by Lake, Jay
At dawn, curfew was lifted in the Slum Ring and traffic reopened between the Suburbs and the Center. After a few uneasy moments it became apparent that the status quo had been restored.
* * * *
Smythe-de Winter tooled his gleaming black machine along the Ring. A thick steel bolt with a large steel washer on either side neatly filled the hole the little old lady’s slug had made in the windshield.
A brick bounced off the roof. Bullets pattered against the side windows.
Smythe-de ran a handkerchief around his neck under his collar and smiled.
A block ahead children were darting into the street, cat-calling and thumbing their noses. Behind one of them limped a fat dog with a spiked collar.
Smythe-de suddenly gunned his motor. He didn’t hit any of the children, but he got the dog.
A flashing light on the dash showed him the right front tire was losing pressure. Must have hit the collar as well! He thumbed the matching emergency-air button and the flashing stopped.
He turned toward Witherspoon-Hobbs and said with thoughtful satisfaction, “I like a normal orderly world, where you always have a little success, but not champagne-heady; a little failure, but just enough to brace you.”
Witherspoon-Hobbs was squinting at the next crosswalk. Its center was discolored by a brownish stain ribbon-tracked by tires.
“That’s where you bagged the little old lady, Smythe-de,” he remarked. “I’ll say this for her now: she had spirit.”
“Yes, that’s where I bagged her,” Smythe-de agreed flatly. He remembered wistfully the witchlike face growing rapidly larger, her jerking shoulders in black bombazine, the wild white-circled eyes. He suddenly found himself feeling that this was a very dull day.
RAFT, by Larry Tritten
Originally published in Darker Matter, 2007.
From out of space came a slender, cylindrical space vessel, half a mile long, hurtling at a skewed angle. Its metallic fuselage bore scores of concave impressions, as if a vast mailed fist had hammered along its length, and it seemed to be falling. As it fell, in what appeared to be a listless way, dark incandescent red and orange colors limned its shape.
Against a universe alight with placid starlight it was an aberrant sight.
An observer would have known immediately that here was a tragedy, a rare drama being played out against the endless dazzle of countless suns reduced to points of white light, impartial and ubiquitous. The craft moved, fell, as swiftly as a meteor, the hot colors burning it with increasing brightness.
And then, falling like a meteor that burns more greatly upon entering an atmosphere, it exploded. Vast involuted peals of radiant light consumed the vessel and for hundreds of miles around it there was turbulence, an inflammatory spectacle, floral in appearance, reducing the quiet drama of mere distant starlight to momentary insignificance.
In the nebulous wake of the explosion great shards of metal detritus careened errantly through space. Then, soon after, a transparent cube the size of a small room went on falling through the void. Inside it an observer would have seen a man-being and a small quadruped beast, both agitated and apparently crying.
The cube’s velocity slowed, slowing more and more until it seemed almost balletic in its motion, delicate, seeming to waft. The man put his hands against the side of the cube, staring out at space and its stars like a wilderness of chandeliers. The small beast ran about, making frightened sounds. The man stared out of the cube for a long while, and then, overcome by the exhaustion of his ordeal, eased away from the side of the cube and lay down on his back with his limbs extended.
Presently the beast calmed down, then went to the man and began to lick his face, an action the man tried to fend off with a flailing of one hand. But when the beast persisted, he reached out suddenly and swept it in an embrace, holding it tightly but gently. Minutes passed during which neither being moved discernibly. Several minutes later the man released the beast, looking out into space as if in confusion.
The man wore a tight-fitting yellow suit, the pockets of which he began to examine, taking out of them, one after another, a small notebook, a felt-tipped pen, some coins, a chain holding a number of keys and a wallet. He put the items on the bottom of the cube and appraised them, smiling now enigmatically. The beast approached the items, probing at them with its muzzle. It walked erratically, as if its legs were weak or injured. The man noticed this, and reached out to stroke its head. Then he opened the wallet and removed a series of photographs, arranging them in a row on the bottom of the cube.
Shaking his head, he seemed to begin to cry again, although there were no tears, just a grieved expression so great it seemed carved into his features.
After a while, the man stood up and walked to one end of the cube, then back to the other end, touching its side tentatively, looking out. Space abounded with stars, stars that seemed to descend all around the two beings like a cosmic snowfall. The man watched them for a long time before lying down again, on his side, the beast moving to lie beside him.
They remained motionless for an hour or so, then the man stirred, got to his feet, and went to one end of the cube. He opened a compartment there, taking out half a dozen small packets that he put on the bottom of the cube through which thousands of distant stars shone. He tore open the top of one of the packets and poured some pellets of food into his palm, shaking more of them onto the bottom of the cube for the beast, which moved wobblingly toward them and devoured them hungrily.
He ate slowly, and when he was finished tossed the empty packet to the other end of the cube. He sat for a while, stroking the beast’s head. Shortly the man rolled over and lay quietly, sleeping. The beast curled up beside him and followed his example. An hour later, the man sat up, glancing about as if bewildered by his surroundings. He stood up, and the beast stirred and also got to its feet. The man put his palms against the side of the cube and stared out with a longing expression, as if he discovered himself, to his dismay, inside a cage.
The cube moved through a sea of black space aglow with the white fire of stars visible through all of its surfaces, everywhere. Suddenly the man broke into a sort of impromptu promenading dance step, waving his arms, grinning, prancing about with the small beast following him waveringly at every motion and turn. He danced oddly and comically for half a minute. Then suddenly he collapsed, sinking to the bottom of the cube, where he arranged himself sitting in a crosslegged posture, his head pressed down into his hands.
His body very slightly convulsed in a series of spasms. He appeared to be sick, or crying again. He reached out with one hand for the beast, but his fingers groped uneventfully in the air. The beast had lain down and no longer moved, or even seemed to be breathing. Its mouth was open, its tongue extended, eyes rolled back in its head. The man crawled over to it, touching it tentatively again and again, then finally moved to the other end of the cube and huddled there, looking back at the beast, shaking his head.
After a while, he stood up and began writing with the pen on one side of the cube. In the middle of the writing the pen stopped functioning and he threw it down, leaving an unfinished statement on the transparent surface, which seen from the outside looked like:
The man sat down again, staring out at the stars, expressionless. An hour passed during which he remained almost completely motionless, then he slowly stood up. He picked up the small beast delicately with both hands and carried it to a corner of the cube, opened another compartment there, slid out a drawer several feet long, put the little beast inside it and slid it back into place. He made an adjustment with an inconspicuous instrument and watched as the beast was drawn outside the cube into space, visible there for a split second, the momentary image immediately obscured by the familiar permanent sight of numberless bright stars.
The man walked to the other end of the cube, paced back again and continued to walk back and
forth aimlessly; his head was inclined downwards as if to avert his gaze, but it confronted stars through the bottom of the cube. He ran his hand through his hair, absently at first, then in an increasingly uneasy manner.
He sat down and turned his attention to the stars. He watched them as intently as someone viewing a film or play. Intermittently he got up and paced around slowly for a minute or so before sitting down again and watching. The process continued for hours, with the man becoming virtually automaton-like in his behavior. Finally, he lay down and slept again.
A few hours later, when he woke, he sat up with what seemed to be great effort. He did not get to his feet, but crawled over to the packets he had removed from the compartment. He tore another one of them open, shook a couple of capsules into his hand, then swallowed them, his mouth writhing as if from a bitter taste. Then he crawled over to the photographs and picked one of them up. He held it briefly to his heart, then touched it to his lips. With a weary and enigmatic smile he lay down on his side and closed his eyes.
Minutes passed and he remained inert, his fingers having curled rigidly in a way that gave his hands the appearance of claws. Hours passed.
Many more hours passed, and then another space craft came from the same direction as the one that had exploded. It was bullet-shaped, about fifteen times the size of the cube and, like the cube, was transparent.
The craft was a Life Finder and it approached the cube cautiously, moving with fine precision until the two craft were adjacent to each other. Inside the new arrival a mechanical creature moved about with care and deliberation. Soon, long flexible tendrils extruded from the craft to a length of two hundred meters and sinuously enveloped the cube. Inside the cube the man lay motionless. The appendages were tipped with discs which searched all about the surface of the cube, slowly in the manner of a stethoscope applied by a doctor. They held onto the cube for about ten minutes while the mechanical creature manipulated them gently. Then the tendrils were withdrawn.
The bullet receded slightly from the cube and suddenly a refulgent beam, blue as starlight, crackled from the bullet into the cube, which disintegrated, portions of it flying in all directions, parts of the cube and the man spinning off and away toward the omnipresent stars. In the same instant as the cube exploded the bullet accelerated in the direction from which it had come, vanishing almost immediately. Then nothing happened; the stars continued to display themselves in the vast theater of space, like myriad cold lights hung in an infinite tree of night.
SPACEMAN ON A SPREE, by Mack Reynolds
Originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1963.
I
They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course. In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.
They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were pseudo-elected and didn’t know much about the field of space travel nor the significance of Seymour Pond’s retirement. Si didn’t bother to remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned up at all.
In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.
The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them back. They hadn’t figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him through decently. Well, possibly he didn’t, given their standards. But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn’t have their standards. He’d had plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.
He’d had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony, boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.
No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There wasn’t anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.
They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.
* * * *
The gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact, Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.
That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under the Ultrawelfare State.
Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home, Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, “Any more bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to the cloddy’s patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have miserably failed.”
Girard-Perregaux said easily, “I wouldn’t call Seymour Pond a cloddy. In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.”
“That’s nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take Pond’s place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has been trained. There aren’t two men on North America—there aren’t two men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our delving into space.” Gubelin snapped his fingers. “Like that, either of us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the road to his destiny.”
His friend said drily, “Either of us could have volunteered for pilot training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn’t.”
“At that time there wasn’t such a blistering percentage of funkers throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our ancestors did?”
Girard-Perregaux grunted his sarcasm and dialed a glass of iced tea and tequila. He said, “Nevertheless, both you and I conform with the present generation in finding it far more pleasant to follow one’s way of life in the comfort of one’s home than to be confronted with the unpleasantness of facing nature’s dangers in more adventurous pastimes.”
Gubelin, half angry at his friend’s argument, leaned forward to snap rebuttal, but the other was wagging a finger at him negatively. “Face reality, Lofting. Don’t require or expect from Seymour Pond more than is to be found there. He is an average young man. Born in our Ultrawelfare State, he was guaranteed his fundam
ental womb-to-tomb security by being issued that minimum number of Basic shares in our society that allows him an income sufficient to secure the food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education to sustain a low level of subsistence. Percentages were against his ever being drafted into industry. Automation being what it is, only a fraction of the population is ever called up. But Pond was. His industrial aptitude dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well. He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to our pleas for a few more trips?”
“But has he no spirit of adventure? Has he no feeling for....”
* * * *
Girard-Perregaux was wagging his finger again, a gesture that, seemingly mild though it was, had an astonishing ability to break off the conversation of one who debated with the easy-seeming, quiet spoken man.
He said, “No, he hasn’t. Few there are who have, nowadays. Man has always paid lip service to adventure, hardships and excitement, but in actuality his instincts, like those of any other animal, lead him to the least dangerous path. Today we’ve reached the point where no one need face danger—ever. There are few who don’t take advantage of the fact. Including you and me, Lofting, and including Seymour Pond.”