6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

  “The history plates also say that there are other worlds than ours, and actually that’s an easier idea to accept, once you’ve found out that the other two are so. As for the stars—well, we just don’t know yet, we haven’t any information at all that would allow us to read the history plates on that subject with new eyes, and there’s no point in making wild guesses unless we can test the guesses. The stars are in space, and presumably, once we’re out in space, we’ll see them and the meaning of the word will become clear. At least we can confidently expect to see some clues —look at all the information we got from Lavon’s trip of a few seconds above the sky!

  “But in the meantime, there’s no point in our speculating in a bubble. We think there are other worlds somewhere, and we’re devising means to make the trip. The other questions, the pendant ones, just have to be put aside for now. We’ll answer them eventually—there’s no doubt in my mind about that. But it may take a long time.”

  Stravol grinned ruefully. “I expected no more. In a way, I think the whole project is crazy. But I’m in it right out to the end, all the same.”

  Shar and Lavon grinned back. All of them had the fever, and Lavon suspected that their whole enclosed universe would share it with them before long. He said:

  “Then let’s not waste a minute. There’s a huge mass of detail to be worked out still, and after that, all the hard work will just have begun. Let’s get moving!”

  The five men arose and looked at each other. Their expressions varied, but in all their eyes there was in addition the same mixture of awe and ambition: the composite face of the shipwright and of the astronaut.

  Then they went out, severally, to begin their voyages.

  ~ * ~

  It was two winter sleeps after Lavon’s disastrous climb beyond the sky that all work on the spaceship stopped. By then, Lavon knew that he had hardened and weathered into that temporarily ageless state a man enters after he has just reached his prime; and he knew also that there were wrinkles engraved on his brow, to stay and to deepen.

  “Old” Shar, too, had changed, his features losing some of their delicacy as he came into his maturity. Though the wedge-shaped bony structure of his face would give him a withdrawn and poetic look for as long as he lived, participation in the plan had given his expression a kind of executive overlay, which at best gave it a mask-like rigidity, and at worst coarsened it somehow.

  Yet despite the bleeding away of the years, the spaceship was still only a hulk. It lay upon a platform built above the tumbled boulders of the sandbar which stretched out from one wall of the world. It was an immense hull of pegged wood, broken by regularly spaced gaps through which the raw beams of the skeleton could be seen.

  Work upon it had progressed fairly rapidly at first, for it was not hard to visualize what kind of vehicle would be needed to crawl through empty space without losing its water; Than and his colleagues had done that job well. It had been recognized, too, that the sheer size of the machine would enforce a long period of construction, perhaps as long as two full seasons; but neither Shar and his assistants nor Lavon had anticipated any serious snag.

  For that matter, part of the vehicle’s apparent incompleteness was an illusion. About a third of its fittings were to consist of living creatures, which could not be expected to install themselves in the vessel much before the actual takeoff.

  Yet time and time again, work on the ship had had to be halted for long periods. Several times whole sections needed to be ripped out, as it became more and more evident that hardly a single normal, understandable concept could be applied to the problem of space travel.

  The lack of the history plates, which the Para steadfastly refused to deliver up, was a double handicap. Immediately upon their loss, Shar had set himself to reproduce them from memory; but unlike the more religious of his ancestors he had never regarded them as holy writ, and hence had never set himself to memorizing them word by word. Even before the theft, he had accumulated a set of variant translations of passages presenting specific experimental problems, which were stored in his library, carved in wood. But most of these translations tended to contradict each other, and none of them related to spaceship construction, upon which the original had been vague in any case.

  No duplicates of the cryptic characters of the original had ever been made, for the simple reason that there was nothing in the sunken universe capable of destroying the originals, nor of duplicating their apparently changeless permanence. Shar remarked too late that through simple caution they should have made a number of verbatim temporary records—but after generations of green-gold peace, simple caution no longer covers preparation against catastrophe. (Nor, for that matter, did a culture which had to dig each letter of its simple alphabet into pulpy water-logged wood with a flake of stonewort encourage the keeping of records in triplicate.)

  As a result, Shar’s imperfect memory of the contents of the history plates, plus the constant and millenial doubt as to the accuracy of the various translations, proved finally to be the worst obstacle to progress on the spaceship itself.

  “Men must paddle before they can swim,” Lavon observed belatedly, and Shar was forced to agree with him.

  Obviously, whatever the ancients had known about spaceship construction, very little of that knowledge was usable to a people still trying to build its first spaceship from scratch. In retrospect, it was not surprising that the great hulk still rested incomplete upon its platform above the sand boulders, exuding a musty odor of wood steadily losing its strength, two generations after its flat bottom had been-laid down.

  The fat-faced young man who headed the strike delegation to Shar’s chambers was Phil XX, a man two generations younger than Shar, four younger than Lavon. There were crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, which made him look both like a querulous old man and like an infant spoiled in the spore.

  “We’re calling a halt to this crazy project,” he said bluntly. “We’ve slaved away our youth on it, but now that we’re our own masters, it’s over, that’s all. Over.”

  “Nobody’s compelled you,” Lavon said angrily.

  “Society does; our parents do,” a gaunt member of the delegation said. “But now we’re going to start living in the real world. Everybody these days knows that there’s no other world but this one. You oldsters can hang on to your superstitions if you like. We don’t intend to.”

  Baffled, Lavon looked over at Shar. The scientist smiled and said, “Let them go, Lavon. We have no use for the faint-hearted.”

  The fat-faced young man flushed. “You can’t insult us into going back to work. We’re through. Build your own ship to noplace!”

  “All right,” Lavon said evenly. “Go on, beat it. Don’t stand around here orating about it. You’ve made your decision and we’re not interested in your self-justifications. Good-bye.”

  The fat-faced young man evidently still had quite a bit of heroism to dramatize which Lavon’s dismissal had short-circuited. An examination of Lavon’s stony face, however, seemed to convince him that he had to take his victory as he found it. He and the delegation trailed in-gloriously out the archway.

  “Now what?” Lavon asked when they had gone. “I must admit, Shar, that I would have tried to persuade them. We do need the workers, after all.”

  “Not as much as they need us,” Shar said tranquilly. “I know all those young men. I think they’ll be astonished at the runty crops their fields will produce next season, after they have to breed them without my advice. Now, how many volunteers have you got for the crew of the ship?”

  “Hundreds. Every youngster of the generation after Phil’s wants to go along. Phil’s wrong about that segment of the populace, at least. The project catches the imagination of the very young.”

  “Did you give them any encouragement?”

  “Sure,” Lavon said. “I told them we’d call on them if they were chosen. But you can’t take that seriously! We’d do badly to displace our picked group of specialists with youths
who have enthusiasm and nothing else.”

  “That’s not what I had in mind, Lavon. Didn’t I see a Noc in these chambers somewhere? Oh, there he is, asleep in the dome. Noc!”

  The creature stirred its tentacle lazily.

  “Noc, I’ve a message,” Shar called. “The protos are to tell all men that those who wish to go to the next world with the spaceship must come to the staging area right away. Say that we can’t promise to take everyone, but that only those who help us to build the ship will be considered at all.”

  The Noc curled its tentacle again, and appeared to go back to sleep.

  ~ * ~

  Lavon turned from the arrangement of speaking-tube megaphones which was his control board and looked at the Para. “One last try,” he said. “Will you give us back the history plates?”

  “No, Lavon. We have never denied you anything before, but this we must.”

  “You’re going with us though, Para. Unless you give us back the knowledge we need, you’ll lose your life if we lose ours.”

  “What is one Para?” the creature said. “We are all alike. This cell will die; but the protos need to know how you fare on this journey. We believe you should make it without the plates, for in no other way can we assess the real importance of the plates.”

  “Then you admit you still have them. What if you can’t communicate with your fellows once we’re out in space? How do you know that water isn’t essential to your telepathy?”

  The proto was silent. Lavon stared at it a moment, then turned deliberately back to the speaking tubes. “Everyone hang on,” he said. He felt shaky. “We’re about to start. Stravol, is the ship sealed?”

  “As far as I can tell, Lavon.”

  Lavon shifted to another megaphone. He took a deep breath. Already the water seemed stifling, although the ship hadn’t moved.

  “Ready with one-quarter power ... One, two, three, go.”

  The whole ship jerked and settled back into place again. The raphe diatoms along the under hull settled into their niches, their jelly treads turning against broad endless belts of crude nematode leather. Wooden gears creaked, stepping up the slow power of the creatures, transmitting it to the sixteen axles of the ship’s wheels.

  The ship rocked and began to roll slowly along the sandbar. Lavon looked tensely through the mica port. The world flowed painfully past him. The ship canted and began to climb the slope. Behind him, he could feel the electric silence of Shar, Para, and the two alternate pilots, Than and Stravol, as if their gaze were stabbing directly through his body and on out the port. The world looked different, now that he was leaving it. How had he missed all this beauty before?

  The slapping of the endless belts and the squeaking and groaning of the gears and axles grew louder as the slope steepened. The ship continued to climb, lurching. Around it, squadrons of men and protos dipped and wheeled, escorting it toward the sky.

  Gradually the sky lowered and pressed down toward the top of the ship.

  “A little more work from your diatoms, Tanol,” Lavon said. “Boulder ahead.” The ship swung ponderously. “All right, slow them up again. Give us a shove from your side, Tol—no, that’s too much—there, that’s it. Back to normal; you’re still turning us! Tanol, give us one burst to line us up again. Good. All right, steady drive on all sides. It shouldn’t be long now.”

  “How can you think in webs like that?” the Para wondered behind him.

  “I just do, that’s all. It’s the way men think. Overseers, a little more thrust now; the grade’s getting steeper.”

  The gears groaned. The ship nosed up. The sky brightened in Lavon’s face. Despite himself, he began to be frightened. His lungs seemed to burn, and in his mind he felt his long fall through nothingness toward the chill slap of the water as if he were experiencing it for the first time. His skin itched and burned. Could he go up there again? Up there into the burning void, the great gasping agony where no life should go?

  The sandbar began to level out and the going became a little easier. Up here, the sky was so close that the lumbering motion of the huge ship disturbed it. Shadows of wavelets ran across the sand. Silently, the thick-barreled bands of blue-green algae drank in the light and converted it to oxygen, writhing in their slow mindless dance just under the long mica skylight which ran along the spine of the ship. In the hold, beneath the latticed corridor and cabin floors, whirring Vortae kept the ship’s water in motion, fueling themselves upon drifting organic particles.

  One by one, the figures wheeling about the ship outside waved arms or cilia and fell back, coasting down the slope of the sandbar toward the familiar world, dwindling and disappearing. There was at last only one single Euglena, half-plant cousin of the protos, forging along beside the spaceship into the marches of the shallows. It loved the light, but finally it, too, was driven away into deeper, cooler waters, its single whiplike tentacle undulating placidly as it went. It was not very bright, but Lavon felt deserted when it left.

  Where they were going, though, none could follow.

  Now the sky was nothing but a thin, resistant skin of water coating the top of the ship. The vessel slowed, and when Lavon called for more power, it began to dig itself in among the sand-grains and boulders.

  “That’s not going to work,” Shar said tensely. “I think we’d better step down the gear-ratio, Lavon, so you can apply stress more slowly.”

  “All right,” Lavon agreed. “Full stop, everybody. Shar, will you supervise gear-changing, please?”

  Insane brilliance of empty space looked Lavon full in the face just beyond his big mica bull’s-eye. It was maddening to be forced to stop here upon the threshold of infinity; and it was dangerous, too. Lavon could feel building in him the old fear of the outside. A few moments more of inaction, he knew with a gathering coldness at the pit of his stomach, and he would be unable to go through with it.

  Surely, he thought, there must be a better way to change gear-ratios than the traditional one, which involved dismantling almost the entire gear-box. Why couldn’t a number of gears of different sizes be carried on the same shaft, not necessarily all in action all at once, but awaiting use simply by shoving the axle back and forth longitudinally in its sockets? It would still be clumsy, but it could be worked on orders from the bridge and would not involve shutting down the entire machine—and throwing the new pilot into a blue-green funk.

  Shar came lunging up through the trap and swam himself to a stop.

  “All set,” he said. “The big reduction gears aren’t taking the strain too well, though.”

  “Splintering?”

  “Yes. I’d go it slow at first.”

  Lavon nodded mutely. Without allowing himself to stop, even for a moment, to consider the consequences of his words, he called: “Half power.”

  The ship hunched itself down again and began to move, very slowly indeed, but more smoothly than before. Overhead, the sky thinned to complete transparency. The great light came blasting in. Behind Lavon there was an uneasy stir. The whiteness grew at the front ports.

  Again the ship slowed, straining against the blinding barrier. Lavon swallowed and called for more power. The ship groaned like something about to die. It was now almost at a standstill.

  “More power,” Lavon ground out.

  Once more, with infinite slowness; the ship began to move. Gently, it tilted upward.

  Then it lunged forward and every board and beam in it began to squall.

  “Lavon! Lavon!”

  Lavon started sharply at the shout. The voice was coming at him from one of the megaphones, the one marked for the port at the rear of the ship.

  “Lavon!”

  “What is it? Stop your damn yelling.”

  “I can see the top of the sky! From the other side, from the top side! It’s like a big flat sheet of metal. We’re going away from it. We’re above the sky, Lavon, we’re above the sky!”

  Another violent start swung Lavon around toward the forward port. On the outside of t
he mica, the water was evaporating with shocking swiftness, taking with it strange distortions and patterns made of rainbows.

  Lavon saw Space.

  ~ * ~

  It was at first like a deserted and cruelly dry version of the bottom. There were enormous boulders, great cliffs, tumbled, split, riven, jagged rocks going up and away in all directions, as if scattered at random by some giant.

  But it had a sky of its own—a deep blue dome so far away that he could not believe in, let alone compute, what its distance might be. And in this dome was a ball of reddish fire that seared his eyeballs.

  The wilderness of rock was still a long way away from the ship, which now seemed to be resting upon a level, glistening plain. Beneath the surface-shine, the plain seemed to be made of sand, nothing but familiar sand, the same substance which had heaped up to form a bar in Lavon’s own universe, the bar along which the ship had climbed. But the glassy, colorful skin over it—