Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  “That’s all right,” Dr. Scott said. “Are you ready for the narcosynthesis?”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” Hooten said. “But I’ve got a funny feeling.”

  “What kind of a feeling?”

  “That I’m beginning to wake up.”

  Dr. Scott looked pleased.

  “Well, suppose you take off your coat and roll up your left sleeve. Lie on the couch there, that’s right. Now I’m going to give you an injection, and you’ll begin to feel sleepy. Simply relax. That’s all you have to do.”

  “Ouch,” Hooten said.

  “That’s all there is to it,” Dr. Scott said, withdrawing the hypodermic. “Suppose you look at something and tell me when it begins to look blurry.”

  “All right,” Hooten said obediently, staring out the window. “The Empire State—you know, it doesn’t look right even now. It’s got the wrong shape. Not like a Wunkery at all.”

  “Like a what?” Dr. Scott asked.

  “A Wunkery. Dr. Rasp’s sky-slit has a fine view of a—”

  “You know there is no such thing as a Wunkery, don’t you?” Dr. Scott broke in with a slight touch of undoctorly impatience. “Dr. Rasp is a creation of your unconscious mind. When you go to sleep you simply dream like anyone else. There is no world full of Wunkeries and Rasps. All that is just a defense against me, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Hooten said drowsily.

  Dr. Scott sighed. “Do things begin to look blurry yet?”

  “No, but I’m...I’m beginning to. ...”

  “To what?”

  “To wake up,” Hooten said indistinctly, and closed his eyes. “Hello, Dr. Rasp.”

  “There is no Dr. Rasp,” Dr. Scott said in an impatient voice. “Dr. Rasp is imaginary.”

  “Dr. Rasp says you don’t exist,” Hooten murmured, his eyes shut. “Yes, Dr. Rasp. ...”

  * * * *

  Hooten opened his faceted eyes and stared through the sky-slit at the Quatt Wunkery. He shook his head dizzily.

  “What’s the matter?” Dr. Rasp asked.

  “Dr. Scott just gave me an injection of sodium pentothal,” Hooten said.

  The psychiatrist made a quick note on his wing-case. Then he crossed his antennae with Hooten’s again and turned on the juice.

  “Dr. Scott is simply a defense,” he pointed out. “There is no Dr. Scott. There is no such thing as sodium pentothal. You are going to estivate now, do you hear me? You will be deeply asleep, so deeply that Dr. Scott cannot wake you up. You will obey me, not Dr. Scott. I tell you to estivate. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes . . . but I’m afraid it isn’t going to work very well. You see, if I estivate I’ll just wake up in Dr. Scott’s—”

  “There is no Dr. Scott. Forget Dr. Scott.”

  “But—”

  “Estivate. Estivate.”

  “All right. Now I’m ... oh, hello, Dr. Scott.”

  * * * *

  Dr. Scott reached for another hypodermic and used it.

  “Just relax,” he said gently.

  “I’m beginning to hate this,” Hooten said pettishly. “I’m caught right in the middle. Something’s going to give if we keep on. I don’t know what, but—can’t we postpone it till tomorrow and let Dr. Rasp have his innings?”

  “I am your doctor,” Scott pointed out. “Not Dr. Rasp. You refer Dr. Rasp to me if he tries to—”

  “Oh, those antennae,” Hooten murmured. “I can’t—I—”

  “Just relax,” Dr. Scott said. “There is no Dr. Rasp.”

  Hooten struggled feebly. “This can’t go on,” he protested in a drowsy voice. “I tell you, something will have to give. I—oh, for God’s sake, Dr. Rasp keeps telling me to estivate.”

  “Hush,” Dr. Scott said, looking thoughtfully toward the hypodermics.

  * * * *

  “Estivate,” said Dr. Rasp.

  “Look out!” Hooten said wildly, struggling. “He’s going to give me another shot.”

  Dr. Rasp curled his antennae tightly around Hooten’s and poured on more juice.

  “Estivate,” he said, and then had a sudden idea. “You too, Dr. Scott. Do you hear me? You’re going to estivate, Dr. Scott. Relax. Stop struggling. You’re in a warm, comfortable, musty burrow. You’re beginning to estivate, Dr. Scott. . .

  * * * *

  “Now he’s trying to make you estivate,” Hooten said, squirming on the couch.

  Dr. Scott smiled grimly. He bent forward and fixed Hooten with a compelling gaze.

  “Relax,” he said. “I’m talking to you, Dr. Rasp. Relax and sleep. I’m going to give you another shot of pentothal in a moment, and that will put you to sleep. Do you hear me, Dr. Rasp?”

  “Oh, God,” Hooten said, blinking his eyes very rapidly indeed. “I feel as though I’m on an alternating current. What’s going to happen? I warn you—we’d better stop this before—“

  He squealed faintly as Dr. Scott punctured his skin with a hypodermic, filled, however, with nothing but a harmless and ineffective solution designed for psychosomatic purposes only. Hooten was already at the brink of tolerance for sodium pentothal and should have been fathoms deep long ago.

  “Go to sleep, Dr. Rasp,” Dr. Scott commanded in a firm, confident voice.

  * * * *

  “Estivate, Dr. Scott,” Dr. Rasp ordered.

  * * * *

  “Sleep.”

  * * * *

  “Estivate.”

  * * * *

  “Sleep!”

  * * * *

  “Estivate!”

  * * * *

  “Wow!” cried Timothy Hooten, springing to his feet with the certain conviction that something had at last, quite resoundingly, given.

  * * * *

  In the middle of Dr. Scott’s office the air was still quivering around a buglike form that staggered on all sixes. Dr. Rasp’s antennae vibrated almost to invisiblity as he fixed his faceted stare in dazed disbelief upon the window, the Empire State Building, and the absurdly bipedal form of Timothy Hooten.

  * * * *

  Dr. Scott in a shimmer of disturbed space-time gazed in wild surmise at the figure reclining before him, all six legs curled in comfortable relaxation, faceted eyes staring. “Hallucination, of course,” he told himself dizzily. “Of course, of course, of course. ...”

  He turned his head for the reassuring sight of his own office around him and his eyes fell upon the sky-slit and the view beyond. The first glimmers of awful conviction began to dawn. He had never seen a Quatt Wunkery before.

  <>

  * * * *

  MURRAY LEINSTER

  If you ever read the mass-circulation slick magazines, you can’t have missed the beautifully constructed stories by Will F. Jenkins that graced them for years; if you read the magazines specializing in science fiction, you are certain to know Jenkins’ alter ego and pen-name, Murray Leinster. Like Simak, Jack Williamson and just about no one else, Leinster’s first appearance in science-fiction magazines began very shortly after the magazines themselves began to appear and he has evolved and grown with the field. Like almost no one but himself, he blends a brilliant and detailed imagination with warm human writing to produce such compassionate stories as . . .

  The Journey

  It was the year Joe graduated from college, and he signed on the Mavourneen for one trip out and back. He wanted to do it, he explained carefully to his father, just to get used to standing on his own feet and earning his living the hard way before beginning to practice the profession his father had paid to have him study for. His father admitted that it was normal for a young man to want to spend a certain amount of time making a fool of himself.

  “It’s a sort of honeymoon with life,” he told Joe, “when you and the cosmos seem especially made for each other and you’re sure you’ll never quarrel. All right. Go ahead.”

  He did better than consent. He pulled some highly necessary wires so Joe could join the Mavourneen as a spaceman, second class, in spite of competition.
And eventually he and Joe’s mother went down to see the Mavourneen lift off. The ship was not new or impressive. She carried cargo only, so Joe was visible to them only as a figure in a white duck crew-suit, working a cargo-crane as the last bales went on board. He saw them and waved, and presently the cargo port closed and sealed, and then the lift-warning horn blared. There was nothing overhead, so it didn’t make a bit of difference, but it was custom. Then came that curious rumbling sound which is a drive warming up, and Joe’s father and mother tried to get rid of the cotton-woolly feeling it made in their ears, and after a little the outside speaker said hollowly: “Seconds to lift:—ten,—nine—eight—seven—”

  Joe’s father and mother felt the way parents would feel at that moment, but Joe felt fine. He was sealed up in the Mavourneen for his first cruise—which would probably be his only one, things being as they were. It wasn’t likely that he’d ever again be able to spare eight months out of his life to go traveling on a freighter, with a living to make which he had to try to nurse into a career.

  Then the ungainly bulk of theMavourneen lifted heavily and seemed to go grunting skyward.

  Joe’s mother waved her handkerchief until the ship was a bare speck. Then she wept, as mothers do when their sons take one step nearer to not needing their mothers any more. His father rumbled unhappily. He remembered, poignantly, how magnificently confident and competent a young man can feel. Then they drove homeward with their thoughts on the Mavourneen—out of atmosphere before they were a mile from the field—and they thought of the clumsy, bulbous-shaped ship as speeding splendidly toward the stars, with sunlight shining on her outer plates. They knew that was how Joe had been thinking of it.

  But Joe was busy. He was rated as spaceman, second class, which is as low as a rating can go. The first hour up he worked in the cargo hold putting braces in place so the cargo wouldn’t shift. That’s always done, and at some time or another between take-off and landing the skipper puts his ship through her paces to see just how she handles with the trim for this particular voyage. The second hour up, Joe followed a spaceman, first class, along a seemingly interminable corridor with white-painted walls and ceilings and a gray-painted floor. This was to learn where motors were— there were motors in most unexpected places—and exactly how they should be oiled.

  He knew that outside the ship the sky had long since turned from blue to dark purple and then to black, and that it was no longer night or day but both at once. Which was because the sun was always shining outside the ship, and the stars shone too—in uncountable multiples of the number to be seen when looking up from one’s bedroom window at home.

  But Joe didn’t see the stars. When he’d followed the spaceman, first class, along the corridor, he went to the crew’s quarters and found his bunk and his possessions exactly where he’d dumped them. His name was on a duty list, so he went and got a swab and wiped down a floor that didn’t need wiping. Then he went to mess—the food was not at all bad—and he found out his watch, and learned that now he could turn in while other people walked around white-painted corridors and swabbed floors.

  He lay in his bunk and thought gloriously that now he was in space. He saw, of course, nothing but the underside of the bunk above his and the strictly aseptic crew’s quarters. He had exactly the physical sensations of anybody in an air-conditioned, metal-walled space anywhere at all. But he knew that outside there was illimitable emptiness, and the sun glared fiercely and silently in the middle of all of it, spurting out pseudopods of flame, and Earth would only be a ball that was momently growing smaller. By now it would be about the size of an orange—but a little greenish for an orange, with patches of fungus-looking white stuff at its poles. And all around would be the stars. Millions and billions and quintillions of them, tinier specks than anybody could imagine and more than anyone could think of counting. But he did not see them. Naturally!

  He didn’t sleep well that first night. —It wasn’t really night, but only a certain number of hours of ship-time. His mother didn’t sleep well either. Back on Earth, she and Joe’s father went to bed and lay quite still, each pretending to the other to be asleep. But it was unbearable. Quite suddenly his mother gave up the pretense and said worriedly in the darkness of the bedroom: “Do you suppose they’re nice boys in the ship?— They all looked so young!”

  And Joe’s father said with a dryness that Joe’s mother didn’t catch: “Oh, yes! They’re nice boys. They’re star-crazy and ships can pick and choose their crews, you know.”

  This was perfectly true, because the most romantic thing in the world— No. The most romantic things in all the solar system were the ships that floated magnificently from one planet to another. There weren’t but so many. There was a stodgy fleet that hauled metal from Mercury—ready-smelted metal. There were brisk liners that went to the domes on Venus—it was proof that one was a millionaire to spend a few weeks every year on Venus—and there were a couple of ships hauling back the things the scientists were finding in the ruined cities on Mars. Then there were the ships that went to the Jovian moons—two of them—and to the mines on Uranus and Pluto. That was all. There was work for perhaps a hundred space-ships. There wasn’t work for more. So every year there were several thousand space-crazy young men trying frantically for each one of the very few vacancies in their crews. The ships could pick their crews on any basis their skippers pleased. Joe was lucky to be signed on.

  But he didn’t see the stars. A week from Earth, he was trusted to remember all the motors and places that had to be oiled. Thereafter he made his round alone. Each watch, he made a trudging progress along what seemed miles of white-painted corridor, dutifully stopping at each place where a motor lurked behind a door or panel, and conscientiously made sure that each one was adequately lubricated. And he had other official duties, of which swabbing floors seemed to be most prominent.

  When he was two weeks out he realized that he was pretty well ignored by the rest of the crew. He was acutely and gloriously aware that he was in space. They prided themselves upon being space-hardened. Which meant having no illusions about the romance of space travel. The older men may even have meant it, but the ones around Joe’s age were self-consciously disillusioned. They were raucously amused at any suggestion that being a spaceman was anything but a tedious and not-too-well-paid job. They conceded only that their profession entitled them to—and secured them—their choice of female companionship in the dives they spent their pay in back on Earth. They talked as nearly as possible in four-letter words only. Which proved their sophistication but made their talk unduly monotonous. Lost in his rapt contemplation of the fact that he was in space, Joe bored them.

  Once the man whose bunk was above Joe’s took action. He sneaked a spare gravity coil out of the electrician’s storeroom and set it up above Joe’s bunk. When Joe was asleep he turned it on. It neatly neutralized the normal gravitation of the ship. Joe woke, weightless, gasping in terror. It was that nightmare sensation of unending fall—the sensation the very first rocketeers had when they essayed to “coast” to the moon on their own momentum. They could not sleep, because when they dozed off they woke instantly in the primeval horror of falling. Even on the moon they could not sleep. The gravity was not enough. Some of them died of sleeplessness and— But everybody knows all about that.

  The gravity coil was intended as a joke. But it was used nightly, and many times a night, until Joe began to feel an hysterical terror of sleeping. Then an old hand exposed the trick and showed Joe the other trick of strapping himself down so that there was always pressure on his body. It was a substitute for the feel of something—or someone—holding him comfortingly fast. But it was a long time before Joe got back real confidence in sleep.

  Back on Earth, Joe’s mother and father very carefully made a boast of Joe’s journeying. They said proudly to their friends that Joe was away out beyond Mars now, which was true. They said that he was an old hand in space now. Which was probably true, too. But he hadn’t seen the star
s. He only traveled among them.

  On the trip out he actually saw the stars just once, and then it was a bare glimpse. It was a little beyond the orbit of Jupiter, when the Mavourneen was something over two months out from Earth and still accelerating—still going a little bit faster every instant than she’d been going the instant before. Joe was trudging the weary, endless, unchanging corridor in which he oiled motors. He saw the Mavourneen’s first mate coming in the opposite direction.

  The mate stopped by a round plate set in the outer wall of the corridor. He took a key from his pocket, unlocked something, and swung the plate inward on a hinge. He looked at what was uncovered.