Strange Ports of Call

by August Derleth (ed)

  The sight and the remembrance brought loneliness like an ache, and brought, too, the knowledge that this journeying was not lifting the weight of strangeness that had settled upon us ever since our arrival at Alpha Centauri. There was nothing here for our souls to feed on, nothing that would satisfactorily fill one year of our life, let alone fifty.

  I watched the realization grow on Blake, and I waited for a sign from Renfrew that he felt it, too. The sign didn’t come. That of itself worried me. Then I grew aware of something else. Renfrew was watching us. Watching us with a hint in his manner of secret knowledge, a suggestion of secret purpose. My alarm grew; and Renfrew’s perpetual cheerfulness didn’t help any. I was lying on my bunk at the end of the third month, thinking uneasily about the whole unsatisfactory situation, when my door opened and Renfrew came in. He carried a paralyzer gun and a rope. He pointed the gun at me and said:

  “Sorry, Bill. Cassellahat told me to take no chances, so just lie quiet while I tie you up.”

  “Blake!” I bellowed.

  Renfrew shook his head gently. “No use,” he said. “I was in his room first.”

  The gun was steady in his fingers; his blue eyes were steely. All I could do was tense my muscles against the ropes as he tied me, and trust to the fact that I was twice as strong, at least, as he was. I thought in dismay: Surely I could prevent him from tying me too tightly.

  He stepped back, finally, said again, “Sorry, Bill.” He went on: “I hate to tell you this, but both of you went off the deep end mentally when we arrived at Centauri, and this is the cure prescribed by the psychologists whom Cassellahat consulted. You’re supposed to get a shock as big as the one that knocked you for a loop.”

  The first time I’d paid no attention to his mention of Cassellahat’s name. Now my mind fastened on it in a burst of understanding. Cassellahat had told Renfrew that Blake and I were mad and all these months Renfrew had been held steady by a sense of responsibility toward us. It was a beautiful psychological scheme. The only thing was: What shock was going to be administered? Renfrew’s voice cut off my thought. He said:

  “It won’t be long now. We’re already entering the field of the bachelor sun.”

  “Bachelor sun!” I yelled.

  He made no reply. The instant the door closed behind him, I began to work on my bonds. I was thinking: What was it Cassellahat had said? Bachelor suns maintained themselves in this space by a precarious balancing. In this space! The sweat poured down my face as I pictured us being precipitated into another plane of the space-time continuum. I could feel the ship falling when I finally worked my hands free of the rope. I hadn’t been tied long enough for the cords to interfere with my circulation. I headed for Blake’s room. In two minutes we were on our way to the control room.

  Renfrew didn’t see us till we had him. Blake grabbed his gun. With one heave I pulled him out of the control chair and onto the floor. He lay there, unresisting, grinning up at us. “Too late,” he taunted. “We’re approaching the first point of intolerance, and there’s nothing you can do except prepare for the shock.”

  I scarcely heard him. I settled myself into the chair and glared into the viewing plates. Nothing showed. That stumped me for a second. Then I saw the recorder instruments. They were trembling furiously, registering a body of infinite size. I stared for a long moment at those incredible figures, then plunged the decelerator far over. Before that pressure of full-driven adeledicnander, the machine grew rigid. I had a mental picture of two irresistible forces in full collision. Gasping, I jerked the power out of gear. We were still falling.

  “An orbit,” Blake was saying. “Get us in an orbit.”

  With shaking fingers I pounded one out on the keyboard, basing my figures on a sun of Solish size, gravity and mass. The bachelor sun wouldn’t let us have it. I tried another orbit, and a third, and more—finally one that would have given us an orbit around mighty Antares itself. But the ship plunged on, down and down. And there was nothing visible on the plates, not a shadow of substance. It seemed to me once that I could make out a blur of greater darkness against the black reaches of space. But the stars were few in every direction and I couldn’t be sure. In despair I whirled out of the seat and knelt beside Renfrew who was still making no effort to get up.

  “Listen, Jim,” I pleaded, “what did you do this for? What’s going to happen?”

  He was smiling easily. “Think,” he said, “of an old, crusty, human bachelor. He maintains a relationship with his fellows, but the association is as remote as that which exists between a bachelor sun and the stars in the galaxy of which it is a part.” He added: “Any second now we’ll strike the first period of intolerance. It works in jumps like quantum, each period being four hundred ninety-eight years, seven months and eight days plus a few hours.”

  It sounded like gibberish. “But what’s going to happen?” I urged. “For Heaven’s sake, man!”

  He gazed up at me blandly, and looking down at him, I realized suddenly that he was sane, the old, rational Jim Renfrew, made better somehow, and stronger. He said quietly:

  “Why, it’ll just knock us out of its toleration area; and in doing so will put us back—”

  JERK!

  The lurch was immensely violent. With a bang, I struck the floor, skidded and then Renfrew’s hand caught me. And it was all over.

  I stood up, conscious that we were no longer falling. I looked at the instrument board. All the lights were dim, untroubled, the needles firmly at zero. I turned and stared at Renfrew, and at Blake who was ruefully picking himself from the floor.

  Renfrew said persuasively, “Let me at the control board, Bill. I want to set our course for Earth.”

  For a long minute I gazed at him, and then, slowly, I stepped aside. I stood by as he set the controls and pulled the accelerator over. Renfrew looked up.

  “We’ll reach Earth in about eight hours,” he said, “and it’ll be about a year and a half after we left five hundred years ago.” It took several seconds before tremendous understanding flowed in upon me. The bachelor sun, in easing us out of its field of toleration, had simply precipitated us into a period of time beyond its field. Renfrew had said, had said that it worked in jumps of . . . four hundred and ninety-eight years and some seven months and—

  But what about the ship? Wouldn’t twenty-seventh century adeledicnander brought to the twenty-second century, before it was invented, change the course of history? I mumbled the question.

  Renfrew shook his head. “Do we understand it? Do we even dare monkey with the raw power inside those engines? I’ll say not. As for the ship, we’ll keep it for our own private use.”

  “B-but—” I began.

  He cut me off. “Look, Bill,” he said, “here’s the situation; that girl who kissed you—don’t think I didn’t see you falling like a ton of bricks—is going to be sitting beside you fifty years from now, when your voice from space reports to Earth that you had wakened on your first lap of the trip to Centaurus.”

  That’s exactly what happened.

  Theodore Sturgeon (1918—) was born and educated in New York City. He has contributed to Astounding Science-Fiction, Unknown, and Weird Tales, among others, and his story “It” was included in Who Knocks? 20 Masterpieces of the Spectral for the Connoisseur (1946). His work is represented also in Adventures in Time and Space and other anthologies.

  THUNDER AND ROSES

  Theodore Sturgeon

  WHEN PETE MAWSER LEARNED ABOUT the show, he turned away from the GHQ bulletin board, touched his long chin, and determined to shave, in spite of the fact that the show would be video, and he would see it in his barracks. He had an hour and a half. It felt good to have a purpose again—even the small matter of shaving before eight o’clock. Eight o’clock Tuesday, just the way it used to be. Everyone used to catch that show on Tuesday. Everyone used to say, Wednesday morning, “How about the way Starr sang The Breeze and I last night?”

  That was a while ago, before the attack, before al
l those people were dead, before the country was dead. Starr Anthim—an institution, like Crosby, like Duse, like Jenny Lind, like the Statue of Liberty. (Liberty had been one of the first to get it, her bronze beauty volatilized, radioactive, and even now being carried about in vagrant winds, spreading over the earth.)

  Pete Mawser grunted and forced his thoughts away from the drifting, poisonous fragments of a blasted liberty. Hate was first. Hate was ubiquitous, like the increasing blue glow in the air at night, like the tension that hung over the base.

  Gunfire crackled sporadically far to the right, swept nearer. Pete stepped out to the street and made for a parked truck. There was a Wac sitting on the short running-board.

  At the comer a stocky figure backed into the intersection. The man carried a tommy-gun in his arms, and he was swinging it to and fro with the gentle, wavering motion of a weathervane. He staggered toward them, his gun-muzzle hunting. Someone fired from a building and the man swivelled and blasted wildly at the sound.

  “He’s—blind,” said Pete Mawser, and added, “he ought to be,” looking at the tattered face.

  A siren keened. An armored jeep slewed into the street. The full-throated roar of a brace of .50 caliber machine guns put a swift and shocking end to the incident.

  “Poor crazy kid,” Pete said softly. “That’s the fourth I’ve seen today.” He looked down at the Wac. She was smiling. “Hey!”

  “Hello, Sarge.” She must have identified him before, because now she did not raise her eyes nor her voice. “What happened?”

  “You know what happened. Some kid got tired of having to fight and nowhere to run to. What’s the matter with you?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t mean that.” At last she looked up at him. “I mean all of this. I can’t seem to remember.”

  “You—well, it’s not easy to forget. We got hit. We got hit everywhere at once. All the big cities are gone. We got it from both sides. We got too much. The air is becoming radioactive. We’ll all—” He checked himself. She didn’t know. She’d forgotten. There was nowhere to escape to, and she’d escaped inside herself, right here. Why tell her about it? Why tell her that everyone was going to die? Why tell her that other, shameful thing: that we hadn’t struck back?

  But she wasn’t listening. She was still looking at him. Her eyes were not quite straight. One held his but the other was slightly shifted and seemed to be looking at his temple. She was smiling again. When his voice trailed off she didn’t prompt him. Slowly, he moved away. She did not turn her head, but kept looking up at where he had been, smiling a little. He turned away, wanting to run, walking fast.

  How long can a guy hold out? When you’re in the army they try to make you be like everybody else. What do you do when everybody else is cracking up?

  He blanked out the mental picture of himself as the last one left sane. He’d followed that one through before. It always led to the conclusion that it would be better to be one of the first. He wasn’t ready for that yet. Then he blanked that out, too.

  Every time he said to himself that he wasn’t ready for that yet, something within him asked “Why not?” and he never seemed to have an answer ready.

  How long could a guy hold out?

  He climbed the steps of the Q. M. Central and went inside. There was nobody at the reception switchboard. It didn’t matter. Messages were carried by jeep, or on motor-cycles. The Base Command was not insisting that anybody stick to a silting job these days. Ten desk-men could crack up for every one on a jeep, or on the soul-sweat squads. Pete made up his mind to put in a little stretch on a squad tomorrow. Do him good. He just hoped that this time the adjutant wouldn’t burst into tears in the middle of the parade ground. You could keep your mind on the manual of arms just fine until something like that happened.

  He bumped into Sonny Weisefreund in the barracks corridor. The Tech’s round young face was as cheerful as ever. He was naked and glowing, and had a towel thrown over his shoulder.

  “Hi, Sonny. Is there plenty of hot water?”

  “Why not?” grinned Sonny. Pete grinned back, wondering if anybody could say anything about anything at all without one of these reminders. Of course there was hot water. The QM barracks had hot water for three hundred men. There were three dozen left. Men dead, men gone to the hills, men locked up so they wouldn’t—

  “Starr Anthim’s doing a show tonight.”

  “Yeah. Tuesday night. Not funny, Pete. Don’t you know there’s a war—”

  “No kidding,” Pete said swiftly. “She’s here—right here on the base.”

  Sonny’s face was joyful. “Gee.” He pulled the towel off his shoulder and tied it around his waist. “Starr Anthim here! Where are they going to put on the show?”

  “HQ, I imagine. Video only. You know about public gatherings.”

  “Yeah. And a good thing, too,” said Sonny. “Somebody’d be sure to crack up. I wouldn’t want her to see anything like that. How’d she happen to come here, Pete?”

  “Drifted in on the last gasp of a busted-up Navy helicopter.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Search me. Get your head out of that gift-horse’s mouth.”

  He went into the washroom, smiling and glad that he still could. He undressed and put his neatly folded clothes down on a bench. There were a soap-wrapper and an empty toothpaste tube lying near the wall. He picked them up and put them in the catchall, took the mop that leaned against the partition and mopped the floor where Sonny had splashed after shaving. Someone had to keep things straight. He might have worried if it were anyone else but Sonny. But Sonny wasn’t cracking up. Sonny always had been like that. Look there. Left his razor out again.

  Pete started his shower, meticulously adjusting the valves until the pressure and temperature exactly suited him. He did nothing carelessly these days. There was so much to feel, and taste, and see now. The impact of water on his skin, the smell of soap, the consciousness of light and heat, the very pressure of standing on the soles of his feet . . . he wondered vaguely how the slow increase of radioactivity in the air, as the nitrogen transmuted to Carbon Fourteen, would affect him if he kept carefully healthy in every way. What happens first? Blindness? Headaches? Perhaps a loss of appetite or slow fatigue.

  Why not look it up?

  On the other hand, why bother? Only a very small percentage of the men would die of radioactive poisoning. There were too many other things that killed more quickly, which was probably just as well. That razor, for example. It lay gleaming in a sunbeam, curved and clean in the yellow light. Sonny’s father and grandfather had used it, or so he said, and it was his pride and joy.

  Pete turned his back on it, and soaped under his arms, concentrating on the tiny kisses of bursting bubbles. In the midst of a recurrence of disgust at himself for thinking so often of death, a staggering truth struck him. He did not think of such things because he was morbid, after all! It was the very familiarity of things that brought death-thoughts. It was either “I shall never do this again” or “This is one of the last times I shall do this.” You might devote yourself completely to doing things in different ways, he thought madly. You might crawl across the floor this time, and next time walk across on your hands. You might skip dinner tonight, and have a snack at two in the morning instead, and eat grass for breakfast.

  But you had to breathe. Your heart had to beat. You’d sweat and you’d shiver, the same as always. You couldn’t get away from that. When those things happened, they would remind you. Your heart wouldn’t beat out its wunklunk, wunklunk any more. It would go one-less, one-less, until it yelled and yammered in your ears and you had to make it stop.

  Terrific polish on that razor.

  And your breath would go on, same as before. You could sidle through this door, back through the next one and the one after, and figure out a totally new way to go through the one after that, but your breath would keep on sliding in and out of your nostrils like a razor going through whiskers, making a sound like a razor
being stropped.

  Sonny came in. Pete soaped his hair. Sonny picked up the razor and stood looking at it. Pete watched him, soap ran into his eyes, he swore, and Sonny jumped.

  “What are you looking at, Sonny? Didn’t you ever see it before?”

  “Oh, sure. Sure. I just was—” He shut the razor, opened it, flashed light from its blade, shut it again. “I’m tired of using this, Pete. I’m going to get rid of it. Want it?”

  Want it? In his foot-locker, maybe. Under his pillow. “Thanks no, Sonny. Couldn’t use it.”

  “I like safety razors,” Sonny mumbled. “Electrics, even better. What are we going to do with it?”

  “Throw it in the—no.” Pete pictured the razor turning end over end in the air, half open, gleaming in the maw of the catchall. “Throw it out the—” No. Curving out into the long grass. He might want it. He might crawl around in the moonlight looking for it. He might find it.

  “I guess maybe I’ll break it up.”

  “No,” Pete said. “The pieces—” Sharp little pieces. Hollow-ground fragments. “I’ll think of something. Wait’ll I get dressed.”

  He washed briskly, towelled, while Sonny stood looking at the razor. It was a blade now, and if it were broken it would be shards and glittering splinters, still razor sharp. If it were ground dull with an emery wheel, somebody could find it and put another edge on it because it was so obviously a razor, a fine steel razor, one that would slice so—“I know. The laboratory. We’ll get rid of it,” Pete said confidently.

  He stepped into his clothes, and together they went to the laboratory wing. It was very quiet there. Their voices echoed. “One of the ovens,” said Pete, reaching for the razor. “Bake-ovens? You’re crazy!”

  Pete chuckled. “You don’t know this place, do you? Like everything else on the base, there was a lot more went on here than most people knew about. They kept calling it the bake-shop. Well, it was research headquarters for new high-nutrient flours. But there’s lots else here. We tested utensils and designed vegetable-peelers and all sorts of things like that. There’s an electric furnace in there that—” He pushed open a door.