The 38th Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK

by Chester S. Geier

  Conley nodded. “They remarked upon having had the strange sensation of being guided. But why did you wish to hide from the city from us?”

  “Because we doubted the intentions of your race,” Garron replied. “A vessel landed on our world before yours—yes, Mapping Expedition 14. Your race possessed extraplanetary travel, and in addition had built a great galactic empire. We feared being conquered, made subjects of an alien people. We knew that members of your race would now visit our world again, and we decided to prepare for them in our own way. We did not possess deadly weapons of force, but we did have what among your people is considered an unusual telepathic ability. A small group of Adulei were organized and trained so that when members of your race came again we would be able to keep them under the illusion that Adulonn was populated only by savages. Thus we hoped to discourage you from ever visiting our world again.”

  By now, Tillman, Ayers and Osgood had approached. Conley introduced them to the Adulei, and Thurmer began tersely to explain what had happened.

  Garron asked Conley, “May I inquire as to how you discovered you were being kept under an illusion?”

  “It was when I noticed that six of your people were constantly in what seemed a strange trance,” Conley said. “These six were always being relieved by another six, and during the interval while the change took place, there appeared what we thought was the mirage of a city. Then I realized that there were six of us here—Tillman, Osgood, Ayers, Gage, Thurmer, and myself. And there were six natives watching us. I tried to find an answer as to what it could mean. I thought of the mirage which appeared during the change-over—and suddenly I had it. The answer was simply each of the six of your people had each of the six of mine in a sort of hypnotic control which prevented them from being aware of the city in the slightest way. But when your people changed places, this control was temporarily relaxed, and hence we caught a momentary glimpse of the city. When I discovered this, I made a plan to render unconscious the six then watching us—but you became aware of what we were up to.”

  Garron smiled. “You forced our hand. And in doing so, you saved your race.”

  “Saved my race…” Conley echoed. “Why, what do you mean?”

  Garron explained, “When we learned the purpose of the second visit of your people to Adulonn—to obtain a means of fighting what you call the Plague—we were sympathetic and wished to help. But we were opposed in this by the faction which regarded your race as a menace to our freedom. Thus two factions arose—one which wished to help your people, and the other which refused. A compromise was reached. If your race was sufficiently intelligent to discover the ruse whereby we were hiding Itarra from you, then you could have our cooperation.” Garron chuckled. “And we gave you every chance, I assure you. It was no coincidence the six of us sat where you could see us. Anyway, you discovered our trick, and thus you have won our help.”

  “But do you have some means of checking the Plague?” Conley asked.

  Garron nodded. “What you call the Plague has long been a common malady among us. We have perfected a drug called Nyalin which stops it almost instantly. Also—we have the tools and materials necessary to help you repair your space vessel. Just furnish us with the specifications, and our engineers will set to work immediately.”

  Conley swayed, suddenly weak with an overwhelming joy and relief. Tillman, Ayers, Thurmer and Osgood crowded around him jubilantly. They slapped his shoulders and pumped his hands until Conley’s aching body seemed ready to come apart.

  “I’m making you commander again,” Tillman announced. “You’ve proved yourself worthy of the position.”

  “And I’m glad just to be a plain, ordinary pilot again,” Ayers said. “Being commander is one hell of a big headache.”

  Thurmer was not to be excluded. “Sorry I drove you the way I did,” he told Conley. “I was pretty bitter about having the ship damaged, that’s all.” Conley grinned. Then he sobered. There was only one thing necessary to make his happiness complete, and that was Naeda. He turned to Garron in sudden inspiration.

  “There was a girl and a man. They disappeared while searching for Itarra. Is there a chance—is it possible that you know what happened to them?”

  “Yes,” Garron said. “You see, before the two opposing factions here in Itarra could reach a compromise, the one which feared your race would deprive us of our freedom had to be satisfied that such would not occur. Accordingly, we decided to examine the minds of two members of your people thoroughly. The girl and the man with her were most convenient, and so we simply increased our control of their minds, forced them to land at a certain spot in the city. The examination showed your race to be friendly and well-intentioned, and jealous enough of their own freedom not to deprive another race of it. The girl and the man have not been harmed. They will be returned as soon as possible.”

  “When you return the girl, will you please make sure that none of the Adulei are throwing their mental weight around?” Conley asked Garron. “Kissing an illusion is no fun!”

  FOUR WHO RETURNED

  Originally published in Amazing Stories, February 1946.

  Light glowed behind the plastic insets of Rowe’s door. I paused on my way out of the office, surprised that he had stayed so late. I’d thought those estimates had kept me so long after everyone else had gone home. On a sudden impulse, I walked over and knocked.

  “Come in.” It was his voice, with that toneless, tired quality which had become all too familiar to me.

  Rowe was seated at his desk, elbows on its untidy, littered surface, shaggy head held in his hands. He peered up at me from beneath grizzled, thick brows.

  “Oh…Herb. Just leaving?” He sat back in his chair, and from the stiff, slow way he did so, I realized he’d held his brooding posture a long time before my entrance.

  I nodded. “It’s late, Frank. All the others have gone home.” I looked at him a moment in silence. “Frank, you’re eating your heart out again. Aren’t you ever going to snap out of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Rowe said. He rubbed the back of a gnarled hand across his forehead and sighed. “I was wondering, Herb… Mars is passing out of conjunction again, and I was wondering…”

  “You’ve been wondering for seven years now,” I told him. “Seven years, Frank. After all that time, there just can’t be any hope. You’ve got to forget the Spaceward.”

  “Forget?” Rowe almost shouted. The deep lines of his face twisted into an expression of anguish. “Forget the fifteen years I spent designing and perfecting the ship? Forget the men who rode her? Forget Jimmy?” He jerked out of his chair and strode to the windows behind his desk, where he stood looking out into the deepening dusk.

  I stared at his back, somewhat stunned at the blaze of emotion I’d evoked. I’d known how he felt over the loss of the Spaceward and all the men in her, including his own son, Jimmy, but I hadn’t guessed, after seven years, that his feeling still ran so deep.

  I looked at him with a new depth of perception. He stood at the windows, his shaggy head bowed. For the first time I became fully aware that his hair was almost white, and that his powerful, short figure had thickened, become stooped. And for the first time I became fully aware that he was old—old and unhappy.

  Through the windows, the neon sign at the gate was visible, that familiar sign which read: “Rowe Rocketcraft. Main Plant.” And I could see part of the plant buildings, their sprawling bulks becoming indistinct in the gathering darkness. Against these outward evidences of success, Rowe stood as a symbol of futility; for without happiness, there can be no real success.

  I thought of the long years of work and hope and aspiration that lay behind Rowe, and I was saddened to think, as far as his own life was concerned, how utterly they had been wasted. To the world, of course, he was success personified, for already the rockets which he had designed and built were beginning to roar through the tenuous reaches
of the stratosphere, linking the farthest corners of the earth by a few hours’ flight. In history he would go down as the inventor of the first successful rocket motor, builder of the first space vessel to leave Earth. But with regard to Jimmy, the one person who had mattered most to him, I knew he would always feel that he had failed.

  My sympathy was all the keener for having been with Rowe through all those lean and struggling years during which he’d fought his rocket motor to perfection. I’d seen my savings vanish, as his had vanished long before, into the hungry maw of those early experiments. And my faith in him had never wavered, even after the last cent had gone and success was still only a dim hope. I had gone out, and by miracles over which I have not yet ceased to be astonished, I had begged and borrowed more. Nor had my faith been displaced; it was a far cry from those days as Rowe’s business manager when there had been no business at all to manage, to the present, as partner in an industry worth many millions.

  The interim had not been an easy one. Rowe had looked ahead with the eyes of a dreamer; stratosphere rockets were only the first step in his plans. Even while I fought to interest a doubting world in the first flimsy rocket planes, he had begun work on the Spaceward. And followed fifteen years of juggling a lean balance between the fledgling industry on the one hand and the seemingly insatiable demands of Rowe’s experiments on the other. But in the end, and at the cost of many gray hairs and many sleepless nights, I’d seen things safely through; the Spaceward had become a reality, and the fledgling was well on its way to becoming a colossus.

  Rowe turned from the window; his gray eyes met mine briefly, then glanced away. “Forgive me for snapping at you, Herb. I realize you meant well.” He took a deep breath and shrugged. “Guess I’m getting old—living too much in the past.”

  “It’s all right, Frank,” I said. “I understand.” And I did, in a way of which I hadn’t been capable a moment before.

  Rowe walked to the north wall of his office, which was covered almost entirely with framed photographs. These were pictures of the Spaceward and her intrepid crew before and after those two memorable flights to the Moon and before the take-off to Mars. The south wall was covered with photographs of Lunar landscapes and others of Earth as seen from the Moon.

  “Yes, that’s the trouble with me,” Rowe whispered. “Living too much in the past… But who can blame me? Jimmy was all I had left after Helen died. And the Spaceward—well, you know yourself, Herb, that all the work I ever did with rockets was in the hope that someday it would lead to a ship like the Spaceward. It did—but the price in the end…”

  I looked away, saddened by the dejection in his appearance and voice. There was silence for a long moment, and then Rowe whispered again.

  “Seven years… Jimmy, boy, what could have happened?”

  My eyes were drawn to the photographs, and I wondered, too. I saw myself upon them, a Herb Farnam seven years younger, with much less gray in my hair. In a particularly large photograph which occupied a central position on the wall, I stood at Rowe’s left—a younger Rowe, too—and at his right stood Jimmy, taller than his father, much slimmer, though possessing the same powerful build, and fully as handsome as my eldest daughter, Doris, had thought him to be. Around us were grouped the smiling heroes of the Moon flights—Paul Wheaton, Victor Sorelle, Art Kolb, Dave Sellers, and John Lauder. And as background was the sleek, gleaming hulk of the Spaceward.

  There was pioneers’ courage, adventurer’s daring, in the smiling faces of those men. There was strength in the metal hull of the Spaceward, tremendous power eloquent in the size of her jet tubes. But in the end? In the end had been seven years of silence, seven years of waiting, for men and a ship which had never returned…

  Rowe’s face was transfigured, almost younger, as he gazed at the photographs. It made me think how particularly true was his declamation to the effect that he lived in the past. Men do live in the past when it holds more pleasure than the present. For Rowe, everything of love and happiness was buried in the past.

  And I wondered about all those others—the wives, sweethearts, relatives, and friends—who had been linked to the men aboard the Spaceward. Did they, too, live in the past? It was a curiously poignant thought, for I had become pretty intimately acquainted with the men and the people in their lives.

  I brought myself back to reality with a jerk. It was late, and Vera had made plans for the evening.

  I touched Rowe’s arm. “Frank, I’ll have to be going. Wouldn’t it be best if you—”

  Rowe shook his head wearily and with something of doggedness. “No. I’d like to stay here a while, Herb. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be all right.”

  With many doubts about this latter, I left him. He was still gazing at the photographs, but his face was no longer transfigured. He, too, had been brought back to reality.

  That was near the end of July. The days which followed were busy ones for me, and the dust of memories, stirred up by that interval in Rowe’s office, settled rather soon. My duties at the plant kept me hopping, and my off hours were taken up with various social engagements. I had practically no home life to speak of; Vera, my wife, always had plans or invitations for something or other, and the house itself seemed nothing more or less than a temporary way station for a constant stream of Beth’s and Andrea’s young men. Not that I minded this latter; if anything at all, I was merely bothered by the contrast between Beth and Andrea on the one hand and Doris on the other.

  While no less pretty or charming than her sisters, Doris, the eldest, was very quiet and serious. She had very little if any social life, and very seldom if ever went out. She was doing postgraduate work in literature, with an eye toward an eventual teaching position, and this seemed to absorb her to the exclusion of all else—or so it seemed at the time. I’m one of those men who find women difficult to understand, and this was complicated further by the fact that in my family were four of them. I’ve often bewailed the lack of a son, though in latter years this has been compensated for by what happened to Jimmy—Jimmy, who had insisted on accompanying that ill-fated flight to Mars.

  In the middle of October came the momentous news, brought to me by none other than Rowe himself. It was afternoon, and my nose was buried deep in a stack of reports, when he burst into my office more wildly excited than I’ve ever known him to be. For some seconds he had difficulty speaking; then words spilled out of him.

  “Herb—the Spaceward! The Spaceward! She’s back!”

  I sat there, staring at Rowe, too astonished to react at once. Then I leaped to my feet, every bit as wildly excited as he was.

  When Rowe had calmed down sufficiently, he explained that he’d had the ’vision set in his office turned on, and an all-station newscast had announced the Spaceward’s return. Site of the landing was Grant Field.

  “Come on!” Rowe finished.

  We gave no thought to the autumn chill then in the air; without pausing to don hats and coats, we ran madly to the landing platform on the building’s roof, leaving a wake of shocked and startled employees behind us. Shouting incoherently at the garage attendants, I had my flitterjet run out, and then Rowe and I tumbled in. I jerked the little craft into the air with an abrupt burst of her jets.

  We’d acted none too soon. A growing swarm of craft was on its way toward the Field. And when I landed the flitterjet, it was only seconds ahead of a squadron of aerial police who had arrived to block further influx of the curious.

  A man in the green uniform of a Field policeman ran up to us, shouting at us to leave. We identified ourselves quickly. Mention of Rowe’s name and a glance at Rowe’s face stilled further protests; without further hesitation, the Field policeman turned and led us to the administration building. It was here, according to him, that the men from the Spaceward had been taken after landing.

  The Field policeman was a dignified young fellow, and he would, I’m sure, have preferred a decorously bris
k walk, but Rowe and I hurried him first into a trot and then into a run. I was excited and impatient, of course, but Rowe was actually trembling. He was like a man on the verge of attaining a long-sought personal paradise. He stumbled as he ran, his eyes, wide and staring, fixed upon the administration building, and between laboring gasps of breath I could hear him murmur over and over again, “Jimmy…Jimmy, boy!”

  This was undoubtedly the greatest moment of his life—a sort of climax point. The return of the two things that had always mattered most to him—Jimmy and the Spaceward. I hoped desperately that he wouldn’t be disappointed. It didn’t seem possible that all the men originally aboard the ship could have returned safe and unharmed after the dangers of seven years. Certainly, some of them would be lost. And if one of them were Jimmy…well, that would be just about the end of everything for Rowe. Seven years of waiting, rewarded finally with overwhelming grief… Tension piled up within me as the administration building drew closer.

  Within me also was a feeling of awed anticipation. The explorers had returned from another world. What strange wonders had they seen? What bizarre adventures had they had? And how would they look after seven years?

  These questions kaleidoscoped through my mind as I ran. And then we were elbowing our respective ways through a crowd before the doors of the administration building. The interior itself was quiet enough, though green uniformed Field policemen seemed everywhere.

  Finally we halted before a door guarded by a particularly large group of Field police. The officer accompanying us made panting explanations to what seemed to be a superior, and then Rowe and I were ushered into a room.

  It was a bright and pleasant room, not very large, but it did seem spacious after the crowds I had seen. And it was quiet. I think I noticed the quietness first. A little later it struck me that the quiet was strange—strained and uncomfortable.