Great Stories of Space Travel

by Groff Conklin (Editor)

  I tried another orbit, and a third, and more—finally one that would have given us an orbit around mighty Antares itself. But the deadly reality remained. The ship plunged on, down and down.

  And there was nothing visible on the plates, not a real shadow of substance. It seemed to me once that I could make out a vague blur of greater darkness against the black reaches of space. But the stars were few in every direction and it was impossible to be sure.

  Finally, 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 up at him; I had the sudden, wondering realization that he was sane, the old completely rational Jim Renfrew, made better somehow, 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 a hand—Renfrew’s —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.”

  Something began to tug at the roof of my cranium. It took several seconds before I decided that it was probably my brain jumping with the tremendous understanding that suddenly flowed in upon me.

  The bachelor sun, I thought dazedly. In easing us out of its field of toleration, it had simply precipitated us into a period of time beyond its field. Renfrew had said . . . had said it worked in jumps of . . . four hundred 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 change the course of history?

  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 first trip to Centaurus.”

  That’s exactly what happened.

  Murray Leinster - PROPAGANDIST

  When you stop to think of it, no other life form on Earth, other than Man, ever calculatedly, using intelligence rather than instinct, sets out to deceive another life form. Other than Man, all animals that trap other animals (like spiders) or hunt other animals (like wolves, hawks, or sharks), or trick other animals (like some snakes and some birds, I am told), do so because it is their natural, instinctive way of getting essential food. Only men do these things not only for necessary food but also for power, or revenge, or sadism, or whatever other nasty motives men may have for hurting or enslaving other animals or men. And that is why there is so much immediate point to this story of the first meeting of two alien races, one ours, the other from a far star. How could one successfully achieve communication between such races and be absolutely certain one was not being tricked? Only an animal can be trusted in a situation such as this—for no animal CAN BE DISHONEST!

  You remember the Space Assassins, of course. They were that race of which no human being ever saw a living member, and escaped to tell about it afterward. You also remember the deadly, far-flung search that was made for their base, their home. They’d been sniping our ships for a long time. But then a squadron of their space fleet raided the Earth colony on Capella Three and without warning or provocation or alternative slaughtered every one of the colony’s half million human population. Then the hunt for them began.

  This is the story of one of the incidents of that hunt —and also it’s the story of a dog named Buck.

  Buck trailed his master sedately into the control room of the light cruiser Kennessee. He waited patiently until the skipper looked up from the electron telescope. Then Buck’s master—Holden—sat down with the sheaf of wave records he’d brought from the communications room. Buck blinked wisely at the skipper and lay down on the floor with an audible, loose-jointed thump. He put his nose between his paws and sighed heavily. But the sigh was not of unhappiness. Buck was a simple dog. He was friendly with everybody on the Kennessee, from the skipper himself to the lowliest mess boy, but his master and private deity was Junior Lieutenant Holden. Whithersoever Holden went, there Buck went also—regulations permitting—and waited until Holden wanted to go somewhere else.

  Now he lay on the foamite flooring. He heard his master’s voice, and the skipper’s in reply. They were concerned and uneasy. Buck dozed. Little, half-formed dreams ran through his slumber. Memory dreams, mostly, of himself racing gloriously through tall grass on the green fields of Earth, with Holden always somewhere near. The voices of the two men formed a halfheard background to his dozing.

  The men were troubled. The Kennessee rode a comet’s orbit through the solar system of Masa Gamma, her drive off and giving no sign of life. She was impersonating a barren visitor from the void, spying out the ground for what would be—if she was successful—the monstrous destruction of an entire race by planet-smasher guided missiles and the merciless weapons of an Earth fleet. The men did not like it. They’d hoped that some other ship would be the one to meet with success in its search. But they had their orders.

  Some weeks back the ship had dropped from overdrive to less-than-light speed far beyond the outermost of the Masa Gamma planets. She’d decelerated to an appropriate speed and course for a wanderer, and she’d begun her ride along a comet’s path through the eleven-planet system. And almost immediately her receptors had picked up evidence of civilization here. Space radio signals. They were unintelligible, of course, but they told that here was a civilization comparable to human culture on a technical basis. And that was what the Kennessee, with every other light ship of Earth’s space navy, was hunting for. There was a race which, without known contact with Earthmen, was the deadly enemy of humanity. For years past, exploring ships from Earth had dropped out of sight with ominous frequency. There had been suspicions, but no proof of an inimical race which destroyed humans wherever it came upon them. But six months ago the Earth colony on Capella Three had been wiped out, terribly, by raiders of whom nothing was known except that they were not human. So somewhere there was a race which held Earth to be its enemy. It had to be found. If it could not be negotiated with, it must be destroyed before it grew strong enough to wipe out all of humankind. And the men on the Kennessee knew that they might have found it on the planets of Masa Gamma. This system had never been explored before, and this civilization which had space radio might be the one—

  Buck, the dog, dozed lightly on the control-room floor. Little fragme
nts of dreams ran through his half-slumbering consciousness: the smells in the engine room; an irrelevant fragment of chasing a cat; a moment or two in which he sniffed elaborately at a tree ... A slightly louder comment made him open his eyes.

  “They’ve interplanetary travel, sir, at least”—that was Holden. “We’ve picked up space-radio messages from definitely between planets. It looks like this is the race we were sent to find.”

  The skipper nodded.

  “It could be. But if they’re to be smashed on our report, we need to make sure. That’s orders, too. Can they smash the Kennessee? That’s the test for the enemy. If this race can’t kill us, they’re not the enemy we’re looking for. If they can, they are. We’ve got to find out.”

  “But interplanetary travel is good evidence—”

  “It’s not interstellar travel,” said the skipper. “We’ll send a torp back immediately with all the data to date. But you’ve picked up no whango waves, Holden. We’ve no proof that these folk can travel between the stars. The enemy can.”

  “They might be concealing the fact,” said Holden. “They’d have picked up our whango wave on arrival. They might be laying for us, waiting for us to walk into their parlor where they can smash us without a chance to fight back or report. That would be typical.” He stood up and Buck got immediately to his four paws and wagged his tail. His master, Holden, was going to go somewhere. So Buck was going with him. He waited contently. To Buck, happiness was going where Holden went, being wherever Holden was, simply soaking in the sensation of being with Holden. It was a very simple pleasure, but it was all he asked of fate or chance. When Holden petted him or played roughly with him, Buck was filled with ecstatic happiness, but now he waited contentedly enough simply to follow Holden.

  “What you say is true enough,” agreed the skipper. “They could be laying for us. We’ll see. A message torp will make sure that if we don’t get back our fleet will know where to come and who to smash. Then we’ll make a landing in a lifeboat. Our enemy couldn’t resist smashing that! And if it gets away, we’ll know something about their weapons, anyhow.”

  “I volunteer, sir, for the lifeboat,” said Holden quickly.

  “We’ll see,” said the skipper. “You get your data ready for the torp. You’re sure this record is a scanning beam? Like the old-fashioned radar? And it’s being kept on us from this fourth planet?”

  “Quite sure, sir,” said Holden. “We can’t know how detailed the information may be that it takes back. Of course, it would be logical enough to scan a supposed comet—”

  “Let’s hope,” said the skipper, twinkling, “that the echo from our hull says, ‘Nobody out here but us comets, boss.’ Get your stuff ready for half an hour from now, Holden.”

  Holden saluted and went out of the control room. Buck went sedately after him, a large brown dog who did not bother his head over such trivia as interstellar travel or nonhuman races that massacred half a million humans with an insensate ferocity.

  Buck was a very contented dog. He was with his master.

  The Planetary Council of Masa Four was in session. It was not a happy gathering. Scanning beams had reported that a supposed new comet, driving in on a perfectly convincing orbit, was actually an artifact— a spaceship. It used no drive and seemed empty of life. But it had come in through the gravitation field of the outermost planets—and it showed no sign of rotation. Which was impossible unless gyroscopes or some similar device were running within it.

  “We have had one visitor from space, before,” said the Moderator of the Planetary Council. He looked very weary. “Our histories tell us of the consequences. If this is another ship of the same race, we must destroy it. Since it is attempting secrecy, such action is justified, I think. But that secrecy suggests suspicion of us—a suspicion that we may have destroyed the last visitor. If we destroy this ship also, we may be sure that suspicion will become certainty and a third visit will be made in overwhelming force. That means that we will have to convert our whole civilization for war. We will have somehow to develop an interstellar drive, and we will have to spend the rest of the time in battle for our very survival. We will have to change from a peaceful race to one with a psychology adapted only to war.”

  The Spokesman for the First Continent said hopefully:

  “Is it certain that this is a ship of the same race as the first? It is not of the same form. Is it certain that this race is of a not-possibly-friendly type, like the first?”

  “It is not certain,” said the Moderator tiredly. “The psychological factors implied by its outer design suggest a different race. But can we risk an attempt at peaceful contact? The crew of one ship would be at our mercy. Might they not pretend friendship in order to escape with information leading to our destruction? Could we trust the friendship of any race at all which sent a single ship to spy?”

  There was silence. Two centuries before, another ship had entered the Masan system. Half a planet devastated, and millions upon millions of fives, had been the cost of the destruction of that one ship. But its destruction had been necessary. Its crew made no response to peaceful overtures. Wherever they landed they destroyed, ferociously, everything savoring of a rival civilization. Especially the inhabitants. They could not be treated with—only killed.

  “If,” said the Spokesman for the Third Continent wistfully, “we could capture a single member of this spaceship’s crew, we could make sure that friendship was hopeless. It is a pity we cannot make sure before—”

  “It is a great pity,” said the Moderator bleakly. “To convert not only our civilization but our people to endless war, for all time, is the greatest of pities. But I do not think there is anything else to do. Will you vote upon preparations for the destruction of this ship?”

  The vote was reluctant but unanimous. For war.

  The Kennessee sent off the torp from the aft communications room. It was not an impressive device, the torp, merely a cigar-shaped object some six feet long. After leaving the Kennessee it would drive away at thirty-five gravities’ acceleration for fifteen minutes and then go into overdrive—when it would cease to exist, as far as normal space was concerned. Its disappearance would be marked by the emission of a monstrous surge of energy—a “whango wave”—which could be detected at hundreds of millions of miles. Near home base it would come out of overdrive with the emission of another, similar, wave. The second wave was useful. From Masa Gamma to the Kennessee’s home base was some eighty light-years. A space-radio message transmitted by tight beam would reach home base only in time to be of interest to the crew’s greatgrandchildren. But the torp would arrive within days, its reappearance wave would be picked up by a far-flung net of communications ships, and they would receive and forward the torp’s automatically transmitted messages, and later pick it up for the recovery of written data and physical specimens.

  Buck was not allowed to be present at the launching. He was a large dog, and the aft communications room was in the tapering, slender tail of the Kennessee. It would be crowded. Holden ordered him out. And Buck was far too well assured, both of Holden’s affection for him and of his own worth, to be sensitive about such a matter. He knew there were times when he couldn’t be underfoot. But he also knew that he was welcome anywhere else on the ship. He went trotting sedately in search of inferior, but still human, company until his master could allow him around again.

  He found crew members stocking a lifeboat for its special mission. He went companionably into the lifeboat with the working party. He wriggled into the control cubicle with the man sent to remove its records —and observed. Presently other men arrived, the work party left, and there were sundry heaving movements of the lifeboat. Buck blinked from where he lay more or less curled up on the floor. Stars shone in the lifeboat portholes. There was a glaring bright light. Unshielded sunshine from Masa Gamma came in a forward port and made a patch of incandescence on the back wall. Junior Lieutenant Maynard walked into the control cubicle and flipped the phone switch.r />
  “Lifeboat in launching position, blister removed, ready to take off,” he said briskly.

  “All right,” said Holden’s voice from the speaker. It sounded gloomy. “Take off when the whango wave hits. It may jam their scanner and get you out of the beam unobserved. Luck.”

  Buck knew loud-speakers. But also he knew his master’s voice. He wagged his tail. It thumped. Maynard jerked his head around and yelled: “Buck! Here’s Buck! Behind me!”

  An instant’s silence. Then Holden’s voice, more gloomy still.

  “No time to get him back on board. He’ll have to go along. Sorry, Maynard.”

  “No harm,” said Maynard cheerfully. “Maybe he’ll mascot us. How much time?”

  “Twenty seconds,” said Holden’s voice. “You have all the luck! I was high man for this job until you drew that ace!”

  Maynard chuckled. The Kennessee rode into a very probably hostile solar system. If it was the home of the race that had been sniping off Earth ships and had massacred the colonists of Capella Three, there was not much chance that the cruiser would ever get away again. But its junior officers had played a hand of stud poker for the privilege of making a dare-landing on the system’s largest planet.

  The speaker suddenly emitted a sound so savage and so loud that the diaphragm jangled musically only once, and then made strangled, rasping noises. That was the whango wave of the message torp. It was a blast of untuned and untunable radiation which would jam every receiver in range while it lasted.

  There was a crushing feeling of weight. Buck slid back against the back rest of the seat on which he now lay. He was pressed- hard against the upholstery. He wriggled and panted. His eyes grew plaintive. Buck did not like acceleration. In fact, he did not like lifeboat travel. But he had his fill of it in the next eighteen hours, anyhow.

  A message arrived at the hastily improvised Department of War on Masa Four. The Department of War was being feverishly organized to coordinate every erg of energy in the entire solar system into synchrophased power beams which at a given moment would stab out from four planets at once—all of them on the same side of the local sun—and converge terribly upon the pseudo comet. There would be no material weapon for the ship’s detectors to note in time for any maneuver of escape. This weapon would strike at the speed of light. An object in the focus of the combined beams would experience the interior temperature of a sun. It was unthinkable that any possible relay could operate before it was volatilized. The weapon was irresistible—as against a single ship. But the computation of phase relationships for the moving planetary projectors, so that the separate beams would reinforce instead of partially canceling one another, was a matter of terrifying complexity. This weapon could destroy one ship of known course and speed, or one ship on the ground, if enough time could be had for calculations. But it would be useless against a fleet. Days or weeks were required for the adjustment of the multitude of beams for a hit on a predetermined spot. Against ships of changing course and speed, the weapon was useless.