Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "I went over the entire ship because I thought there might be a hidden source of buoyancy somewhere. It would take a lot of air bubbles to turn this ship into a balloon, but there are large vacuum chambers under the multiple series condensers in the engine room which conceivably could have sucked in a helium leakage from the carbon pile valves. And there are bulkhead porosities which could have clogged."

  "Yeah," muttered Slashaway, scratching his head. "I see what you mean, sir."

  "It was no soap. There's nothing inside the ship that could possibly keep us up. Therefore there must be something outside that isn't air. We know there is air outside. We've stuck our heads out and sniffed it. And we've found out a curious thing.

  "Along with the oxygen there is water vapor, but it isn't H2O. It's HO. A molecular arrangement like that occurs in the upper Solar atmosphere, but nowhere on Earth. And there's a thin sprinkling of hydrocarbon molecules out there too. Hydrocarbon appears ordinarily as methane gas, but out there it rings up as CH. Methane is CH4. And there are also scandium oxide molecules making unfamiliar faces at us. And oxide of boron--with an equational limp."

  "Gee," muttered Slashaway. "We're up against it, eh?"

  Lawton was squatting on his hams beside an emergency 'chute opening on the deck of the Penguin's weather observatory. He was letting down a spliced beryllium plumb line, his gaze riveted on the slowly turning horizontal drum of a windlass which contained more than two hundred feet of gleaming metal cordage.

  Suddenly as he stared the drum stopped revolving. Lawton stiffened, a startled expression coming into his face. He had been playing a hunch that had seemed as insane, rationally considered, as his wild idea about the bulkhead porosities. For a moment he was stunned, unable to believe that he had struck pay dirt. The winch indicator stood at one hundred and three feet, giving him a rich, fruity yield of startlement.

  One hundred feet below him the plummet rested on something solid that sustained it in space. Scarcely breathing, Lawton leaned over the windlass and stared downward. There was nothing visible between the ship and the fleecy clouds far below except a tiny black dot resting on vacancy and a thin beryllium plumb line ascending like an interrogation point from the dot to the 'chute opening.

  "You see something down there?" Slashaway asked.

  Lawton moved back from the windlass, his brain whirling. "Slashaway there's a solid surface directly beneath us, but it's completely invisible."

  "You mean it's like a frozen cloud, sir?"

  "No, Slashaway. It doesn't shimmer, or deflect light. Congealed water vapor would sink instantly to earth."

  "You think it's all around us, sir?"

  Lawton stared at Slashaway aghast. In his crude fumblings the gym slugger had ripped a hidden fear right out of his subconsciousness into the light.

  "I don't know, Slashaway," he muttered. "I'll get at that next."

  * * * * *

  A half hour later Lawton sat beside the captain's desk in the control room, his face drained of all color. He kept his gaze averted as he talked. A man who succeeds too well with an unpleasant task may develop a subconscious sense of guilt.

  "Sir, we're suspended inside a hollow sphere which resembles a huge, floating soap bubble. Before we ripped through it it must have had a plastic surface. But now the tear has apparently healed over, and the shell all around us is as resistant as steel. We're completely bottled up, sir. I shot rocket leads in all directions to make certain."

  The expression on Forrester's face sold mere amazement down the river. He could not have looked more startled if the nearer planets had yielded their secrets chillingly, and a super-race had appeared suddenly on Earth.

  "Good God, Dave. Do you suppose something has happened to space?"

  Lawton raised his eyes with a shudder. "Not necessarily, sir. Something has happened to us. We're floating through the sky in a huge, invisible bubble of some sort, but we don't know whether it has anything to do with space. It may be a meteorological phenomenon."

  "You say we're floating?"

  "We're floating slowly westward. The clouds beneath us have been receding for fifteen or twenty minutes now."

  "Phew!" muttered Forrester. "That means we've got to--"

  He broke off abruptly. The Perseus' radio operator was standing in the doorway, distress and indecision in his gaze. "Our reception is extremely sporadic, sir," he announced. "We can pick up a few of the stronger broadcasts, but our emergency signals haven't been answered."

  "Keep trying," Forrester ordered.

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  The captain turned to Lawton. "Suppose we call it a bubble. Why are we suspended like this, immovably? Your rocket leads shot up, and the plumb line dropped one hundred feet. Why should the ship itself remain stationary?"

  Lawton said: "The bubble must possess sufficient internal equilibrium to keep a big, heavy body suspended at its core. In other words, we must be suspended at the hub of converging energy lines."

  "You mean we're surrounded by an electromagnetic field?"

  Lawton frowned. "Not necessarily, sir. I'm simply pointing out that there must be an energy tug of some sort involved. Otherwise the ship would be resting on the inner surface of the bubble."

  Forrester nodded grimly. "We should be thankful, I suppose, that we can move about inside the ship. Dave, do you think a man could descend to the inner surface?"

  "I've no doubt that a man could, sir. Shall I let myself down?"

  "Absolutely not. Damn it, Dave, I need your energies inside the ship. I could wish for a less impulsive first officer, but a man in my predicament can't be choosy."

  "Then what are your orders, sir?"

  "Orders? Do I have to order you to think? Is working something out for yourself such a strain? We're drifting straight toward the Atlantic Ocean. What do you propose to do about that?"

  "I expect I'll have to do my best, sir."

  Lawton's "best" conflicted dynamically with the captain's orders. Ten minutes later he was descending, hand over hand, on a swaying emergency ladder.

  "Tough-fibered Davie goes down to look around," he grumbled.

  He was conscious that he was flirting with danger. The air outside was breathable, but would the diffuse, unorthodox gases injure his lungs? He didn't know, couldn't be sure. But he had to admit that he felt all right so far. He was seventy feet below the ship and not at all dizzy. When he looked down he could see the purple domed summits of mountains between gaps in the fleecy cloud blanket.

  He couldn't see the Atlantic Ocean--yet. He descended the last thirty feet with mounting confidence. At the end of the ladder he braced himself and let go.

  He fell about six feet, landing on his rump on a spongy surface that bounced him back and forth. He was vaguely incredulous when he found himself sitting in the sky staring through his spread legs at clouds and mountains.

  He took a deep breath. It struck him that the sensation of falling could be present without movement downward through space. He was beginning to experience such a sensation. His stomach twisted and his brain spun.

  He was suddenly sorry he had tried this. It was so damnably unnerving he was afraid of losing all emotional control. He stared up, his eyes squinting against the sun. Far above him the gleaming, wedge-shaped bulk of the Perseus loomed colossally, blocking out a fifth of the sky.

  Lowering his right hand he ran his fingers over the invisible surface beneath him. The surface felt rubbery, moist.

  He got swayingly to his feet and made a perilous attempt to walk through the sky. Beneath his feet the mysterious surface crackled, and little sparks flew up about his legs. Abruptly he sat down again, his face ashen.

  From the emergency 'chute opening far above a massive head appeared. "You all right, sir," Slashaway called, his voice vibrant with concern.

  "Well, I--"

  "You'd better come right up, sir. Captain's orders."

  "All right," Lawton shouted. "Let the ladder down another ten feet."

  Lawton a
scended rapidly, resentment smouldering within him. What right had the skipper to interfere? He had passed the buck, hadn't he?

  * * * * *

  Lawton got another bad jolt the instant he emerged through the 'chute opening. Captain Forrester was leaning against a parachute rack gasping for breath, his face a livid hue.

  Slashaway looked equally bad. His jaw muscles were twitching and he was tugging at the collar of his gym suit.

  Forrester gasped: "Dave, I tried to move the ship. I didn't know you were outside."

  "Good God, you didn't know--"

  "The rotaries backfired and used up all the oxygen in the engine room. Worse, there's been a carbonic oxide seepage. The air is contaminated throughout the ship. We'll have to open the ventilation valves immediately. I've been waiting to see if--if you could breathe down there. You're all right, aren't you? The air is breathable?"

  Lawton's face was dark with fury. "I was an experimental rat in the sky, eh?"

  "Look, Dave, we're all in danger. Don't stand there glaring at me. Naturally I waited. I have my crew to think of."

  "Well, think of them. Get those valves open before we all have convulsions."

  A half hour later charcoal gas was mingling with oxygen outside the ship, and the crew was breathing it in again gratefully. Thinly dispersed, and mixed with oxygen it seemed all right. But Lawton had misgivings. No matter how attenuated a lethal gas is it is never entirely harmless. To make matters worse, they were over the Atlantic Ocean.

  Far beneath them was an emerald turbulence, half obscured by eastward moving cloud masses. The bubble was holding, but the morale of the crew was beginning to sag.

  Lawton paced the control room. Deep within him unsuspected energies surged. "We'll last until the oxygen is breathed up," he exclaimed. "We'll have four or five days, at most. But we seem to be traveling faster than an ocean liner. With luck, we'll be in Europe before we become carbon dioxide breathers."

  "Will that help matters, Dave?" said the captain wearily.

  "If we can blast our way out, it will."

  The Captain's sagging body jackknifed erect. "Blast our way out? What do you mean, Dave?"

  "I've clamped expulsor disks on the cosmic ray absorbers and trained them downward. A thin stream of accidental neutrons directed against the bottom of the bubble may disrupt its energies--wear it thin. It's a long gamble, but worth taking. We're staking nothing, remember?"

  Forrester sputtered: "Nothing but our lives! If you blast a hole in the bubble you'll destroy its energy balance. Did that occur to you? Inside a lopsided bubble we may careen dangerously or fall into the sea before we can get the rotaries started."

  "I thought of that. The pilots are standing by to start the rotaries the instant we lurch. If we succeed in making a rent in the bubble we'll break out the helicoptic vanes and descend vertically. The rotaries won't backfire again. I've had their burnt-out cylinder heads replaced."

  An agitated voice came from the visiplate on the captain's desk: "Tuning in, sir."

  Lawton stopped pacing abruptly. He swung about and grasped the desk edge with both hands, his head touching Forrester's as the two men stared down at the horizontal face of petty officer James Caldwell.

  Caldwell wasn't more than twenty-two or three, but the screen's opalescence silvered his hair and misted the outlines of his jaw, giving him an aspect of senility.

  "Well, young man," Forrester growled. "What is it? What do you want?"

  The irritation in the captain's voice seemed to increase Caldwell's agitation. Lawton had to say: "All right, lad, let's have it," before the information which he had seemed bursting to impart could be wrenched out of him.

  It came in erratic spurts. "The bubble is all blooming, sir. All around inside there are big yellow and purple growths. It started up above, and--and spread around. First there was just a clouding over of the sky, sir, and then--stalks shot out."

  For a moment Lawton felt as though all sanity had been squeezed from his brain. Twice he started to ask a question and thought better of it.

  Pumpings were superfluous when he could confirm Caldwell's statement in half a minute for himself. If Caldwell had cracked up--

  Caldwell hadn't cracked. When Lawton walked to the quartz port and stared down all the blood drained from his face.

  The vegetation was luxuriant, and unearthly. Floating in the sky were serpentine tendrils as thick as a man's wrist, purplish flowers and ropy fungus growths. They twisted and writhed and shot out in all directions, creating a tangle immediately beneath him and curving up toward the ship amidst a welter of seed pods.

  He could see the seeds dropping--dropping from pods which reminded him of the darkly horned skate egg sheaths which he had collected in his boyhood from sea beaches at ebb tide.

  It was the unwholesomeness of the vegetation which chiefly unnerved him. It looked dank, malarial. There were decaying patches on the fungus growths and a miasmal mist was descending from it toward the ship.

  The control room was completely still when he turned from the quartz port to meet Forrester's startled gaze.

  "Dave, what does it mean?" The question burst explosively from the captain's lips.

  "It means--life has appeared and evolved and grown rotten ripe inside the bubble, sir. All in the space of an hour or so."

  "But that's--impossible."

  Lawton shook his head. "It isn't at all, sir. We've had it drummed into us that evolution proceeds at a snailish pace, but what proof have we that it can't mutate with lightning-like rapidity? I've told you there are gases outside we can't even make in a chemical laboratory, molecular arrangements that are alien to earth."

  "But plants derive nourishment from the soil," interpolated Forrester.

  "I know. But if there are alien gases in the air the surface of the bubble must be reeking with unheard of chemicals. There may be compounds inside the bubble which have so sped up organic processes that a hundred million year cycle of mutations has been telescoped into an hour."

  Lawton was pacing the floor again. "It would be simpler to assume that seeds of existing plants became somehow caught up and imprisoned in the bubble. But the plants around us never existed on earth. I'm no botanist, but I know what the Congo has on tap, and the great rain forests of the Amazon."

  "Dave, if the growth continues it will fill the bubble. It will choke off all our air."

  "Don't you suppose I realize that? We've got to destroy that growth before it destroys us."

  * * * * *

  It was pitiful to watch the crew's morale sag. The miasmal taint of the ominously proliferating vegetation was soon pervading the ship, spreading demoralization everywhere.

  It was particularly awful straight down. Above a ropy tangle of livid vines and creepers a kingly stench weed towered, purplish and bloated and weighted down with seed pods.

  It seemed sentient, somehow. It was growing so fast that the evil odor which poured from it could be correlated with the increase of tension inside the ship. From that particular plant, minute by slow minute, there surged a continuously mounting offensiveness, like nothing Lawton had ever smelt before.

  The bubble had become a blooming horror sailing slowly westward above the storm-tossed Atlantic. And all the chemical agents which Lawton sprayed through the ventilation valves failed to impede the growth or destroy a single seed pod.

  It was difficult to kill plant life with chemicals which were not harmful to man. Lawton took dangerous risks, increasing the unwholesomeness of their rapidly dwindling air supply by spraying out a thin diffusion of problematically poisonous acids.

  It was no sale. The growths increased by leaps and bounds, as though determined to show their resentment of the measures taken against them by marshalling all their forces in a demoralizing plantkrieg.

  Thwarted, desperate, Lawton played his last card. He sent five members of the crew, equipped with blow guns. They returned screaming. Lawton had to fortify himself with a double whiskey soda before he could face t
he look of reproach in their eyes long enough to get all of the prickles out of them.

  From then on pandemonium reigned. Blue funk seized the petty officers while some of the crew ran amuck. One member of the engine watch attacked four of his companions with a wrench; another went into the ship's kitchen and slashed himself with a paring knife. The assistant engineer leapt through a 'chute opening, after avowing that he preferred impalement to suffocation.

  He was impaled. It was horrible. Looking down Lawton could see his twisted body dangling on a crimson-stippled thornlike growth forty feet in height.

  Slashaway was standing at his elbow in that Waterloo moment, his rough-hewn features twitching. "I can't stand it, sir. It's driving me squirrelly."

  "I know, Slashaway. There's something worse than marijuana weed down there."

  Slashaway swallowed hard. "That poor guy down there did the wise thing."

  Lawton husked: "Stamp on that idea, Slashaway--kill it. We're stronger than he was. There isn't an ounce of weakness in us. We've got what it takes."

  "A guy can stand just so much."

  "Bosh. There's no limit to what a man can stand."

  From the visiplate behind them came an urgent voice: "Radio room tuning in, sir."

  Lawton swung about. On the flickering screen the foggy outlines of a face appeared and coalesced into sharpness.

  The Perseus radio operator was breathless with excitement. "Our reception is improving, sir. European short waves are coming in strong. The static is terrific, but we're getting every station on the continent, and most of the American stations."

  Lawton's eyes narrowed to exultant slits. He spat on the deck, a slow tremor shaking him.

  "Slashaway, did you hear that? We've done it. We've won against hell and high water."

  "We done what, sir?"

  "The bubble, you ape--it must be wearing thin. Hell's bells, do you have to stand there gaping like a moronic ninepin? I tell you, we've got it licked."

  "I can't stand it, sir. I'm going nuts."

  "No you're not. You're slugging the thing inside you that wants to quit. Slashaway, I'm going to give the crew a first-class pep talk. There'll be no stampeding while I'm in command here."