The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Dave Dryfoos

  “I’m busy,” he snapped, and turned toward the girl.

  “Please, Myron,” she said, gently turning him around again. “If you could lend me some clothes, and find something to do outside while I get into them…”

  Hastily he said, “Excuse me, Honey.” Then, glaring defiantly at me, he gave her a pecking kiss that she tried to dodge but caught on the end of her nose.

  I went outside then, for the first time, and he joined me almost immediately. After looking at a few other things he squatted down beside me to check the cracked bottom plates of the operations-hull, and when he stood up again he swayed and pressed his forehead. “A little dizziness,” he muttered. “Been squatting too long.”

  I said nothing.

  He next inspected the point where the boom joined the operations-hull. The plates there had been pried at with considerable leverage when the drive-hull hit the tree, and were damaged. The drive-hull wasn’t hurt, though. “We can fix the ship,” he said, “but I’m tired now.”

  He turned to the girl, who’d joined us wearing one of Myron’s jumpers and looking like a barefoot boy in hand-me-down overalls. “Honey,” he said, “you’ll show me around a little while Cousin John lays out our tools, won’t you?”

  “I’d love to,” she replied. Her teeth were white behind the generous red lips. She let him take her hand. They walked a few aimless steps into the woods, looking at each other and not where they were going. Their hips and shoulders bumped with seeming clumsiness at every step.

  “Wait!” I called. “The tools’ll get laid out twice as fast if you help, Myron.”

  “I don’t feel like it,” he said dully. He reached a long arm to lean on a nearby tree, turning to face me. “There must have been something wrong with the stuff you fed me.”

  Before I could even deny it, he’d gone behind the tree to be sick.

  Honey followed. “Go away!” he told her. “You might catch this.”

  “Don’t go anywhere, Miss,” I said, running up to join them. “He knows—so you must also know—that this is acute radiation syndrome. He got it from you; you’ll have to help him.”

  “Go away, Honey,” Myron insisted. “I’ve got to have some privacy.”

  “I’ll go,” she agreed, “but I won’t go far. Maybe Cousin John can find some medicine for me to give you.”

  I could, and I did, though he wasn’t given all the medicine at that particular time. For use as needed, I gave Honey whole blood to keep up the red cell count; penicillin to help ward off infection; and toluidine blue to limit bleeding.

  Also I dug out a tent and cot. There would have to be a lot of pounding on that damaged operations-hull, so I thought Myron might as well sleep elsewhere. I told Honey to take Myron’s usual bunk, but she refused pointblank and stayed in the tent with him. She also insisted on preparing his food, so before working on the ship I decided to unload all the quartermaster type stores to provide her with immediate access to everything she might need.

  Once that job was done, though, I was free to work on the ship—alone. I did what I could for a few Earthdays. Then Myron began to feel a little better, and got up. He again insisted on exploring with Honey. I again vetoed the idea.

  “But I feel fine!” he argued.

  “You don’t feel fine at all,” I stated. “You feel a little better than you did at your worst. You know the course of this disease as well as I do—You’re having the usual remission and that’s all. You’ve got to help fix the ship while you’re able, so we can get you away from here and restore your health.”

  “But I want to have a little picnic for Honey now,” he said plaintively. “Her nursing probably saved my life, the last couple of days.”

  “Maybe so,” I said for her to hear, “But if she thinks she saved you for her own pleasure, she has another think coming. We came here with certain duties to perform, and we’re going to perform them.”

  “Honey doesn’t need you to tell her what to do,” Myron shouted angrily, “and neither do I. We’ll do as we please!”

  “You know he’s going to have a relapse, don’t you, Miss?” I said, ignoring him.

  “Yes.

  “Do you know when he will relapse?”

  “No.”

  “Then suppose you make him stay here, where he can be taken care of.”

  Her shoulder drooped inside the too-large jumper. “All right,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, Honey,” Myron said.

  She drew herself straight. “No,” she said, “we’re going to repair this ship. And when it’s done, you’re going to get into it and go back where you came from.”

  And that was that. Myron couldn’t budge her. So far as his illness let him, he vented his frustration in hard work, but that was the only satisfaction he got for a while.

  Hard work was really needed, too. Damage was worse than we’d thought. When we got the damaged plates off the place where the boom joined the operations-hull, we found the frame was cracked.

  Myron had to jury-rig some climbing irons, go up a tree part way, and fasten a block there before we could even get a purchase on some of the damaged members. And when we got them all out on the ground it turned out there just weren’t enough replacement units to go around.

  We would have to weld and refit some of the broken parts. But our drive was gravitronic, so we had no source of either heat or electricity to weld the extreme-service alloys the ship was made of.

  I asked Honey if she had any way to generate an electric current for welding use. “I could try,” she said. “I never before existed in human form so I don’t know its limitations. But we could find out.”

  “No!” Myron said explosively. “There’s no telling what might happen if you try that. You might disappear completely, or die, or revert to a fireball. Forget it. If we can’t leave, we’ll stay.”

  “Get that idea out of your mind,” I said. “You can’t stay. Millions of dollars worth of training and equipment were invested in this trip by a lot of people who are not here to watch out for their interests. You’ve got to report back to them. You can’t leave any stone unturned. Your life has a value to others, if not to yourself.”

  “To me, for one,” Honey said.

  “But your life has value to me!’ he said fretfully.

  They stared at each other till I said, “All right. Love is grand. But do I have to stay here forever?”

  “No, you don’t, Cousin John,” Honey said promptly. “But you’re really trying to protect Myron and not yourself, and I appreciate that. So I’m going to get the electricity so you can weld your ship together.”

  She wouldn’t let Myron talk her out of that but insisted that we get all set and ready to weld. A lot of improvising was needed before we’d assembled rods and cables and an eye-shield and the rest of the paraphernalia. So when she left us I was busy trying out ways of holding the work and Myron was fitting himself with a helmet, and neither of us saw her go.

  I don’t know what she did nor how she did it. But she carried one end of a long cable into the woods, and at the other end we got current enough to finish the job.

  When the parts were all fixed I made Myron help install them to keep him from wandering in search of Honey. For a long time he worked hard, and when he finally decided to lay off and rest a while, I knew he’d gotten too tired to stray.

  He fell asleep under a tree and when he awoke he was sick again. He’d lost all interest in the repair-work—was apathetic and even absent-minded. This was the third of the four phases of acute radiation syndrome.

  Nothing new about the disease—it’s been known on Earth since 1945. But our scheduled time on Terra-nu was about up, and Myron’s symptoms would complicate our departure. Honey was an additional complication. I hoped she’d stay away.

  Myron didn’t. In time he got so sick he couldn’t stand, but he flatly refuse
d to go to his bunk, or even rest in the tent. He sat leaning against a tree looking hopefully around as long as he could hold his head up. Eventually the effort exhausted him and he fell asleep.

  I’d been working inside, and happened to come up through the hatch just as Honey appeared between the trees. Fatigue showed in every drooping line of her. Something about her looked different, strange. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was because by now the sun was low and everything in sight was suffused with pink. Then I saw that Honey’s tawny hair had turned white.

  Myron saw it at about the same time. There hadn’t been any noise so he must have sensed her presence. He awoke and gave a low grown and staggered to his feet. She tottered toward him and they collapsed on one another, each propping the other up. She wept and it could have been her own exhaustion or grief at seeing Myron so sick again, or joy at seeing him at all. Myron patted her and cooed in her ear.

  I gave them a minute and then went out and said. “Thank you, Honey. You’ve saved Myron’s life.”

  Myron turned to me and said, “Admit she’s made it possible for you to leave, Coz.”

  “Sure.” I said. “She certainly has, Myron: she’s made it possible for us both to leave.”

  “I’m not going,” he said flatly.

  “Don’t be silly,” I answered. “You’ve got to go. It’s your duty.”

  “Can’t—can’t he stay a little while longer?” Honey begged. “Just a short time?” They were still clinging together. He kissed her.

  I said, “It’ll be dark here soon. We can’t stay through your three-weeks-long night.”

  “I could take care of you,” Honey said.

  “I know,” I told her. “But the configuration of our own Solar System will be wrong if we don’t leave on schedule. We haven’t got the power to get past our Sun when it’s between us and our home planet. We’ve got to stick to the time-table because it was figured pretty close to begin with.”

  She’d known all that before I said it, sharing Myron’s mind. But she’d wanted to hear it and when I finished she kissed him and said, “He’s right. It’s unanswerable; you’ve got to go.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “He’s sick,” I reminded her. “His judgment’s impaired. Don’t—I hate to say this, but—don’t let him commit suicide by staying here.”

  “No, no!” she promised. “I’ll go with him.”

  That meant her judgment was impaired, too. I had to explain: “We go backward in time, Honey. You wouldn’t exist when we got to Earth, even if you started out with us. You can’t come.”

  “You don’t have to rub it in,” Myron said. “She’s sick. Can’t you see that? She got sick fulfilling your terrible demands. Leave her alone, Coz, understand? Understand?”

  “But Myron,” I said. “If you stay, you may even die of this radiation-illness. And if she’s so sick, how can she help you? Come home with me, and simply by going back in time to Earth’s space-time coordinates, you’ll reach a point at which the illness will never have been. On Earth you’ll be perfectly well—perfectly.”

  “That’s right, dear,” Honey said, leaning her head on his chest and stroking the back of his neck. “And you won’t miss me—you won’t even remember me. So why delay?”

  “That’s why!” he said, pushing her to arm’s length and looking into her eyes. “I don’t want to forget you.”

  “But you may die!” I protested.

  “Probably not,” he said mildly. “I don’t feel as if I were going to die. It’s hard to tell with this radiation thing. But mental states help, and with Honey to nurse me there’s a good chance I’ll pull through.”

  “But only a chance!” I said. “Come with me, and your future’s a certainty.”

  “A gloomy one, without Honey. I just don’t want it.”

  “Oh, Myron,” she began. Then she sobbed and was silent—apparently too tired to go on arguing in favor of something she feared. I had to do the talking.

  “You can’t risk death for a figment of your imagination,” I said to Myron. “You can’t chance death on a strange planet for a mere dream. I mean—well—there’s nothing so mere about Honey, but she is a dream, isn’t she? I mean—”

  “You mean well,” he said, grinning at me. “But of course I can die for a dream. How could I ever have come to Terra-nu in the first place if I weren’t the sort that would chance death on a strange planet for a mere dream? Maybe you can’t understand it, Coz, but that’s what a spaceman is. And I’m ordering you to leave me here and go on home to Earth by yourself.”

  He turned, took Honey’s hand, and stumbled toward the tent.

  “If you stay,” I said, “I’m duty bound to report this place is dangerous, Myron. So you’re making me betray Honey—or the Presence she represents.”

  “We crashed, didn’t we?” he said, following Honey into the tent. “The danger’s real: there’s no betrayal.” He ducked under the tent-flap and was gone.

  “You’re also betraying Mankind!” I shouted after him. “They’ll never again send a spaceman like you to a strange planet!”

  They haven’t, either. When I watched Myron disappear into that tent with his Honey, I was seeing the last of the old-fashioned spacemen.

  It had always seemed pretty silly to send men on those fast space-time trips that they couldn’t remember without artificial aids. It was plain stupid to send them if they would refuse to come back. So thereafter only the aids were sent.

  From that time to this, all space-exploration has been done by us robots.

  BRIDGE CROSSING

  In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.

  But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.

  He wasn’t worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fireproof.

  But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he’d been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.

  And nowadays Molly’s presence wasn’t the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, “The soldiers don’t want little boys. The soldiers don’t want little boys. The soldiers don’t—”

  “I’m not a little boy!” Roddie suddenly shouted. “I’m full-grown and I’ve never even seen an Invader. Why won’t you let me go and fight?”

  Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly’s shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.

  “A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—” she chanted.

  Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.

  “Wuzzums hungry?” Molly cooed, still rocking.

  Utterly disgusted, Roddie lipped her head off her neck.

  It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn’t made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.

  He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly’s head back on her neck: She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. “Hello, boys,” she simpered. “Looking for a good time?”

  Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn’t know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she’d taught him
: “Soldiers, come to attention and report!” There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.

  “Sir,” they chorused, “we have met the enemy and he is ours.” He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.

  “Come here, fellow,” Roddie said. “Let’s see if I can fix that.” The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.

  “Death to Invaders!” he yelled, and charged crazily.

  Molly stepped in front of him.

  “You aren’t being very nice to my baby,” she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.

  Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.

  Roddie salvaged and returned Molly’s needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.

  It was lucky he did. The left arm’s pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.

  Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.

  To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.