6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

  Nikobat says—

  ~ * ~

  Brent broke off as Kruj Krujil Krujilar staggered into the room. The little man was no longer dapper. His robes were tattered, and their iridescence was overlaid with the solid red of blood. He panted his first words in his own tongue, then recovered himself. “We must act apace, John. Where is Stephen?”

  “At Underground quarters. But what’s happened?”

  “I was nearing the building where they do house us travelers when I beheld hundreds of people coming along the street. Some wore our robes, some wore Stappers’. And they all—” He shuddered. “They all had the same face— a brown hairless face with black eyes.”

  Brent was on his feet. “Bokor!” The man had multiplied himself into a regiment. One man who was hundreds—why not thousands? millions?—could indeed be a conqueror. “What happened?”

  “They entered the building. I knew that I could do nothing there, and came to find you and Stephen and the bodiless one. But as I came along the street, lo! on every corner there was yet another of that face, and always urging the people to maintain the Stasis and destroy the travelers. I was recognized. By good hap those who set upon me had no rods, so I escaped with my life.”

  Brent thought quickly. “Martha is with Stephen, so Sirdam is probably there, too. Go to him at once and warn him. I’m going to the travelers’ building and see what’s happened. Meet you at the headquarters as soon as I can.”

  Kruj hesitated. “Mimi—”

  “I’ll bring her with me if I can. Get going.”

  ~ * ~

  The streets were mad. Wild throngs jammed the moving roadways. Somewhere in the distance mountainous flames leaped up and their furious glitter gleamed from the eyes of the mob. These were the ordinary citizens of Stasis, no longer cattle, or rather cattle stampeded.

  A voice blared seemingly out of the heavens. Brent recognized the public address system used for vital State messages. “Revolt of travelers haves spreaded to amphitheater of Cosmos. Flames lighted by travelers now attack sacred spot. People of Cosmos: Destroy travelers!”

  There was nothing to mark Brent superficially as a traveler. He pushed along with the mob, shouting as rabidly as any other. He could make no headway. He was borne along on these foaming human waves.

  Then in front of him he saw three Bokors pushing against the mob. If they spied him—His hands groped along the wall. Just as a Bokor looked his way, he found what he was seeking—one of the spying niches of the Stappers. He slipped into safety then peered out cautiously.

  From the next door he saw a man emerge whom he knew by sight—a leading dramatist of the sollies, who had promised to be an eventual convert of Kruj’s disciples. Three citizens of the mob halted him as he stepped forth.

  “What bees your name?”

  “Where be you going?”

  The solly writer hesitated. “I be going to amphitheater. Speaker have sayed—”

  “When do you come from?”

  “Why, from now.”

  “What bees your name?”

  “John—”

  “Ha!” the first citizen yelled. “Stappers have telled us to find this John. Tear him to pieces; he bees traveler.”

  “No, truly. I be no traveler; I be writer of sollies.”

  One of the citizens chortled cruelly. “Tear him for his bad sollies!”

  There was one long scream-

  ~ * ~

  Fire breeds fire, literally as well as metaphorically. The dwelling of the travelers was ablaze when Brent reached it. A joyous mob cheered and gloated before it.

  Brent started to push his way through, but a hand touched his arm and a familiar voice whispered, “Ach-tung! Ou vkhodit.”

  He interpreted the warning and let the Venusian draw him aside. Nikobat rapidly explained.

  “The Stappers came and subdued the whole crowd with paralyzing rods. They took them away—God knows what they’ll do with them. There’s no one in there now; the fire’s just a gesture.”

  “But you— How did you—”

  “My nerve centers don’t react the same. I lay doggo and got away. Mimi escaped, too; her armor has deflecting power. I think she’s gone to warn the Underground.”

  “Then come on.”

  “Don’t stay too close to me,” Nikobat warned. “They’ll recognize me as a traveler; stay out of range of rods aimed at me. And here. I took these from a Stapper I strangled. This one is a paralyzing rod; the other’s an annihilator.”

  ~ * ~

  The next half-hour was a nightmare—a montage of flames and blood and sweating bodies of hate. The Stasis of Stupidity was becoming a Stasis of Cruelty. Twice groups of citizens stopped Brent. They were unarmed; Bokor wisely kept weapons to himself, knowing that the fangs and claws of an enraged mob are enough. The first group Brent left paralyzed. The second time he confused his weapons. He had not meant to kill.

  He did not confuse his weapons when he bagged a brace of Bokors. But what did the destruction of two matter? He fought his way on, finally catching up with Nikobat at their goal. As they met, the voice boomed once more from the air. “Important! New Chief of Stappers announces that officers of Chief of Stappers and Head of State be henceforth maked one. Under new control, travelers will be wiped out and Stasis preserved. Then on to South America for glory of Cosmos!”

  Brent shuddered. “And we started out so beautifully on our renaissance!”

  Nikobat shook his head. “But the bodiless traveler said that Stephen was to destroy the Stasis. This multiple villain cannot change what has happened.”

  “Can’t he? We’re taking no chances.”

  The headquarters of the Underground was inappositely in a loft. The situation helped. The trap entrance was unnoticeable from below and had gone unheeded by the mobs. Brent delivered the proper raps, and the trap slid open and dropped a ladder. Quickly they mounted.

  The loft was a sick bay. A half-dozen wounded members of Stephen’s group lay groaning on the floor. With them was Kruj. Somewhere the little man had evaded the direct line of an annihilator, but lost his hand. Blood was seeping out of his bandages, and Mimi, surprisingly feminine and un-Amazonic, held his unconscious head in her lap.

  “You don’t seem to need warning,” Brent observed.

  Stephen shook his head. “We be trapped here. Here we be safe for at littlest small while. If we go out—”

  Brent handed him his rods. “You’re the man we’ve got to save, Stephen. You know what Sirdam’s said—it all depends on you. Use these to protect yourself, and we’ll make a dash for it. If we can lose ourselves in the mob as ordinary citizens, there’s a chance of getting away with it. Or” —he turned to Martha-Sirdam—”have you any ideas?”

  “Yes. But only as last resort.”

  Nikobat was peering out the window. “It’s the last resort now,” he said. “There’s a good fifty of those identical Stappers outside, and they’re headed here. They act as though they know what this is.”

  Brent was looking at Stephen, and he saw a strange thing. Stephen’s face was expressionless, but somewhere behind his eyes Brent seemed to sense a struggle. Stephen’s body trembled with an effort of will; and then his eyes were clear again. “No,” he said distinctly. “You do not need to control me. I understand. You be right. I will do as you say.” And he lifted the annihilator rod.

  Brent started forward, but his muscles did not respond to his commands. Force his will though he might, he stood still. It was the bodiless traveler who held him motionless to watch Stephen place the rod to his temple.

  “This bees goodest thing that I can do for mans,” said Stephen simply. Then his headless corpse thumped on the floor.

  Brent was released. He dashed forward, but vainly. There was nothing men could do for Stephen now. Brent let out a choking gasp of pain and sorrow.

  Then the astonished cries of the Undergrounders recalled him from his friend’s body. He looked about him. Where was Nikobat? Where were Kruj and Mimi?

&
nbsp; A small inkling of the truth began to reach him. He hurried to the window and looked out.

  There were no Bokors before the house. Only a few citizens staring dazedly at a wide space of emptiness.

  At that moment the loud-speaker sounded. “Announcement,” a shocked voice trembled. “Chief of Stappers haves just disappeared.” And in a moment it added, “Guards report all travelers have vanished.”

  The citizens before the house were rubbing their eyes like men coming out of a nightmare.

  ~ * ~

  “But don’t you see, madam— No? Well, let me try again.” Brent was not finding it easy to explain her brother’s heroic death to an untenanted Martha. “Remember what your inhabitant told us? The Stasis was overthrown by Stephen.”

  “But Stephen bees dead.”

  “Exactly. So listen: All these travelers came from a future wherein Stephen had overthrown the Stasis so that when Stephen destroyed himself, as Sirdam realized, he likewise destroyed that future. A world in which Stephen died unsuccessful is a world that cannot be entered by anyone from the other future. Their worlds vanished and they with them. It was the only way of abolishing the menace of the incredibly multiplied Bokor.”

  “Stephen bees dead. He cans not overthrow Stasis now.”

  “My dear madam— Hell, skip it. But the Stasis is damned nonetheless in this new world created by Stephen’s death. I’ve been doing a little galping on my own. The people are convinced now that the many exemplars of Bokor were some kind of evil invader. They rebound easy, the hordes; they dread the memory of those men and they dread also the ideas of cruelty and conquest to which the Bokors had so nearly converted them.

  “But one thing they can’t rebound from is the doubts and the new awarenesses that we planted in their minds. And there’s what’s left of your movement to go on with. No, the Stasis is damned, even if they are going to erect yet another Barrier.”

  “Oh,” Martha shuddered. “You willn’t let them.”

  Brent grinned. “Madam, there’s damned little letting I can do. They’re going to, and that’s that. Because, you see, all the travelers vanished.”

  “But why—”

  Brent shrugged and gave up. “Join me in some bond?” It was clear enough. The point of time which the second Barrier blocked existed both in the past of the worlds of Nikobat and Sirdam, and in the past of this future they were now entering. But if this future road stretched clear ahead, then travelers—a different set from a different future, but travelers nonetheless—would have appeared at the roadblock. The vanishing Bokors and Nikobat and the rest would have been replaced by another set of stranded travelers.

  But no one, in this alternate unknown to Sirdam in which Stephen died a failure, had come down the road of the future. There was a roadblock ahead. The Stasis would erect another Barrier ... and God grant that some scientific successor to Alex would create again the means of disrupting it. And the travelers from this coming future—would they be Sirdams to counsel and guide man, or Bokors to corrupt and debase him?

  Brent lifted his glass of bond. “To the moment after the next Barrier!” he said.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  SURFACE TENSION ..... By James Blish

  DR. CHATVIEUX took a long time over the microscope, leaving la Ventura with nothing to do but look at the dead landscape of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word. From space, the new world had shown only one small, triangular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the continent was mostly swamp.

  The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the one real spur of rock which Hydrot seemed to possess, which reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea level. From this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds and puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx and ruby.

  “If I were a religious man,” the pilot said suddenly, “I’d call this a plain case of divine vengeance.”

  Chatvieux said: “Hmn?”

  “It’s as if we’d been struck down for—is it hubris, arrogant pride?”

  “Well, is it?” Chatvieux said, looking up at last. “I don’t feel exactly swollen with pride. Do you?”

  “I’m not exactly proud of my piloting,” la Ventura admitted. “But that isn’t quite what I meant. I was thinking about why we came here in the first place. It takes a lot of arrogance to think that you can scatter men, or at least things very much like men, all over the face of the galaxy. It takes even more pride to do the job—to pack up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men, make them suitable for every place you touch.”

  “I suppose it does,” Chatvieux said. “But we’re only one of several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the galaxy, so I doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners.” He smiled dryly. “If they had, maybe they’d have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we try to produce men adapted to Earthlike planets, nothing more than that. We’ve sense enough to know that we can’t adapt men to a planet like Jupiter, or to a sun, like Tau Ceti.”

  “Anyhow, we’re here,” la Ventura said grimly. “And we aren’t going to get off. Phil tells me that we don’t even have our germ-cell bank any more, so we can’t seed this place in the usual way. We’ve been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the panatropes to do with our carcasses—provide built-in waterwings?”

  . “No,” Chatvieux said calmly. “You and I and all the rest of us are going to die, Paul. Panatropic techniques don’t work on the body; that was fixed for you for life when you were conceived. To attempt to rebuild it for you would only maim you. The panatropes affect only the genes, the inheritance-carrying factors. We can’t give you built-in waterwings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we’ll be able to populate this world with men, but we won’t live to see it.”

  The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold blubber collecting in his stomach. “How long do you give us?”

  “Who knows? A month, perhaps.”

  The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed back, admitting salt, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, and it appeared to bother him. He was not well equipped for introspection, and with his ultraphone totally smashed, unresponsive to his perpetually darting hands, he had been thrown back into his own mind, whose resources were few. Only the tasks Chatvieux had set him to had prevented him from setting like a gelling colloid into a permanent sulk.

  He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt, into the loops of which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges. “More samples, Doc,” he said. “All alike—water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?”

  “A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?”

  Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors of the crash were crowding into the panatrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux’ senior assistant, a perpetually sanguine, perpetually youthful technician willing to try anything once, including dying; Eunice Wagner, behind whose placid face rested the brains of the expedition’s only remaining ecologist; Elfftherios Venezuelos, the always-silent delegate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura’s and Phil’s, were now without meaning, but whose bright head and tall, deceptively indolent body shone to the pilot’s eyes brighter than the home sun.

  Five men and two women—to colonize a planet on which “standing room” meant treading water.

  They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners. Joan Heath went to stand beside la Ventura. They did not look at each other, but the warmth of her shoulder beside
his was all that he needed. Nothing was as bad as it seemed.

  Venezuelos said, “What’s the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?”

  “This place isn’t dead,” Chatvieux said. “There’s life in the sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the crustacea; the most advanced form I’ve found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets, and it doesn’t seem to be well distributed. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with small metazoans of lower orders, right up to the rotifers—including a castle-building rotifer like Earth’s Floscularidae. In addition, there’s a wonderfully variegated protozoan population, with a dominant ciliate type much like Paramoecium, plus various Sarcodines, the usual spread of phytoflagellates, and even a phosphorescent species I wouldn’t have expected to see anywhere but in salt water. As for the plants, they run from simple blue-green algae to quite advanced thallus-producing types— though none of them, of course, can live out of the water.”