The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  “I’d like nothing better,” the message went on, “than to put the old Midas back in shape. What a ship she was! But aside from getting a pig-headed man like you to let me do it, there seems to be no way. The only place where the necessary shops and skilled work can be found is right here on Earth. And since one of those taped-together scrap jobs broke up on the way to Venus, inspection here won’t let another ion blaster land. I’ve tried getting them to wink at the law, but it’s no dice.

  “Anyhow, I’m sending my private blowtorch to Ceres on the double. Get back here where the money grows on the trees, Zeke. I’ve got a top job wide open beside me—needed a good engineer I could trust for years and couldn’t find one. It’s all yours, and I can’t wait to see you and Mary again.”

  Zeke dropped the cable onto the desk and stood gazing at it without seeing it. The girl waited inquiringly.

  “Will there be any answer?” she asked. “It’s to go collect, unlimited.”

  He shook his head and started for the door. Then he changed his mind. He had to answer, of course.

  But it was hard work inventing the words to explain about the repairs being good enough for him to get the job on Pluto. Lying wasn’t easy for him. And nothing could have stopped Levitchoffsky, obviously, if he’d known the truth.

  Later he sat in the control room with Mary while she read and reread the message and his copy of the answer. At last, she put it down.

  “It’s good, Zeke,” she assured him. “I think he’ll believe it.”

  He ran his hands over the controls, cutting on the panel lights that seemed too dim, as if the bulbs were about to fail. Under them, the hair on the back of his hands seemed more grizzled than ever as he filled his pipe.

  “Maybe he did need an engineer,” he said at last.

  “Maybe,” she agreed. Then she reached a hand out for his. “It was a good cable you sent him, Zeke.”

  From below, there was the sound of Grundy getting his things. He’d been mad when Zeke had told him he couldn’t carry him back, until Zeke had shown him the ruined drivers. Then he’d turned white and shut up. His steps started for the ladder to the control room, then hesitated.

  Zeke went to the door. “Sorry, Mr. Grundy. Maybe you won’t have to wait long. I hear there’s a blowtorch coming here in a couple days. How were the mines?”

  He’d meant to ask that before, but had forgotten.

  Grundy grunted in disgust. “Rotten. The lode’s completely shot. Not a thing there my company can make any advances against. Why?”

  “Curious,” Zeke answered. “Well, so long.”

  He shut the door and watched Grundy carrying his suitcase across the field, noticing that the pickup on the rear telescreen was growing weak. But that wouldn’t matter now.

  Forty years, he thought again. Forty years while he and the old Midas earned their way and helped to keep men moving out to new frontiers. Now they had grown old together, and some of those frontiers were old and ready to be abandoned.

  “There’s still Venus,” he said slowly. “I guess we could retire on what she’d bring for scrap. And it wouldn’t be charity.”

  Mary nodded, but said nothing. Then she shook her head, and he sighed in sudden relief.

  Above them, the sky was the black of space, with the hot pinpoints of stars burning through it. Zeke had read stories long before about ships that would someday cross the immense distance to those stars. But so far, nobody had found a drive that would make it possible during the span of one lifetime.

  He’d even imagined that he might be on such a ship, when he was young and foolish. And now, maybe, he was old and foolish. Maybe a man began to get crazy notions when he was old. But what was crazy about it? There was nothing else. “Mary,” he told her quietly, not knowing how to discuss it, “you married a fool, I guess.”

  She followed his gaze upwards, and made a funny, choking sound in her throat. Then, surprisingly, he saw her smile. “As long as a couple of fools stick together, Zeke, I guess it doesn’t much matter, does it?”

  And somehow, it was settled. Zeke reached for the big power switch and cut it on. From below there was the instant soft murmur of the great engine, eager as always to go, unmindful of the weakness of the failing, aged drivers. He stretched out his hands toward the controls, and then stopped. Below, on the field, the failing screen showed a group of people coming up under the big ship and heading for the ramp that he hadn’t yet lifted. He couldn’t take off with them in the path of the blast.

  His legs trembled slightly as he stood up, but he reached the lock before they were up the ramp. In the light he cut on, he saw a young, rather pretty woman with a group of perhaps thirty boys and girls from eight to twelve following her. And behind them all came Mayor Aaron Cowslick.

  The Mayor heaved his way up, puffing a little. “Meet my daughter Ruth,” he introduced them. “You heard about the mines, Zeke?”

  Zeke nodded. “I heard. Rotten luck, Aaron.”

  “Yeah. Toughest on the kids. Word leaked out, and they heard about it this afternoon. It’s always tough on kids who’ve grown up on one world to find they’ve got to get out. Ruth thought they might be cheered up if she could promise them you’d let them go through a genuine ion blaster. They’ve been excited as hell all the way here.”

  “Bring them in,” Zeke told him. It had been a long time since he’d been a kid, aching for a chance to get into a real ship. But he could remember some of it. In their case though, he supposed it was like going into the pages of a historical novel—like a chance to investigate a real pirate ship. “Mary’s up topside, if you’d like to join us. And don’t worry—they won’t hurt anything.”

  “I’ll show them around—I’ve read up on these ships,” Ruth told her father and Zeke. “Dad, you don’t have to come.”

  Aaron breathed an obvious sigh of relief and followed. But from below, there came the sound of yells of excitement that couldn’t be stilled. Zeke had a picture of the young woman filling their heads with nonsense and misunderstanding. How could she answer their questions from books?

  At last he stood up and went down again, leaving Aaron with Mary. Once, other kids had swarmed around the ship, when everything except the children was younger. If this had to be the last time, the old Midas was going to be handled justly!

  And it had to be the last time. He’d been working it out as the minutes slipped by. They could risk one more landing and take-off, out on the wastes of Pluto. There was ice there that could be used to fill the fuel tanks and the cargo holds—enough to power the Midas for two years of steady drive, or a year with power left to operate her equipment indefinitely.

  And on board was food enough for a long time, if they used the products of the air-replenishing hydroponics tanks to supplement it. Enough to keep two old people until death found them naturally.

  It wouldn’t be suicide, after all. They’d go further out than my man before, and after they died, the Midas would coast on forever, or until she reached some system out there that could trap her. She’d go on and on, and there was no known limit to the frontiers she could reach. Her steering drivers were shot, but the main drivers were all she’d need to build up an unthinkable speed.

  There would be no still waters. Instead, there’d be what Tennyson had called “such a tide as moving seems asleep, too deep for sound and foam…”

  He had almost reached the great engine compartment then, but he stopped to collect himself, wondering what nonsense Ruth would be telling the children.

  Then he blinked in surprise. Amazingly, she’d gotten her facts pretty much correct. She was trying to answer anything they asked, and doing a good job of it.

  He stood listening, nodding with approval. Some of that didn’t come from books—it was almost his own words, as Aaron must have repeated them to her.

  “As much power as a uranium plant?” one of her pupils in
terrupted her.

  “More,” she told the boy. “More than two plants like the one we have. And a lot bigger, as you can see. Why, one of the ships the spacemen call blowtorches couldn’t even lift a power plant like this. It has to be powerful, just to lift its own weight.”

  “Boy!” It was a piping masculine voice, filled with awe. Zeke could see the boy, staring up at the huge motor, touching it with an almost reverent finger. “Boy, I wish they still used this kind of ship. Then I’d be an engineer. I’d sure like that!”

  Zeke watched him touch the motor again, and the great power plant seemed to purr under his fingers, as Zeke had fancied it purred in response to his own ministrations.

  He turned softly toward the control cabin, no longer worried about what Ruth would tell them.

  Aaron and Mary were still sitting in the semi-darkness, but they turned as he came in. He walked to the control board and cut off the panel lamps, turning on the main dome light. He didn’t need darkness now as he swung to face them.

  “Aaron,” he asked quietly, “if I landed this ship wherever you figure is handy, do you reckon your engineers could help me hook your power lines to that big engine I’ve got going to waste? And do you think maybe you could use a good engineer to teach some of your youngsters how to handle fusion engines?”

  It was the only answer, of course. He had a motor that would work for a thousand years at least, at almost no cost for fuel; and Ceres had everything except the power such a motor could give. It was economically inefficient, of course, to consider using such motors today. But sometimes, age was more important than economics, whether on worlds, or motors, or men.

  He saw surprise give place to slow understanding. Mary beamed at him through the tears that were suddenly coursing down her cheeks, and Aaron came to his feet with hope and life brightening his face.

  The mayor choked, and his hand was reaching for Zeke’s “We’ll always be able to find a use for good men, Zeke,” he said.

  They would be still waters, after all—settling into one place, on a quiet little world old enough to have lost its roughness. But not all waters had to be stagnant, once the current had passed.

  THE ONE-EYED MAN

  A blank-faced zombie moved aside as Jimmy Bard came out of the Dictator’s office, but he did not notice it; and his own gesture of stepping out of the way of the worried, patrolling adult guards was purely automatic. His tall, well-muscled body went on doing all the things long habit had taught it, while his mind churned inside him, rebelling hopelessly at the inevitable.

  For a moment, the halls were free of the countless guards, and Jimmy moved suddenly to one of the walls, making quick, automatic motions with his hands. There was no visible sign of change in the surface, but he drew a deep breath and stepped forward; it was like breasting a strong current, but then he was inside and in a narrow passageway, one of the thousands of secret corridors that honeycombed the whole monstrous castle.

  Here there could be no adults to remind him of what he’d considered his deficiencies, nor of the fact that those deficiencies were soon to be eliminated. The first Dictator Bard had shared the secret of the castle with none save the murdered men who built it; and death had prevented his revealing it even to his own descendants. No tapping would ever reveal that the walls were not the thick, homogenous things they seemed, for tapping would set off alarms and raise stone segments where needed, to make them as solid as they appeared. It was Jimmy’s private kingdom, and one where he could be bedeviled only by his own thoughts.

  But today, those were trouble enough. Morbid fascination with them drove him forward through the twisting passages until he located a section of the wall that was familiar, and pressed his palm against it. For a second, it seemed cloudy, and then was transparent, as the energies worked on it, letting vibration through in one direction only. He did not notice the quiet sounds of those in the room beyond, but riveted his eyes on the queer headpieces worn by the two girls and single boy within.

  Three who had reached their twelfth birthday today and were about to become adults—or zombies! Those odd headpieces were electronic devices that held all the knowledge of a complete, all-embracing education, and they were now working silently, impressing that knowledge onto the minds of their wearers at some two hundred million impulses a second, grooving it permanently into those minds. The children who had entered with brains filled only with the things of childhood would leave with all the information they could ever need, to go out into the world as full adults, if they had withstood the shock of education. Those who failed to withstand it would still leave with the same knowledge, but the character and personality would be gone, leaving them wooden-faced, soulless zombies.

  Once Jimmy had sat in one of those chairs, filled with all the schemes and ambitions of a young rowdy about to become a man. But that time, nothing had happened! He could remember the conferences, the scientific attempts to explain his inability to absorb information from the compellor Aaron Bard had given the world, and his own tortured turmoil at finding himself something between an adult and a zombie, useless and unwanted in a world where only results counted. He had no way of knowing, then, that all the bitter years of adjusting to his fate and learning to survive in the contemptuous world were the result of a fake. It was only within the last hour that he had discovered that.

  “Pure fake, carefully built up!” His Dictator father had seemed proud of that, even over the worry and desperation that had been on his face these last few days. “The other two before you who didn’t take were just false leads, planted to make your case seem plausible; same with the half dozen later cases. You’d have burned—turned zombie, almost certainly. And you’re a Bard, someday to dictate this country! I took the chance that if we waited until you grew older, you’d pass, and managed to use blank tapes… Now I can’t wait any longer. Hell’s due to pop, and I’m not ready for it, but if I can surprise them, present you as an adult… Be back here at six sharp, and I’ll have everything ready for your education.”

  Ten years before, those words would have spelled pure heaven to him. But now the scowl deepened on his forehead as he slapped off the one-way transparency. He’d learned a lot about this world in those ten years, and had seen the savage ruthlessness of the adults. He’d seen no wisdom, but only cunning and cleverness come from the Bard psychicompellors.

  “Damn Aaron Bard!”

  “Amen!” The soft word came sighing out of the shadows beside the boy, swinging him around with a jerk. Another, in here! Then his eyes were readjusting to the pale, bluish glow of the passages, and he made out the crouched form of an elderly man, slumped into one of the corners. That thin, weary figure with the bitter mouth and eyes could never be a castle guard, however well disguised, and Jimmy breathed easier, though the thing that might be a weapon in the hands of the other centered squarely on him.

  The old man’s voice trembled faintly, and there were the last dregs of bitterness in it. “Aaron Bard’s damned, all right… I thought the discovery of one-way transparency was lost, though, along with controlled interpenetrability of matter-stuff around which to build a whole new science! And yet, that’s the answer; for three days, I’ve been trying to find a trapdoor or sliding panel, boy, and all the time the trick lay in matter that could be made interpenetrable. Amusing to you?”

  “No, sir.” Jimmy held his voice level and quite normal. A grim ability to analyze any situation had been knocked into him during the years of his strangeness in a world that did not tolerate strangeness, and he saw that the man was close to cracking. He smiled quietly—and moved without facial warning, with the lightning reaction he had forced himself to learn, ripping the weapon out of weakened hands. His voice was still quiet. “I don’t know how you know those things, nor care. The important thing is to keep you from letting others know, and…”

  Sudden half-crazed laughter cut off his words. “Go back to the others and tell them? Go ba
ck and be tortured again? They’d love that. Aaron Bard’s come back to tell us about some more of his nice discoveries! So sweet of you to call, my dear…I’m damned, all right, by my own reputation.”

  “But Aaron Bard’s been dead eighty years! His corpse is preserved in a glass coffin on exhibition; I’ve seen it myself.” And yet there was more than simple insanity here; the old man had known the two secrets which were discovered by Aaron Bard and which his son, the first Dictator, had somehow managed to find and conceal for his own ends after the inventor’s death in an explosion. Those secrets had been built into the palace as part of the power of his Dictatorship, until they had been lost with his death. But the old man was speaking again, his voice weak and difficult.

  “What does a mere eighty-year span mean, or a figure of wax in a public coffin? The real body they held in sterile refrigeration, filled with counter-enzymes…my own discovery, again! You know of it?”

  Jimmy nodded. A Russian scientist had found safe revival of dogs possible even after fifteen minutes of death; with later development, men had been operated on in death, where it served better than anesthesia, and revived again. The only limit had been the time taken by the enzymes of the body to begin dissolving the tissues; and with the discovery by Aaron Bard of a counteracting agent, there had ceased to be any theoretical limit to safe revival. Dying soldiers in winter had injected ampules of it and been revived days or weeks later, where the cold had preserved them. “But—eighty years!”

  “Why not—when my ideas were still needed, when my last experiment dealt with simple atomic power, rather than the huge, cumbersome U-235 method? Think what it would mean to an army! My son did—he was very clever at thinking of such things. Eighty years, until they could perfect their tissue regrowing methods and dare to revive my body.” He laughed again, an almost noiseless wracking of his exhausted shoulders, and there was the hint of delirious raving in his voice now, though the words were still rational.