Going back to the Kingston-Kanes, he pulled out the wire, found its end fused into shapelessness. Definitely a failure. Inserting the second sample, another gray wire not so dull as the first, he returned to the controls, rammed the energizer. The tail rockets promptly blasted with a low, moaning note and the thrust dial showed sixty per cent normal surge.
Some people would have got mad at that point. Steve didn’t. His lean, hawklike features quirked, he felt in his pocket for the third sample, tried that. No soap. The fourth likewise was a flop. The fifth produced a peculiar and rhythmic series of blasts which shook the vessel from end to end and caused the thrust-dial needle to waggle between one hundred twenty per cent and zero. He visualized the Probe patrols popping through space like outboard motors while he extracted the stuff and fed the sixth sample. The sixth roared joyously at one hundred seventy per cent. The seventh sample was another flop.
He discarded all but what was left of the sixth wire. The stuff was about twelve gauge and near enough for his purpose. It resembled deep-colored copper but was not as soft as copper nor as heavy. Hard, springy and light, like telephone wire. If there were at least a thousand yards of it below, and if he could manage to drag it up to the ship, and if the golden thing didn’t come along and ball up the works, he might be able to blow free. Then he’d get to some place civilized—if he could find it. The future was based on an appalling selection of “ifs.”
The easiest and most obvious way to salvage the needed treasure was to blow a hole in the roof, lower a cable through it, and wind up the wire with the aid of the ship’s tiny winch. Problem: how to blow a hole without suitable explosives. Answer: drill the roof, insert unshelled pistol ammunition, say a prayer and pop the stuff off electrically. He tried it, using a hand drill. The bit promptly curled up as if gnawing on a diamond. He drew his gun, bounced a shell off the roof; the missile exploded with a sharp, hard crack and fragments of shell casing whined shrilly into the sky. Where it had struck, the roof bore a blast smudge and a couple of fine scratches.
There was nothing for it but to go down and heave on his shoulders as much loot as he could carry. And do it right away. Darkness would fall before long, and he didn’t want to encounter that golden thing in the dark. It was fateful enough in broad light of day, or in the queer, green glow of the building’s interior, but to have it stealing softly behind him as he struggled through the nighttime with his plunder was something of which he didn’t care to think.
Locking the ship and leaving Laura inside, he returned to the building, made his way past the mile of cases and cabinets to the machine section at back. He stopped to study nothing on his way. He didn’t wish to study anything. The wire was the thing, only the wire. Besides, mundane thoughts of mundane wire didn’t twist one’s mind around until one found it hard to concentrate.
Nevertheless, his mind was afire as he searched. Half of it was prickly with alertness, apprehensive of the golden column’s sudden return; the other half burned with excitement at the possibility of release. Outwardly, his manner showed nothing of this; it was calm, assured, methodical.
Within ten minutes he’d found a great coil of the coppery metal, a huge ovoid, intricately wound, lying beside a disassembled machine. He tried to move it, could not shift it an inch. The thing was far too big, too heavy for one to handle. To get it onto the roof he’d have to cut it up and make four trips of it—and some of its inner windings were fused together. So near, so far! Freedom depended upon his ability to move a lump of metal a thousand feet vertically. He muttered some of Laura’s words to himself.
Although the wire cutters were ready in his hand, he paused to think, decided to look farther before tackling this job. It was a wise decision which brought its reward, for at a point a mere hundred yards away he came across another, differently shaped coil, wheel-shaped, in good condition, easy to unreel. This again was too heavy to carry, but with a tremendous effort which made his muscles crack he got it up on its rim and proceeded to roll it along like a monster tire.
Several times he had to stop and let the coil lean against the nearest case while he rested a moment. The last such case trembled under the impact of the weighty coil and its shining, spidery occupant stirred in momentary simulation of life. His dislike of the spider shot up with its motion, he made his rest brief, bowled the coil onward.
Violet streaks again were creeping from the horizon when he rolled his loot out of the mighty exit and reached the bottom of the bank. Here, he stopped, clipped the wire with his cutters, took the free end, climbed the bank with it. The wire uncoiled without hindrance until he reached the ship, where he attached it to the winch, wound the loot in, rewound it on the feed spool.
Night fell in one ominous swoop. His hands were trembling, slightly but his hawklike face was firm, phlegmatic as he carefully threaded the wire’s end through the automatic injector and into the feed hole of the Kingston-Kanes. That done, he slid open Laura’s door, gave her some of the fruit they’d picked off the Oron tree. She accepted it morbidly, her manner still subdued, and not inclined for speech.
“Stay inside, Honey,” he soothed. “We’re getting out of this and going home.”
Shutting her in, he climbed into the control seat, switched on the nose beam, saw it pierce the darkness and light up the facing cliff. Then he stamped on the energizer, warmed the tubes. Their bellow was violent and comforting. At seventy per cent better thrust he’d have to be a lot more careful in all his adjustments: it wouldn’t do to melt his own tail off when success was within his grasp. All the same, he felt strangely impatient, as if every minute counted, aye, every second!
But he contained himself, got the venturis heated, gave a discreet puff on his starboard steering flare, watched the cliff glide sidewise past as the ship slewed around on its belly. Another puff, then another, and he had the vessel nose-on to the front edge of the roof. There seemed to be a faint aura in the gloom ahead and he switched off his nose beam to study it better.
It was a faint yellow haze shining over the rim of the opposite slope. His back hairs quivered as he saw it. The haze strengthened, rose higher. His eyes strained into the outer pall as he watched it fascinatedly, and his hands were frozen on the controls. There was dampness on his back. Behind him, in her traveling compartment, Laura was completely silent, not even shuffling uneasily as was her wont. He wondered if she were cowering.
With a mighty effort of will which strained him as never before, he shifted his control a couple of notches, lengthened the tail blast. Trembling in its entire fabric, the ship edged forward. Summoning all he’d got, Steve forced his reluctant hands to administer the take-off boost. With a tearing crash that thundered back from the cliffs, the little vessel leaped skyward on an arc of fire. Peering through the transpex, Steve caught a fragmentary and foreshortened glimpse of the great golden column advancing majestically over the crest, the next instant it had dropped far behind his tail and his bow was arrowing for the stars.
An immense relief flooded through his soul though he knew not what there had been to fear. But the relief was there and so great was it that he worried not at all about where he was bound or for how long. Somehow, he felt certain that if he swept in a wide, shallow curve he’d pick up a Probe beat-note sooner or later. Once he got a beat-note, from any source at all, it would lead him out of the celestial maze.
Luck remained with him, and his optimistic hunch proved correct, for while still among completely strange constellations he caught the faint throb of Hydra III on his twenty-seventh day of sweep. That throb was his cosmic lighthouse beckoning him home.
He let go a wild shriek of “Yipee!” thinking that only Laura heard him—but he was heard elsewhere.
Down on Oron, deep in the monster workshop, the golden giant paused blindly as if listening. Then it slid stealthily along the immense aisles, reached the filing system. A compartment opened, two glassy plates came out.
For a moment the plates contacted the Oron’s strange, sparkling sub
stance, became etched with an array of tiny dots. They were returned to the compartment, and the door closed. The golden glory with its imprisoned stars then glided quietly back to the machine section.
Something nearer to the gods had scribbled its notes. Nothing lower in the scale of life could have translated them or deduced their full purport.
In simplest sense, one plate may have been inscribed, “Biped, erect, pink, homo intelligens type P-739, planted on Sol III, Condensation Arm BDB—moderately successful.”
Similarly, the other plate may have recorded, “Flapwing, large, hook-beaked, vari-colored, periquito macao type K.8, planted on Sol III, Condensation Arm BDB—moderately successful.”
But already the sparkling hobbyist had forgotten his passing notes. He was breathing his essence upon a jeweled moth.
E FOR EFFORT
by T. L. Sherred
THE CAPTAIN WAS MET AT THE AIRPORT BY A STAFF CAR. LONG AND FAST it sped. In a narrow, silent room the general sat, ramrod-backed, tense. The major waited at the foot of the gleaming steps shining frostily in the night air. Tires screamed to a stop and together the captain and the major raced up the steps. No words of greeting were spoken. The general stood quickly, hand outstretched. The captain ripped open a dispatch case and handed over a thick bundle of papers. The general flipped them over eagerly and spat a sentence at the major. The major disappeared and his harsh voice rang curtly down the outside hall. The man with glasses came in and the general handed him the papers. With jerky fingers the man with glasses sorted them out. With a wave from the general the captain left, a proud smile on his weary young face. The general tapped his fingertips on the black glossy surface of the table. The man with glasses pushed aside crinkled maps, and began to read aloud.
Dear Joe:
I started this just to kill time, because I got tired of just looking out the window. But when I got almost to the end I began to catch the trend of what’s going on. You’re the only one I know that can come through for me, and when you finish this you’ll know why you must.
I don’t know who will get this to you. Whoever it is won’t want you to identify a face later. Remember that, and please, Joe—hurry!
Ed.
It all started because I’m lazy. By the time I’d shaken off the sandman and checked out of the hotel every seat in the bus was full. I stuck my bag in a dime locker and went out to kill the hour I had until the next bus left. You know the bus terminal: right across from the Book-Cadillac and the Statler, on Washington Boulevard near Michigan Avenue. Michigan Avenue. Like Main in Los Angeles, or maybe Sixty-third in its present state of decay in Chicago, where I was going. Cheap movies, pawnshops and bars by the dozens, a penny arcade or two, restaurants that feature hamburg steak, bread and butter and coffee for forty cents. Before the War, a quarter.
I like pawnshops. I like cameras, I like tools, I like to look in windows crammed with everything from electric razors to sets of socket wrenches to upper plates. So, with an hour to spare, I walked out Michigan to Sixth and back on the other side of the street. There are a lot of Chinese and Mexicans around that part of town, the Chinese running the restaurants and the Mexicans eating Southern Home Cooking. Between Fourth and Fifth I stopped to stare at what passed for a movie. Store windows painted black, amateurish signs extolling in Spanish “Detroit premiere… cast of thousands… this week only… ten cents—” The few 8x10 glossy stills pasted on the windows were poor blowups, spotty and wrinkled; pictures of mailed cavalry and what looked like a good sized battle. All for ten cents. Right down my alley.
Maybe it’s lucky that history was my major in school. Luck it must have been, certainly not cleverness, that made me pay a dime for a seat in an undertaker’s rickety folding chair imbedded solidly—although the only other customers were a half-dozen Sons of the Order of Tortilla—in a cast of second-hand garlic. I sat near the door. A couple of hundred watt bulbs dangling naked from the ceiling gave enough light for me to look around. In front of me, in the rear of the store, was the screen, what looked like a white-painted sheet of beaverboard, and when over my shoulder I saw the battered sixteen millimeter projector I began to think that even a dime was no bargain. Still, I had forty minutes to wait.
Everyone was smoking. I lit a cigarette and the discouraged Mexican who had taken my dime locked the door and turned off the lights, after giving me a long, questioning look. I’d paid my dime, so I looked right back. In a minute the old projector started clattering. No film credits, no producer’s name, no director, just a tentative flicker before a closeup of a bewhiskered mug labeled Cortez. Then a painted and feathered Indian with the title of Guatemotzin, successor to Montezuma; an aerial shot of a beautiful job of model-building tagged Ciudad de Mejico, 1521. Shots of old muzzle-loaded artillery banging away, great walls spurting stone splinters under direct fire, skinny Indians dying violently with the customary gyrations, smoke and haze and blood. The photography sat me right up straight. It had none of the scratches and erratic cuts that characterize an old print, none of the fuzziness, none of the usual mugging at the camera by the handsome hero. There wasn’t any handsome hero. Did you ever see one of these French pictures, or a Russian, and comment on the reality and depth brought out by working on a small budget that can’t afford famed actors? This, what there was of it, was as good, or better.
It wasn’t until the picture ended with a pan shot of a dreary desolation that I began to add two and two. You can’t, for pennies, really have a cast of thousands, or sets big enough to fill Central Park. A mock-up, even, of a thirty-foot fall costs enough to irritate the auditors, and there had been a lot of wall. That didn’t fit with the bad editing and lack of sound track, not unless the picture had been made in the old silent days. And I knew it hadn’t by the color tones you get with pan film. It looked like a well-rehearsed and badly-planned newsreel.
The Mexicans were easing out and I followed them to where the discouraged one was rewinding the reel. I asked him where he got the print.
“I haven’t heard of any epics from the press agents lately, and it looks like a fairly recent print.”
He agreed that it was recent, and added that he’d made it himself. I was polite to that, and he saw that I didn’t believe him and straightened up from the projector.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” I said that I certainly did, and I had to catch a bus. “Would you mind telling me why, exactly why?” I said that the bus—“I mean it. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me just what’s wrong with it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I told him. He waited for me to go on. “Well, for one thing, pictures like that aren’t made for the sixteen millimeter trade. You’ve got a reduction from a thirty-five millimeter master,” and I gave him a few of the other reasons that separate home movies from Hollywood. When I finished he smoked quietly for a minute.
“I see.” He took the reel off the projector spindle and closed the case. “I have beer in the back.” I agreed beer sounded good, but the bus—well, just one. From in back of the beaverboard screen he brought paper cups and a Jumbo bottle. With a whimsical “Business suspended” he closed the open door and opened the bottle with an opener screwed on the wall. The store had likely been a grocery or restaurant. There were plenty of chairs. Two we shoved around and relaxed companionably. The beer was warm.
“You know something about this line,” tentatively.
I took it as a question and laughed. “Not too much. Here’s mud,” and we drank. “Used to drive a truck for the Film Exchange.” He was amused at that.
“Stranger in town?”
“Yes and no. Mostly yes. Sinus trouble chased me out and relatives bring me back. Not any more, though; my father’s funeral was last week.” He said that was too bad, and I said it wasn’t. “He had sinus, too.” That was a joke, and he refilled the cups. We talked awhile about Detroit climate.
Finally he said, rather speculatively, “Didn’t I see you around here last night? Just about eight.” He
got up and went after more beer.
I called after him. “No more beer for me.” He brought a bottle anyway, and I looked at my watch. “Well, just one.”
“Was it you?”
“Was it me what?” I held out my paper cup.
“Weren’t you around here—”
I wiped foam off my mustache. “Last night? No, but I wish I had. I’d have caught my bus. No, I was in the Motor Bar last night at eight. And I was still there at midnight.”
He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “The Motor Bar. Just down the street?” And I nodded. “The Motor Bar. Hm-m-m.” I looked at him. “Would you like… sure, you would.” Before I could figure out what he was talking about he went to the back and from behind the beaverboard screen rolled out a big radio-phonograph and another Jumbo bottle. I held the bottle against the light. Still half full. I looked at my watch. He rolled the radio against the wall and lifted the lid to get at the dials.
“Reach behind you, will you? The switch on the wall.” I could reach the switch without getting up, and I did. The lights went out. I hadn’t expected that, and I groped at arm’s length. Then the lights came on again, and I turned back, relieved. But the lights weren’t on; I was looking at the street!
Now, all this happened while I was dripping beer and trying to keep my balance on a tottering chair—the street moved, I didn’t and it was day and it was night and I was in front of the Book-Cadillac and I was going into the Motor Bar and I was watching myself order a beer and I knew I was wide awake and not dreaming. In a panic I scrabbled off the floor, shedding chairs and beer like an umbrella while I ripped my nails feeling frantically for that light switch. By the time I found it—and all the while I was watching myself pound the bar for the barkeep—I was really in fine fettle, just about ready to collapse. Out of thin air right into a nightmare. At last I found the switch.
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 38