they blast it, it won't get any more ships."

  "Right, sir."

  Greg knew that he had just signed his own death warrant and those of his men. But the system was in danger, and it was the only thing he could do. They continued their helpless, plummeting dive.

  "We've got a couple of triple megatons on board ourselves, don't forget, sir!" Dan reminded him respectfully.

  "Yes, of course we have! Right. This is an emergency. If they'll still fire, we'll let go!"

  Greg began pressing computer keys with savage efficiency. The deadly three megaton missiles winged away toward the asteroid. They stood by with bated breath, waiting to see the showers of debris scattered into space. The bombs struck the asteroid—and failed to explode!

  CHAPTER III

  There was nothing they could do but wait, with cold, quiet resignation, as the ships plummeted down toward what must be certain, inevitable death.

  Dan looked at Greg, and Greg looked at Dan, and through their minds ran thoughts that were too deep for words, thoughts that came from the deepest depths of the human mind.

  "Been good to know you," said Greg quietly.

  "Same here," said Dan. Monosyllables, he thought. This is where fact parts company with fiction. If this was a play on the televiewer, we should be making some sort of grand speech. Funny… when real life comes to a sudden stop, all you can say is, "Cheerio," because those grand thoughts that need putting into grand words can be put into such words only if you've got time… oceans of time. We haven't got oceans of anything. We haven't even oceans of space.

  "How long do you think we've got?" asked Greg.

  " 'Bout ten seconds," said Dan.

  "That's how I figured it. Ah well…" That "Ah well" was pregnant with meaning. It held resignation and something more. They relapsed into stony silence. Sparks left the radio and came up, looking over their shoulders through the observation port at the rough granular surface leaping to meet them.

  "Shall we try the rockets again?" His voice was so flat it held scarcely any inflexion.

>   "I'll keep my hand on the button until we hit," said the captain. "But I don't think it'll do any good." He tried the rockets again, but there was nothing but a "click" from the button. The firing mechanism was as dead as a doornail, as dead as they reckoned they would be in a few seconds. "Get the suits on, I suppose, just in case."

  "Yes, it's better than nothing. Reduces the odds from about a million to one to a million to two, I suppose. All right. Suits on, chaps!" There was no panic as they quietly donned the suits.

  "Any good trying to get out through the air lock?"

  "We should be still caught in that force, whatever it is. It would only mean that we hit the meteorite completely unprotected. If we stay inside the ship, there's just a chance it will take enough of the impact to leave one, or perhaps two of us alive. If we go out there without the suits, we shall be squashed like beetles."

  "Yes, I see what you mean."

  They stood there, weird, ungainly, plastic-clad figures, waiting for the end.

  Eyes behind steel-strong plastic lenses betrayed feelings that were quite inexpressible.

  "A few more seconds," said Greg quietly. Those last seconds were like centuries…

  It seemed that the ship would never hit, and then everything erupted into an enormous sea of concussion and violence and destruction…