The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 03

by Anthology

  He looked around at them again, surprised that there was the slightest hesitation to accept his statement.

  "We'll have to redesign that ladder, though," he said. "It's a mite too fine-cuts the hell out of your hands!"

  He held out his palms. Across each were several welts. One, on his right hand, had apparently resumed bleeding stickily since Lydman had come in. He fumbled out a handkerchief with his other hand and blotted it.

  Smith held his hands to his head.

  "I can't swallow it yet!" he groaned. "You feel... uneasy... in here, so you go out a window ninety-nine floors in the air-"

  "Only twenty-four above the set-back, really," Lydman corrected him.

  "It's enough, isn't it? So you go out, climb up to the helicopter roof, and then climb down again and back through the window! And you pretend to feel better. I would have had a heart attack!"

  "Who wouldn't?" said Westervelt.

  The mere conception of what it must have been like made him feel sick.

  "As long as I know it's there," muttered Lydman. "As long as I know it's there. I can use that way any time. Just don't anybody pull that little ladder down."

  "Would... ?"

  The meek little syllable came from Beryl, who had now managed to stand without the support of the partition.

  Every head in the room swiveled to bear upon her. She gulped, and found part of her voice.

  "Would there be an old martini lying around in the locker?" she asked. "I'm afraid to go for it myself because my knees feel as if they'll collapse at the first step."

  There was a general outburst of laughter that revealed the enormity of their relief. Parrish hurried over to put an arm around the blonde, and Smith himself went to the locker and opened it.

  With the break in the tension, Beryl managed to walk pretty well, perhaps with a little more swagger of the hips than usual, Westervelt thought. Smith found a drink for her, and insisted that Lydman have tea. The chief pulled the tab himself and held the cup for the few seconds required to heat the beverage.

  Most of them, like Westervelt, had had too many coffees or sandwiches, and were content to sit down and regain their composure. Westervelt was mildly surprised to see Parrish take a position behind Lydman and knead the big man's neck muscles to relax him.

  "Did they tell you the news yet?" asked Smith. "We got two out-Syssoka and Greenhaven!"

  "No!" said Lydman, managing a smile. "Tell me, but if I get up to leave in the middle, I'd rather you didn't stop me."

  "Nobody is stopping anybody tonight!" said Smith, and fell to giving his assistant an account of Taranto and Meyers.

  Westervelt got up quietly and padded into the switchboard cubbyhole.

  "Lend me your headset, Pauline," he murmured, "and punch Joe's number."

  "Sure," said the little blonde.

  She left the screen off and kissed him behind the ear just as Rosenkrantz answered.

  "Nothing personal, Willie," she giggled. "I just feel so relieved!"

  "Who is it now?" demanded Rosenkrantz's voice. "You left the lens off, did you know that?"

  "It's Willie, Joe. He came back and he's sitting down having tea."

  "Back? Where was he?"

  Westervelt told him.

  Then he told him again and switched off. Joe, he thought, would have to live with it for a while.

  When he stepped out of the cubicle, everyone was watching Smith narrate, with broad gestures, the flummoxing of the staid authorities of Greenhaven. The chief was not above calling upon Parrish for an estimate of the charms of Maria Ringstad that caused an outcry among the girls. Lydman smiled politely, but not from the heart. He was still quietly reserved.

  Everyone was watching Smith. No one paid any attention to the redhaired man who drifted into the office area just as Westervelt squirmed past Pauline and stepped out of the switchboard room.

  The youth blinked at the topcoat over the man's arm. He focused upon the wavy hair and reached for the man's shoulder to turn him around.

  "Charlie Colborn!" he yelped.

  Smith got it first.

  "Well, now," he said, standing up. "If it's getting so everybody and his brother start parading through that door at this time of night, I'm leaving! Where's my hat, Si?"

  Lydman had caught on almost as quickly, and was on his feet before the general whoop went up.

  "I just want to phone my wife," said Colborn. "It's so late I might as well stay here the rest of the night. What's keeping all of you?"

  They glared at him.

  "The power's been on for fifteen minutes," he told them. "I would have been up sooner, but that nut of a building manager insisted on running test trips with all the elevators before he'd let anyone come up."

  Lydman had started for the elevator, in shirtsleeves as he was and carrying a cup of tea in one hand and a bloody handkerchief. There was no doubt that he meant to go home that way.

  "BOB!" roared Smith. "All of you-listen!"

  Lydman stopped but did not turn around.

  "In the first place, Charlie," said Smith, "you are not going to call your wife from here unless you faithfully give the impression that you are all alone. If you slip, I'll swear to her I saw you picked up by two redheads in a helicopter and you had all the office petty cash with you."

  "But-"

  "Tell her the traffic was too much. Don't tell her we couldn't get to the street. That goes for everybody else too!"

  "But... why?" Colborn got out.

  "Why? You want the D.I.R. boys throwing this up to us every time I try to get money out of them for the bare necessities of our operation? We can get people out of dungeons on planets not even in the Galatlas, but can't even escape from our own little hideaway?"

  "It never happened," Parrish agreed quickly.

  "Damn' right!" said Smith. "Okay, Bob, push the button! Go with him, Willie! You girls-nobody in before noon tomorrow; we have an extra TV operator to take care of things."

  "Look, I..." Colborn started to say as he stepped out of Westervelt's way.

  "Aw, thanks for phoning in the first place," grinned Smith, punching him lightly on the shoulder. "Wait for me downstairs, Willie! We'll see what we can do about Harris tomorrow!"

  "Appoint him an ambassador," muttered Westervelt, coming up behind Lydman as the elevator door slid smoothly open.

  What an outfit! he thought to himself. I'm going to apply for field duty, where you can get out among the stars and let someone else figure ways to keep you out of trouble.

  Somehow, incredibly, everyone but Colborn managed to catch the same elevator.

  THE END

  * * *

  Contents

  ANYTHING YOU CAN DO

  By Randall Garrett

  [1]

  Like some great silver-pink fish, the ship sang on through the eternal night. There was no impression of swimming; the fish shape had neither fins nor a tail. It was as though it were hovering in wait for a member of some smaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, so that it, in turn, could pounce and kill.

  But still it moved and sang.

  Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have told that this particular fish was dying.

  In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder--long, tapered, and oval in cross-section--but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth silver-pink exterior was featureless.

  That one exception was a long, purplish-black, roughened discoloration that ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters of length. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying.

  Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the discoloration. Had he thought about it, he would have deduced the presence of the burn, but it was by far the least of his worries.

  The ship sang, and the song was a song of death.

  The internal damage that had been done to the ship was far more serious
than the burn on the surface of the hull. It was that internal damage which occupied the thoughts of the Nipe, for it could, quite possibly, kill him.

  He had, of course, no intention of dying. Not out here. Not so far, so very far, from his own people. Not out here, where his death would be so very improper.

  He looked at the ball of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that such a relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendously energetic plasmoid, one that could still do such damage so far out. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normally produce such energetic swirls of magnetohydrodynamic force.

  But the thing had been there, nonetheless, and the ship had hit it at high velocity. Fortunately the ship had only touched the edge of the swirling cloud--otherwise the ship would have vanished in a puff of incandescence. But it had done enough. The power plants that drove the ship at ultralight velocities through the depths of interstellar space had been so badly damaged that they could only be used in short bursts, and each burst brought them closer to the fusion point. Even when they were not being used they sang away their energies in ululations of wavering vibration that would have been nerve-racking to a human being.

  The Nipe had heard the singing of the engines, recognized it for what it was, realized that he could do nothing about it, and dismissed it from his mind.

  Most of the instruments were powerless; the Nipe was not even sure he could land the vessel. Any attempt to use the communicator to call home would have blown his ship to atoms.

  The Nipe did not want to die, but, if die he must, he did not want to die foolishly.

  It had taken a long time to drift in from the outer reaches of this sun's planetary system, but using the power plants any more than was absolutely necessary would have been foolhardy.

  The Nipe missed the companionship his brother had given him for so long; his help would be invaluable now. But there had been no choice. There had not been enough supplies for two to survive the long inward fall toward the distant sun. The Nipe, having discovered the fact first, had, out of his mercy and compassion, killed his brother while the other was not looking. Then, having disposed of his brother with all due ceremony, he had settled down to the long, lonely wait.

  Beings of another race might have cursed the accident that had disabled the ship, or regretted the necessity that one of them should die, but the Nipe did neither, for, to him, the first notion would have been foolish and the second incomprehensible.

  But now, as the ship fell ever closer toward the yellow-white sun, he began to worry about his own fate. For a while, it had seemed almost certain that he would survive long enough to build a communicator, for the instruments had already told him and his brother that the system ahead was inhabited by creatures of reasoning power, if not true intelligence, and it would almost certainly be possible to get the equipment he needed from them. Now, though, it looked as if the ship would not survive a landing. He had had to steer it away from a great gas giant, which had seriously endangered the power plants.

  He did not want to die in space--wasted, forever undevoured. At least, he must die on a planet, where there might be creatures with the compassion and wisdom to give his body the proper death rites. The thought of succumbing to inferior creatures was repugnant, but it was better than rotting to feed monocells or ectogenes, and far superior to wasting away in space.

  Even thoughts such as these did not occupy his mind often or for very long. Far, far better than any of those thoughts were thoughts connected with the desire and planning for survival.

  The outer orbits of the gas giants had been passed at last, and the Nipe fell on through the Asteroid Belt without approaching any of the larger pieces of rock-and-metal. That he and his brother had originally elected to come into this system along its orbital plane had been a mixed blessing. To have come in at a different angle would have avoided all the debris--from planetary size on down--that is thickest in a star's equatorial plane, but it would also have meant a greater chance of missing a suitable planet unless too much reliance were placed on the already weakened power generators. As it was, the Nipe had been fortunate in being able to use the gravitational field of the gas giant to swing his ship toward the precise spot where the third planet would be when the ship arrived in the third orbit. Moreover, the planet would be retreating from the Nipe's line of flight, which would make the velocity difference that much the less.

  For a while the Nipe had toyed with the idea of using the mining bases that the local life-form had set up in the Asteroid Belt as bases for his own operations, but he had decided against it. Movement would be much freer and more productive on a planet than it would be in the Belt.

  He would have preferred using the fourth planet for his base. Although much smaller, it had the same reddish, arid look as his own home planet, while the third planet was three quarters drowned in water. But there were two factors that weighed so heavily against that choice that they rendered it impossible. In the first place, by far the greater proportion of the local inhabitants' commerce was between the asteroids and the third planet. Second, and even more important, the fourth world was at such a point in its orbit that the energy required to land would destroy the ship beyond any doubt.

  It would have to be the third world.

  As the ship fell inward, the Nipe watched his pitifully inadequate instruments, doing his best to keep tabs on every one of the ships that the local life-form used to move through space. He did not want to be spotted now, and even though the odds were against these beings having any instrument highly developed enough to spot his own craft, there was always the possibility that he might be observed optically.

  So he squatted there in his ship, a centipede-like thing about five feet in length and a little less than eighteen inches in diameter, with eight articulated limbs spaced in pairs along his body, each limb ending in a five-fingered manipulatory organ that could be used equally well as hand or foot. His head, which was long and snouted, displayed two pairs of violet eyes that kept a constant watch on the indicators and screens of the few instruments that were still functioning aboard the ship.

  And he waited as the ship fell toward its rendezvous with the third planet.

  [2]

  Wang Kulichenko pulled the collar of his uniform coat up closer around his ears and pulled the helmet and face-mask down a bit. It was only early October, but here in the tundra country the wind had a tendency to be chill and biting in the morning, even at this time of year. Within a week or so, he'd have to start using the power pack on his horse to electrically warm his protective clothing and the horse's wrappings, but there was no necessity for that yet. He smiled a little, as he always did when he thought of his grandfather's remarks about such "new-fangled nonsense."

  "Your ancestors, son of my son," he would say, "conquered the tundra and lived upon it for thousands of years without the need of such womanish things. Are there no men any more? Are there none who can face nature alone and unafraid without the aid of artifices that bring softness?"

  But Wang Kulichenko noticed--though out of politeness he never pointed it out that the old man never failed to take advantage of the electric warmth of the house when the short days came and the snow blew across the country like fine white sand. And Grandfather never complained about the lights or the television or the hot water, except to grumble occasionally that they were old and out of date and that the mail-order catalog showed that much better models were available in Vladivostok.

  And Wang would remind the old man, very gently, that a paper-forest ranger only made so much money, and that there would have to be more saving before such things could be bought. He did not--ever--remind the old man that he, Wang, was stretching a point to keep his grandfather on the payroll as an assistant.

  Wang Kulichenko patted his horse's rump and urged her softly to step up her pace just a bit. He had a certain amount of territory to cover, and although he wanted to be careful in his checking he also wanted to get home ear
ly.

  Around him, the neatly-planted forest of paper-trees spread knotty, alien branches, trying to catch the rays of the winter-waning sun. Whenever Wang thought of his grandfather's remarks about his ancestors, he always wondered, as a corollary, what those same ancestors would have thought about a forest growing up here, where no forest like this one had ever grown before.

  They were called paper-trees because the bulk of their pulp was used to make paper--they were of no use whatever as lumber--but they weren't really trees, and the organic chemicals that were leached from them during the pulping process were of far more value than the paper pulp.

  They were mutations of a smaller plant that had been found in the temperate regions of Mars and purposely changed genetically to grow in the Siberian tundra country, where the conditions were similar to, but superior to, their natural habitat. They looked as though someone had managed to crossbreed the Joshua tree with the cypress and then persuaded the result to grow grass instead of leaves. And the photosynthesis of those grasslike blades depended on an iron-bearing compound that was more closely related to hemoglobin than to chlorophyll, giving them a rusty red color instead of the normal green of Earthly plants.

  In the distance, Wang heard the whining of the wind increase, and he automatically pulled his coat a little tighter, even though he noticed no increase in the wind velocity around him.

  Then, as the whine became louder, he realized that it was not the wind.

  He turned his head toward the sound and looked up. For a long minute he watched the sky as the sound increased in volume, but he could see nothing at first. Then he caught a glimpse of motion, a dot that was hard to distinguish against the cloud-mottled gray sky.

  What was it? An air transport in trouble? There were two transpolar routes that passed within a few hundred miles of here, but no air transport he had ever seen made a noise like that. Normally they were so high up as to be both invisible and inaudible. Must be trouble of some sort.

  He reached down to the saddle pack without taking his eyes from the moving speck and took out the radiophone. He held it to his ear and thumbed the call button insistently.