Great Stories of Space Travel

by Groff Conklin (Editor)

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 every second of 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 rear-view 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 in my nostrils. With a gasp I slammed the door, stood there in the narrow hallway, shuddering.

  After a 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, he lay dead now from his own invention.

  What was it 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. That 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 some 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.

  For a long moment before sleep came, I thought of Renfrew and the terrible shock that was coming to him on top of all the natural reactions to his situation, that 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 very 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 that super soup, then went eagerly to the big log book.

  It is utterly impossible for me to describe the thrill that coursed through me, 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 there was. 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 couldn’t have asked fate to give us an unkindlier 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 more than any of us. So all we can say is, “Sleep well, good friend. We’ll never forget you.”

  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 the 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 worshipping 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-by party was enough to put anyone into a sort of 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—well-l-l!

  (I deliberately put it as baldly as that, because the human mind thinks of awfully strange angles, no matter how it censures 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 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, a gorgeous, shining brilliant.

  Alpha Centauri was 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.

  Exci
tement blazed inside me; and consciousness came 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 were remembered 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. The sleep found me still without a plan about Renfrew.

  When I woke up, alarm bells were ringing.

  I lay still. There was nothing else to do. If I had moved, consciousness would have slid from me. Though it was mental torture even to think it, I realized that, no matter what the danger, the quickest way was to follow my routine to the second and in eveiy detail.

  Somehow I did it. The bells clanged and brrred, 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 sipping my soup.

  The conviction came to me that if that sound continued much longer, Blake and Renfrew would surely waken from their sleep.

  At last, I felt free to cope with the emergency.

  Breathing hard, I eased myself into the control chair, cut off the mind-wrecking 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 hideous 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.

  Frantically, I manipulated the distance estimators— and then for a moment stared in blank disbelief at the answers that clicked metallically onto the product plate.

  Seven miles! Only seven miles! Curious is the human mind. A moment before, when I had thought of it as an abnormally shaped sun, it hadn’t resembled anything but an incandescent mass. Abruptly, now, I saw that it had a solid outline, an unmistakable material shape.

  Stunned, I leaped to my feet because—

  It was a spaceship! An enormous, mile-long ship. Rather—I sank back into my seat, subdued by the catastrophe I was witnessing, and consciously adjusting my mind—the flaming hell of what had been a spaceship. Nothing that had been alive could possibly still be conscious in that horror of ravenous fire. The only possibility was that the crew had succeeded in launching lifeboats.

  Like a madman, I searched the heavens for a light, a glint of metal that would show the presence of survivors.

  There was nothing but the night and the stars and the hell of burning ship.

  After a long time, I noticed that it was farther away, and 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 the ship.

  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 torpedoshaped 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, very reluctantly, my mind seething 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 expectations were in store for us. Thrill on thrill of anticipation raced through me.

  It was only at the last instant, as sleep was already grasping at my brain that the realization struck that I had forgotten about the problem of Renfrew.

  I felt no alarm. Surely, even Renfrew would come alive in that great fashion of his when confronted by a complex alien civilization.

  Our troubles were over.

  Excitement must have bridged that final one hundred fifty years of time. Because, when I wakened, 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 Pelham—not 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.

  Then why this feeling that millenniums had ticked by, second on slow second? Why this eerie, empty awareness of a journey through fathomless, unending night?

  Was the human mind so easily fooled?

  It seemed to me, finally, that the answer was that I had been alive for those five hundred years, all my cells and my organs had existed, and it was not even impossible that some part of my brain had been horrendously aware throughout the entire unthinkable period.

  And there was, of course, the additional psychological fact that I knew now that five hundred years had gone by, and that—

  I saw with a mental start, that my ten minutes were up. Cautiously, I turned on the massager.

  The gentle, padded hands had been working on me for about fifteen minutes when my door opened; the * light clicked on, and there stood Blake.

  The too-sharp movement of turning my head to look at him made me dizzy. I closed my eyes, and heard him walk across the room toward me.

  After a minute, I was able to look at him again without seeing blurs. I saw then that he was carrying a bowl of the soup. He stood staring down at me with a strangely grim expression on his face.

  At last, his long, thin countenance relaxed into a wan grin.

  “ ’Lo, Bill,” he said. “Ssshh!” he hissed immediately. “Now, don’t try to speak. I’m going to start feeding you this soup while you’re still lying down. The sooner you’re up, the better I’ll like it.”

  He was grim again, as he finished almost as if it were an afterthought: “I’ve been up for two weeks.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, and ladled out a spoonful of soup. There was silence, then, except for the rustling sound of the massager. Slowly, the strength flowed through my body, and with each passing second, I became more aware of the grimness of Blake.

  “What about Renfrew?” I managed finally, hoarsely. “He awake?”

  Blake hesitated, then nodded. His expression darkened with frown; he said simply:

  “He’s mad, Bill, stark, staring mad. I had to tie him up. I’ve got him now in his room. He’s quieter now, but at the beginning he was a gibbering maniac.”

  “Are you crazy?” I whispered at last. “Renfrew was never so sensitive as that. Depressed and sick, yes; but the mere passage of time, abrupt awareness that all his friends are dead, couldn’t make him insane.” Blake was shaking his head. “It isn’t only that. Bill—” He paused, then: “Bill, I want you to prepare your mind for the greatest shock it’s ever had.”

  I stared up at him with an empty feeling inside me. “What do you mean?”

  He went on grimacing: “I know you’ll be able to take it. So don’t get scared. You and I, Bill, are just a couple of lugs. We’re along because we went to U with Renfrew and Pelham. Basically, it wouldn’t matter to insensitives like us wh
ether we landed in 1,000,-000 B. C. or A. D. We’d just look around and say: ‘Fancy seeing you here, mug?’ or ‘Who was that pterodactyl I saw you with last night? That wasn’t no pterodactyl; that was Unthahorsten’s bulbous wife.’ ” I whispered, “Get to the point, Ned. What’s up?” Blake rose to his feet. “Bill, after I’d read your reports about, and seen the photographs of, that burning ship, I got an idea. The Alpha suns were pretty close two weeks ago, only about six months away at our average speed of five hundred miles a second. I thought to myself: ‘I’ll see if I can tune in some of their radio stations.’

  “Well,” he smiled wryly, “I got hundreds in a few minutes. They came in all over the seven dial waves, with bell-like clarity.”

  He paused; he stared down at me, and his smile was a sickly thing. “Bill,” he groaned, “we’re the prize fools in creation. When I told Renfrew the truth, he folded up like ice melting into water.”

  Once more, he paused; the silence was too much for my straining nerves.

  “For heaven’s sake, man—” I began. And stopped. And lay there, very still. Just like that the lightning of understanding flashed on me. My blood seemed to thunder through my veins. At last, weakly, I said: “You mean—”

  Blake nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the way it is. And they’ve already spotted us with their spy rays and energy screens. A ship’s coming out to meet us.”

  “I only hope,” he finished gloomily, “they can do something for Jim.”

  I was sitting in the control chair an hour later when I saw the glint in the darkness. There was a flash of bright silver, that exploded into size. The next instant an enormous spaceship had matched our velocity less than a mile away.

  Blake and I looked at each other. “Did they say,” I said shakily, “that that ship left its hangar ten minutes ago?”

  Blake nodded. “They can make the trip from Earth to Centauri in three hours,” he said.

  I hadn’t heard that before. Something happened inside my brain. “What!” I shouted. “Why, it’s taken us five hund—”

  I stopped; I sat there. “Three hours!” I whispered. “How could we have forgotten human progress?”