The night was long and lonely. He was too far from civilization for his radio equipment to bring the comfort of familiar sounds. He tried to read, but found concentration impossible. He thought of the birds, wondering where they were now, how they kept from freezing to death at night. He rewrote his notes, adding remembered facts and impressions. Finally he decided sleep was the most painless way of spending the night, and swallowed a small capsule designed to induce total sleep for at least six hours.
* * * *
He awoke the next morning standing on his head.
The bed, horizontal the night before, was now vertical. The whole room was vertical. Panic swept over him like a wave of burning fire. He scrambled to the airlock. It opened grotesquely.
The ship, which last night had stood so proudly, now lay on its side. And in his drugged sleep he had not known when it fell. For Ingomar, the bottom dropped out of everything, and his heart dropped with it. There was no resetting of a ship once it had fallen. This took special equipment. Ingomar Bjorgson was a doomed man, and he knew it.
While he stood outside in the morning sun, staring at the horrible spectacle before him, the two birds alighted, one on each side.
“Why didn’t you listen to us?” Pisces I said in an accusing tone.
“Yes,” Pisces II echoed angrily. “You make me sick, thinking you’re so smart, coming down here in your big ship and strutting around like you think you’re a God, or something. Now, how big do you feel? Do you realize that this is our first opportunity to leave this planet? I’ve a good notion to peck your stupid eyes out right here and now.”
“Leave him be,” Pisces I said. “He may not be so bright, but I think he would have taken us with him, after he got used to us and saw how harmless we are.”
Pisces II leapt at him, almost knocking Ingomar off his feet. “Shut up! I’ve a good notion to peck your eyes out, too.”
“Oh, stop it!” Ingomar said wearily. “We’re all doomed to spend the rest of our lives here. How was I to know that the storm would be so bad? My instruments gave no indication whatever.”
“Actually, it was our fault,” Pisces II said, more calmly. “We failed to mention the nature of the storm. We thought you knew. It was a magnetic storm. A shifting of magnetic currents surrounding the planet. We had no idea that you would think of the weather.”
They walked with him around the fallen ship. It was not injured, that much Ingomar could see. The soft bed of sand had cushioned its fall. If it could only be righted! Ingomar knew it was impossible.
“It is pointed toward that knoll out there. See? Suppose we all got inside and blasted off. We would slide along and maybe when we reached the knoll we’d have enough speed to keep on going in a straight line until we could point her nose upward.”
Ingomar shook his head, but he appreciated the suggestion. It indicated that they were willing to try anything. He knew their motives were not entirely philanthropic, but he liked them more for it, anyway.
He said, “There is only one way out, and that is for someone to come in and get us.”
“Well,” Pisces II said, “What are you waiting for? Call them.”
“I can’t. We are too far out for communication.”
The two gray birds eyed one another in disbelief. Pisces I scratched his breast impolitely. Then he said, “Are you telling us that you have come this far from your own solar system, knowing that you could not call for help, if necessary?”
Ingomar nodded.
* * * *
Pisces II snorted through his beak, and scratched in the sand. “Stupidity,” he said. “There is no other word for it.”
“Yes, there is,” Pisces I answered, somewhat sharply. “In fact, there are several possible words. Bravery. Desperation. Actually I think it is a combination of both. I am sure that you are aware how rare intelligent life is in the universe. When you heard of us, you rushed out here at once. I would call it bravery to go beyond the sound of the voices of your kind. You are desperate because you are lonely in an almost empty universe.”
“We must help him,” said Pisces II.
“Of course. But first let’s make him comfortable. It will be a long wait.”
“Thank you,” Ingomar said, moved by their sympathy. “But you cannot help. Or do you have a way to send messages?”
“Yes, in a way,” Pisces II said, “You see.…”
Pisces I lifted a huge wing and knocked Pisces II in the sand. He turned to Ingomar. “Do you promise to take us with you, if we should succeed in getting help?”
Ingomar did not think it over. “Yes,” he said.
“Then we will do it. But first we must make you comfortable. Do you have equipment for shelter, besides the ship?”
“Yes, there is the bubble. It can be expanded to become a house.”
“Get it,” Pisces II said.
Ingomar did. He dragged it outside and began to unfold it, in preparation for inflation. But Pisces II stopped him. “Not here,” he said. “It will be a long time. Our calculation is that it will take at least forty-five days to get help. The trip from your planet alone is at least forty days. You will not wish to stare at your toppled ship for so long. I suggest we go beyond the first knoll.”
Pisces I laughed and said to Ingomar, “For once he is using his brain. We will carry it.”
He grasped the bubble in his claws, flapped his enormous wings and sailed off. Soon he returned, and among the three of them all his food and books and any equipment he might need was carried over the knoll out of sight of the wrecked ship.
“We will not return,” they said, “until the rescue ship arrives. So make yourself comfortable. Do not stray too far from the ship. This is the most miserable planet in the universe. Give us plenty of time. We know we can summon help, but we do not know how long it will take. We may need as many as seventy-five days.”
Ingomar settled down to wait.
* * * *
The fierce, burning sun had turned Ingomar’s face and naked arms into fried areas of intense pain, but he regained consciousness when he felt the coolness of the ointment. It penetrated deep down, under the burned skin, into flesh and muscle, soothing injured cells.
He opened his eyes. He moved his head. The eyes were burned and bloodshot, but he could see a ship standing a hundred feet away. It was not sleek and long, pointing its needle nose at the sky, though. It was round, dull white, like a giant egg laid by a giant bird.
Bird? Ingomar chuckled, senses returning, thinking through his pain of Pisces I or Pisces II laying an egg. Then he laughed aloud.
He stopped, quite abruptly, and looked again. The egg was still there, but it was not an egg. It was actually a ship and the airlock was open and Pisces II was backing out, dragging a sort of stretcher on wheels.
“It’s a…a…ship!” he exclaimed, tears running down his cheeks, over the ointment. “Whose ship is it?”
“Ours,” said Pisces I.
“Yours?” Ingomar said, after a long pause while the pain raged over his skin. He tried to sit up, and Pisces I got behind him and pushed, nudging him upright. “Where did you get it?”
“Oh,” Pisces II interrupted. “We had it all the time.”
“Shut up!” Pisces I yelled. “He asked me.”
“Hold your tongue,” Pisces II retorted hotly, “or I’ll take off and leave you here. I’ve had enough of you in the past century to last a lifetime.”
Pisces I said to Ingomar, “Pay no attention to that peasant.” He helped Pisces II push the stretcher next to Ingomar. Then he pushed a lever and the stretcher reduced itself to ground height. It was too short for Ingomar’s body, having been designed for the body of a bird. “He’s right, though,” Pisces I continued, giving the stretcher a kick because it wasn’t long enough. “We had the ship all along. It was despicable of us to deceive you, but our ship was de
fective, and we needed yours for parts.”
Ingomar shook his head. “There was no magnetic storm?”
Pisces II nodded his head. “Oh, yes, there was a storm. But not a natural phenomenon, I’m sorry to say. Too bad. The natural storms are much more beautiful.”
“And you had the bubble set up away from the ship so I wouldn’t see you steal the parts?”
They hung their heads. “Despicable,” they said. “A rotten thing to do.”
Ingomar was too ill for anger. “Let me understand this,” he said. “You ruined my ship to get parts for yours. Why? Why not just take my ship?”
“Too slow,” Pisces II said. He took the container of ointment in his beak and set it beside Ingomar’s hand. “Here, you can rub it on by yourself now. Get busy.”
Pisces I said, “By your standards our planet is a terrible distance away. Your ship would take too long. Hurry, now. We’ve got to take you to…what do you call it, Earth? What an odd name! We’re in sort of a hurry to get home, as you might imagine.”
Ingomar hurried. With the help of the mysterious, healing ointment he was soon able to get up and make his way to the ship.
“One more question,” he said. “Your ship was defective and you set down here and you’ve been here for a long time, and you’re a long way from home. What were you doing so far from home, in the first place?”
“What do you suppose?” said Pisces I irritably. “We were looking for intelligent life. Get a move on, now. If we don’t waste too much time on this Earth, we may still find some!”
CONES, by Frank Belknap Long
Originally published in Astounding Stories, February 1936.
They had never seen such skies. Glory beyond bright glory, wonder beyond wonder, in the black celestial vault above them. Earth the brightest of all the bright stars; Venus a small, watery green moon suspended in the bottomless depths of the sky; Mars a tiny reddish dot. And all the stars of the Galaxy shining in the brilliant whorls and angles of half-familiar constellations.
It was night on Mercury—cold night in a narrow world of infrequent night and day. Across a thin strip on the surface of the Sun’s nearest neighbor there occurred at forty-four-day intervals the familiar alternations of sunlight and darkness which Gibbs Crayley and the other members of the First Mercury Exploration Expedition knew and loved on their home planet. The librations of the little celestial body, which rotated only once on its axis in its eighty eight-day journey about the Sun, splashed alternate bands of sunlight and dark over a relatively restricted strip of its metallic crust.
Where the face of Mercury was forever turned away from the Sun, the temperature was within a few degrees of absolute zero; there oxygen was a fine-white snow. On the bright side, continuously under the sun’s rays, heat blighted and blasted the surface, and no alien shape of protoplasm could live there for long, no matter how well protected by the sciences of man. But on the strip where light and dark alternated, the conditions of climate and temperature were less extreme, and protected human life could exist there, if only for brief periods. Encased in a flexible metallic spacesuit surmounted by a rigid helmet, with fifty-pound weights attached to thighs, and oxygen tanks strapped to shoulders, a man could survive—and explore.
Gibbs Crayley, scientist-explorer, was leading the first expedition from Earth ever to land on the surface of Mercury. It was an invasion in force, spearheaded by the indomitable will and daring of the one man whose whole life had been directed toward this moment. Crayley was a representative of the small, select tribe of pure scientist-explorers, fanatics whose driving motivations were tempered only by the cautions of science. And now he led the way as he and his small band cautiously ventured out on the surface of the unknown planet.
Beside him was his wife, Helen. To her, the disciplines, exactions, and rewards of scientific exploration were a steadily sustaining flame; she made a magnificent complement to her husband’s cold daring, his almost personal obsession with the mysteries of the Sunward planet.
William Seaton, trailing the Crayleys by a few feet, was impatient of natural wonders, preferring the cool precision of manmade instruments, a pattern of beauty an engineer could understand. Immediately behind him came Frederick Parkerson, a middle-aged biologist, and Ralph Wilkus, a tall, gangling youth who excelled in the arts of astrogation and cookery. These two, close friends as they had become, were alike absorbed by the fascinations and complexities of exploration in its more immediate aspects; they lived for what the next moment might bring that was new and strange.
Behind them trailed Tom Grayson, a metallurgist, and young Allan Wilson, an associate member of the National Biological Institute, essentially unimaginative men whose minds were occupied largely with the problems of movement and personal safety on this incredible planet. They completed the roster of the crew.
The explorers were setting out on their longest expedition since they had landed on Mercury. It was their hope to make it to the foothills of the high, craggy peaks which reared their angular shapes above the curiously near horizon. Behind them the immense, melon-shaped hull of their cobalt-glass spaceship loomed, flecked with Venus light. It was hardly more than half a mile away, yet its stern was already hidden by the abrupt curvature of the planet’s surface.
Crayley led the way with slowly deliberate caution. With only his flash lamp to guide him, he walked slowly forward, step by step, testing every foot of the ground ahead of him with his electrodynamometer-tipped staff. The very surface on which the group trod was a treacherous mystery; in particular, they knew it to be spotted irregularly with shock patches of enormously high electrical potential. A step into one of them would crumple a man in his spacesuit and sear his body to a crisp.
These shock patches had been discovered several days before (“day” being defined in terms of an Terran twenty-four hours, not in Mercury’s own terms) when the Craleys’ dog had stumbled into one of them. Its body was now a charred cinder under the glittering Mercurian night sky. Crayley had provided a miniature spacesuit for the animal, complete with oxygen tank, heating coils, and weights, and it had run ahead a short distance to the end of its leash, as dogs will do, exploring on its own. Now Scottie was gone, a martyr to science.
After that, the explorers had thoroughly investigated the electromagnetic qualities of the crust, testing it until the full strangeness and menace of the phenomenon was apparent to all. It was because of the raging interference set up by the patches that they had to move in silence, for radio communication was obviously impossible.
Slowly the little group filed across the slightly luminous surface of the Mercurian plain. All around them surged an alien atmosphere tainted with heavy gases and ionized by cosmic rays. Their oxygen tanks were their sole protection against the corrosive horrors of this Mercurian air.
Gibbs Crayley, thinking of this and of the extended journey they were hoping to make, cut down the release gauge on his tank by two degrees, and signaled to the rest of the crew to do likewise. He knew that as the flow diminished they would all breathe less freely, but oxygen here was more precious than water on the deserts of Earth, and they could not afford to squander it.
A moment later Crayley noticed with some concern that, of all the group, his wife alone had not followed instructions. He stared at her and motioned to her oxygen gauge. She ignored him; and so, standing still, he raised his dynamometer-tipped staff from the ground and gave her tank a rap.
Behind the thick goggles of her helmet, Crayley could see Helen’s eyes widen in momentary vexation. He knew she was convinced that there was more than enough oxygen in the tank to last the round trip; they had discussed it before they started out. Obviously she planned to leave her gauge alone; and apparently she had an impulse to rebuke her husband by tapping his tank in return.
In any event, she actually raised her own staff from the ground and swung it toward Crayley’s encased form. But as the metal wand
swung up and toward him, Crayley stopped abruptly and stiffened. His electrodynamometer had recorded a mountain-moving charge in the patch of glowing soil immediately before him. And as Helen’s staff thumped against his shoulder, he swooped sideways, caught her about the knees, and in a running tackle carried her swiftly backward to safety.
Unfortunately, young Grayson let his attention be diverted by this odd action on his superior’s part. Momentarily swinging his forgotten detector aside, he stepped forward into the shock patch while looking over his shoulder at the odd sight the Crayleys presented.
One moment he was walking in the bright circle cast by his electric torch. The next, only a tortured part of him could be seen, waving frantic hands in the faint Venus light. There was a burst of flame that blotted out the stars.
Like a dry leaf in a blast furnace, Grayson’s limbs withered instantaneously into inert ash. Then the upper part of the youth’s body crashed horribly in front of Seaton. For an instant the engineer was too appalled to move. He simply stood with his own staff extended, as though the fact that it was a man-made device could give him security when all else failed.
Behind him the other members of the group crowded forward in horror. Through their goggles they saw the hideous spectacle of a limbless torso, spacesuit blasted away, spinning upright on a blazing red field, light spiraling from sandy hair galvanically extended. Faster and faster spun the body—and then flame mercifully engulfed it.
Crayley set Helen down and threw one arm about her shoulder to steady her. For an instant she stood swaying, eyes lowered in sick comprehension. Then she stiffened and resumed her position beside her husband. There was no attempt at communication. Messages in sign languages could have been exchanged, but none were. There was nothing to say. The group moved on almost instantly, to avoid funking—like aviators going up immediately after a crash. The accident was due to human error, and they could not afford to stop for that. With slow steps they resumed their journey into the dark Mercurian night.
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 41