“The’s metals too—platinum and that. I made tests. It was the big meteor brought ’em in.”
“Think you can get it?” Galt sounded a little skeptical.
“Sure!” Barron didn’t like being doubted. “You seen the ’scope. Kicked clean off the scale, didn’t it? You seen the little chunk from the blast—big as a house and just a little piece at that. The real big stuff is back of that rock wall, under the crater. It’s what blights their vines, like the old guy told us. It’s gotta be lousy with radioactives to act like it does.”
Galt’s young voice was awed—sort of reverent.
“Geez!” he murmured. “It’s like heaven, findin’ it like that! Like a dream. Millions for the both of us, and then Lanak and the canals and home. Earth!”
Barron was talking on—details—practicality. He was no milksop, dreamin’ about home! “We can blast down through from the top, right in the middle where it’s lowest. We’ll save time that way, and there’s no chance of shiftin’ the water. We got water there, and food, just for the takin’, and we don’t want to lose it. By God, kid, we got it soft! Millions for the both of us!”
Galt’s voice sounded a little dubious. “What food do you mean? Won’t blasting like that kill the peas?”
The big man roared with laughter. “Peas! Who wants the lousy dried-up swill? We got meat, kid—just for th’ takin’! Rabbits. Thousands of ’em. Fill up that big crack with a couple good blasts and they’re there till we’re done with th’ place. We’ll eat meat, kid.”
Galt peered back over his shoulder. The old man was lying still—sleeping maybe. Crazy old duffer! Living half his life over millions and never knowing it. Gibbering about rabbits like they were men, and about peas.
“What about the old guy?” he asked.
Barron leered knowingly. “Him? The’s nobody knows about him but us and nobody that cares a cuss. We can forget him.” Forget!
Both men turned at a sudden sound. The old man was trying to stand up. The acceleration pushed him back. He hunched forward on his knees. He was by the fuel-chambers, where the outlets bulged into the ship. He was laughing—crazy, screaming laughter.
Good God! He was spilling the hydrogen tanks!
Over the red desert a bright speck blossomed into a great white puff of flame. After a while a sound came, thin and very far away, like the bursting of a rock.
A plume of fire streaked slowly down across the sky and vanished into the up-flung chaos of the badlands. A fountain of light shot up where it fell, bright with specks of burning metal. Another sound came, deeper, the thin echo of a mighty roar.
The Maee were watching from the crack in the plateau that was the only entrance to their secret haven. In the dark their eyes were great and round—myriads of green eyes, watching from the dark.
A. E. Van Vogt (1912—) is a Canadian by birth, but at present lives in California. He has contributed primarily to Astounding Science-Fiction, and his work appears in both Adventures in Time and Space and The Best of Science-Fiction. In 1946 Arkham House published his outstanding novel of mutants in a future world, Sian. The Weapon Makers was also published in 1946, and The World of A will be published this year by Simon &r Schuster, the first in a projected science-fiction series.
FAR CENTAURUS
A. E. Van Vogt
I WAKENED WITH A START, AND THOUGHT: How was Renfrew taking it?
I must have moved physically, for blackness edged with pain closed over me. How long I lay in that agonized faint I have no means of knowing. My next awareness was of the thrusting of the engines that drove the spaceship. Slowly this time, consciousness returned. I lay very quiet, feeling the weight of my years of sleep, determined to follow the routine prescribed so long ago by Pelham. I didn’t want to faint again.
I lay there, and I thought: It was silly to have worried about Jim Renfrew. He wasn’t due to come out of his state of suspended animation for another fifty years.
I began to watch the illuminated face of the clock in the ceiling. It had registered 23:12; now it was 23:22. The ten minutes Pelham had suggested for a time lapse between passivity and initial action was up. Slowly, I pushed my hand toward the edge of the bed. Click! My fingers pressed the button that was there. There was a faint hum. The automatic massaging pads began to fumble gently over my naked form. First, they rubbed my arms; then they moved to my legs, and so on over my body. As they progressed over my body, I could feel the fine slick of oil that oozed from them working into my dry skin. A dozen times I could have screamed from the pain of life returning. But in an hour I was able to sit up and turn on the lights.
The small, sparsely furnished, familiar room couldn’t hold my attention for more than an instant. I stood up.
The movement must have been too abrupt. I swayed, caught on to the metal column of the bed, and retched discolored stomach juices. The nausea passed. But it required an effort of will for me to walk to the door, open it, and head along the narrow corridor that led to the control room. I wasn’t supposed to so much as pause there, but a spasm of dreadful fascination seized me, and I couldn’t help it. I leaned over the control chair and glanced at the chronometer. It said: 53 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 0 days, 0 hours and 27 minutes.
Fifty-three years! Back on Earth, the people we had known, the young men we’d gone to college with, that girl who had kissed me at the party given us the night we left—they were all dead. Or dying of old age. I remembered the girl very vividly. She was pretty, vivacious, a complete stranger. She had laughed as she offered her red lips, and she had said, “A kiss for the ugly one, too.” She’d be a grandmother now, or in her grave.
I began to heat the can of concentrated liquid that was to be my first food. The small task calmed my mind. Fifty-three years and seven and one-half months, I thought. Nearly four years over my allotted time. I’d have to do some figuring before I took another dose of Eternity drug. Twenty grains had been calculated to preserve my life for exactly fifty years. The stuff was evidently more potent than Pelham had been able to estimate from his short period advance tests.
I sat tense, thinking about that. Abrupt consciousness came of what I was doing. I laughed aloud. The sound both startled and relieved me. Was I actually being critical? A miss of only four years was a bull’s-eye across that span of years. Why, I was alive and still young. Time and space had been conquered. The universe belonged to man.
I ate my “soup,” sipping each spoonful deliberately. I made the bowl last thirty minutes. Then, greatly refreshed, I made my way back to the control room. This time I paused for a long look through the plates. It took only a few moments to locate Sol, a very brightly glowing star in the approximate center of the rearview plate. Alpha Centauri required longer to locate. But it shone finally, a glow point in a light sprinkled darkness. I wasted no time trying to estimate their distances. They looked right. In fifty-four years we had covered approximately one-tenth of the four and one-third light years to the famous nearest star system.
Satisfied, I threaded my way back to the living quarters. Take them in a row, I thought. Pelham first. As I opened the air-tight door of Pelham’s room, a sickening odor of decayed flesh tingled into my nostrils. With a gasp I slammed the door, stood there in the narrow hallway, shuddering. After a long minute, there was still nothing but the reality. Pelham was dead.
I cannot clearly remember what I did then. I ran; I know that.
I flung open Renfrew’s door, then Blake’s. The clean, sweet smell of their rooms, the sight of their silent bodies on their beds brought back a measure of my sanity. A great sadness came to me. Poor, brave Pelham, inventor of the Eternity drug that had made the great plunge into interstellar space possible, lay dead now from his own invention. He had said: “The chances are greatly against any of us dying. But there is what I am calling a death factor of about ten percent, a by-product of the first dose. If our bodies survive the initial shock, they will survive additional doses.” The death factor must be greater than ten percent. T
hat extra four years the drug had kept me asleep—
Gloomily, I went to the storeroom and procured my personal spacesuit and a tarpaulin. But even with their help, it was a horrible business. The drug had preserved the body to some extent but pieces kept falling off as I lifted it. At last I carried the tarpaulin and its contents to the air lock, and shoved it into space.
I felt pressed now for time. These waking periods were to be brief affairs in which what we called the “current” oxygen was to be used up, but the main reserves were not to be touched. Chemicals in each room slowly refreshed the “current” air over the years, readying it for the next to awaken. In a curious defensive fashion, we had neglected to allow for an emergency like the death of one of our members. Even as I climbed out of the spacesuit, I could feel the difference in the air I was breathing.
I went first to the radio. It had been calculated that half a light year was the limit of radio reception, and we were approaching that limit now. Hurriedly, though carefully, I wrote my report out, then read it into a transcription record and started sending. I set the record to repeat a hundred times. In a little more than five months hence, headlines would be flaring on Earth.
I clamped my written report into the ship log book and added a note for Renfrew at the bottom. It was a brief tribute to Pelham. My praise was heartfelt, but there was another reason behind my note. They had been pals, Renfrew, the engineering genius who built the ship, and Pelham, the great chemist-doctor whose Eternity drug had made it possible for men to take this fantastic journey into vastness. It seemed to me that Renfrew, waking up into the great silence of the hurtling ship, would need my tribute to his friend and colleague. It was little enough for me to do, who loved them both.
The note written, I hastily examined the glowing engines, made notations of several instrument readings, and then counted out fifty-five grains of Eternity drug. That was as close as I could get to the amount I felt would be required for one hundred and fifty years. Before I fell asleep I thought of Renfrew. The terrible shock that was coming to him on top of all the natural reactions to his situation would strike deep into his peculiar, sensitive nature. I stirred uneasily at the picture. The worry was still in my mind when darkness came.
Almost instantly, I opened my eyes. I lay thinking: the drug! It hadn’t worked.
The draggy feel of my body warned me of the truth. I lay still, watching the clock overhead. This time it was easier to follow the routine except that, once more, I could not refrain from examining the chronometer as I passed through the galley. It read: 201 years, 1 month, 3 weeks, 5 days, 7 hours, 8 minutes.
I sipped my bowl of soup, then went eagerly to the big log book. It is impossible for me to describe the thrill I felt as I saw the familiar handwriting of Blake, and then, as I turned back the pages, of Renfrew.
My excitement drained slowly as I read what Renfrew had written. It was a report; nothing more: gravitometric readings, a careful calculation of the distance covered, a detailed report on the performance of the engines and, finally, an estimate of our speed variations based on the seven consistent factors. It was a splendid mathematical job, a first-rate scientific analysis. But that was all. No mention of Pelham, not a word of comment on what I had written or on what had happened. Renfrew had awakened; and if his report was any criterion, he might as well have been a robot. I knew better than that. So, I saw as I began to read Blake’s report, did Blake.
Bill,
Tear this sheet out when you’ve read it!
Well, the worst has happened. We could not have asked fate to give us an unkinder kick in the pants. I hate to think of Pelham being dead—what a man he was, what a friend—but we all knew the risk we were taking, he better than any of us. Space rest his great soul.
But Renfrew’s case is now serious. After all, we were worried, wondering how he’d take his first awakening, let alone a bang between the eyes like Pelham’s death. And I think that first anxiety was justified.
As you and I have always known, Renfrew was one of Earth’s fair-haired boys. Just imagine any one human being born with his combination of looks, money and intelligence. His great fault was that he never let the future trouble him. With that dazzling personality of his, and the crew of worshiping women and yes-men around him, he didn’t have much time for anything but the present. Realities always struck him like a thunderbolt. He could leave those three ex-wives of his—and they weren’t so ex, if you ask me—without grasping that it was forever.
That good-bye party was enough to put anyone into a mental haze when it came to realities. To wake up a hundred years later and realize that those he loved had withered, died and been eaten by worms—we-e-ll!
(I put it baldly like that because the human mind always thinks of the worst angles, no matter how it censors speech.)
I personally counted on Pelham acting as a sort of psychological support to Renfrew; and we both know that Pelham recognized the extent of his influence over Renfrew. That influence must be replaced. Try to think of something, Bill, while you’re charging around doing the routine work. We’ve got to live with that guy after we all wake up at the end of the five hundred years.
Tear out this sheet. What follows is routine. Ned.
I burned the letter in the incinerator, examined the two sleeping bodies—how deathly quiet they lay!—and then returned to the control room.
In the plate, the sun was a very bright star, a jewel set in black velvet. Alpha Centauri was even brighter. It was a radiant light in that panoply of black and glitter. It was still impossible to make out the separate suns of Alpha A, B, C and Proxima, but their combined light brought a sense of awe and majesty. Excitement pulsed through me, and I had a sudden realization of the glory of this trip we were making, the first men to head for far Centaurus, the first men to dare aspire to the stars. Even the thought of Earth failed to dim that surging tide of wonder, the thought that seven, possibly eight generations, had been born since our departure; the thought that the girl who had given me the sweet remembrance of her red lips was now known to her descendants as their great-great-great-great-grandmother—if she was thought of at all. The immense time involved, the whole idea, was too meaningless for emotion. I did my work, took my third dose of the drug, and went to bed. Sleep found me still without a plan about Renfrew.
When I awoke, alarm bells were ringing. I lay still. There was nothing else I could do. If I had moved I would have lost consciousness. Though it was mental torture even to think of it, I realized that no matter what the danger, the quickest way was to follow my routine in every detail. Somehow I did it. The bells clanged and fared, but I lay there until it was time to get up. The clamor was hideous as I passed through the control room. But I passed through, and sat for half an hour over my soup. It seemed to me that if that sound continued much longer, Blake and Renfrew would surely awaken from their sleep.
At last I was free to cope with the emergency. Breathing hard, I eased myself into the control chair, cut off the alarms and switched on the plates. A fire glowed at me from the rear-view plate. It was a colossal white fire, longer than it was wide and filling nearly a quarter of the whole sky. The thought came to me that we must be within a few million miles of some monstrous sun that had recently roared into this part of space. Hastily, I manipulated the distance estimators, and then for a moment stared in disbelief at the answers that clicked metallically onto the product plate. Seven miles! Only seven miles! The human mind is curious. A moment before, when I had thought it an abnormally shaped sun, it hadn’t resembled anything but an incandescent mass. Now I saw that it had a solid outline, an unmistakable material shape. As I realized what it was, I leaped to my feet. A spaceship! An enormous, mile-long ship. Rather—I sank back into my seat, subdued by the catastrophe I was witnessing—the flaming shell of what had been a spaceship. Frantically, I searched the heavens for a light, a glint of metal that would show the presence of survivors. But there was nothing but the night and the stars and the hell of burning shi
p.
After a long time I noticed that the burning mass seemed to be receding. Whatever drive forces had matched its velocity to ours must be yielding to the fury of the energies that were consuming it. I began to take pictures, and I felt justified in turning on the oxygen reserves. As it withdrew into distance, the miniature nova that had been a torpedo-shaped space liner began to change color, to lose its white intensity. It became a red fire silhouetted against darkness. My last glimpse showed it as a long, dull glow that looked like nothing else than a cherry colored nebula seen edge on, like a blaze reflecting from the night beyond a far horizon.
I had already, in between observations, done everything else required of me and now I re-connected the alarm system and reluctantly, my mind filled with speculation, returned to bed. As I lay waiting for my final dosage of the trip to take effect, I thought: The great star system of Alpha Centauri must have inhabited planets. If my calculations were correct, we were only one point six light years from the main Alpha group of suns, slightly nearer than that to red Proxima. Here was proof that the universe had at least one other supremely intelligent race. Wonders beyond our wildest imaginings were in store for us.
It was only at the last instant, when I was already half-asleep, that I remembered the problem of Renfrew. I felt no alarm. Surely, even Renfrew would be drawn out of himself when confronted by a complex civilization. Our troubles were over.
Excitement must have bridged that final one hundred and fifty years of time. Because, when I awakened, I thought: “We’re here! It’s over, the long night, the incredible journey. We’ll all be waking, seeing each other, as well as the civilization out there. Seeing, too, the great Centauri suns.”
The strange thing, it struck me as I lay there exulting, was that the time seemed long. And yet . . . yet I had been awake only three times, and only once for the equivalent of a full day. In the truest sense of meaning, I had seen Blake and Renfrew—and Pelliam—no more than a day and a half ago. I had had only thirty-six hours of consciousness since a pair of soft lips had set themselves against mine and clung in the sweetest kiss of my life.
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