Great Stories of Space Travel

by Groff Conklin (Editor)

  After all, a man’s dog doesn’t thrive when he’s separated from the man.

  The Kennessee rode on in the orbit it had chosen. Maynard had made an unhappy, abject apology to Holden for the desertion of Buck, and Holden accepted it, and neither of them felt at all better afterward. A man would have been left behind under exactly the same circumstances, but a dog is somehow different. He can’t take care of himself. His abandonment couldn’t be helped, but it rankled.

  The material brought back from Masa Four was duly examined. The space-radio records piled up, and electron-telescope examination of the planets continued, and evidences of a highly developed civilization accumulated—while scanner-beam observation of the Kennessee from Masa Four went on unendingly.

  It was a dubious situation extended almost to the breaking point. The lifeboat voyage had produced a reaction of ground vehicles and atmosphere fliers. It gave an impression of limited offensive power. But, on the other hand, there was interplanetary travel here. And the scanner beam on the Kennessee and the instant detection of the lifeboat was proof that the people of this system knew exactly what the Kennessee was.

  A civilization without defense weapons but with interplanetary ships and space radio should have tried to make contact with the Kennessee. If only to placate invaders, some attempt to open communication should have been made. Absence of such efforts was ominous. The appearance was that of a race which played possum until it could strike an overwhelming blow. So the Kennessee stayed in a state of nerve-racking alertness, with detectors out all around, and relays set to throw on overdrive should a high-velocity guided missile seem to draw near.

  “It looks bad,” admitted the skipper to Holden. “We’d have tried to make contact, in their shoes. But whoever raided the Capella colony simply rode in and started killing. Maybe these people are that sort. Anyhow, if they do get us, our fleet will know who did it and come take them apart with planet-smasher bombs.”

  Holden said dourly:

  “I wish I’d been in that lifeboat. When do we send back another message torp?”

  “We make no more landings,” said the skipper. He added, “You’d never be able to find where the other boat landed, and anyhow Buck—”

  “Was probably blasted the instant they saw him,” said Holden.

  He couldn’t blame anybody, but he was angry. He missed Buck.

  On the twelfth day after Buck’s landing, an interplanetary ship took off from Masa Four. The Kennessee had now ridden in beyond that planet and was headed for a perihelion point on the other side of Masa Gamma. If she survived to get there, it was the skipper’s intention to put on overdrive and go back to base with all his records. But this interplanetary ship changed all plans. It appeared to be a rocket, in that it left behind a trailing cloud of vapor which looked like ejected gases. The spectroscopes, though, showed it to be merely hydrocarbon—smoke particles. And it altogether lacked the backward velocity which would have proved it a means of propulsion. It was simply a trail of vapor, as if for advertisement.

  In two days it had climbed well away from the planet and changed direction in a long smooth curve. The Navigation Officer came to the control room shortly after, to report that it was on an interception course, with interception speed, and would draw gradually closer to the Kennessee until contact was made. Then its trail of vapor broke, and swelled, and broke, and swelled, as if unmistakably to draw attention from the cruiser.

  The control-room loud-speaker boomed shortly. Holden’s voice:

  “Sir!” he said harshly. “That phony rocket is beaming signals at us, running up and down the spectrum and trying frequency and amplitude modulation and everything else. Listen!”

  The speaker said resonantly: “Woof!" It was Buck’s joyous bark. An instant later came the word “Buck” in a distorted but definitely recognizable version of Holden’s own voice. And then, quite insanely, “Lie down, sir!” “Come get it boy!” “Fetch it, Buck” and all the other phrases to which the dog Buck had been trained to respond. As. a means of opening communication between alien and mutually suspicious races, the vocabulary known to a big brown dog named Buck lacked dignity, but nothing could have been much more informative.

  “You see what it means, sir!” said Holden in a strained voice. “They got the stuff out of Buck’s brain, somehow! They read his memories! They must have, somehow! They want to make contact!” Then he said thickly, “But if they killed him to rummage in his brain—”

  “Mr. Holden,” said the skipper, “answer them, please. Speak as if to Buck himself, and see what happens.”

  In the speaker in the control room he heard Holden’s voice as he spoke into another microphone.

  “Buck!” said Holden hoarsely. “If you hear me, speak up boy! Buck! Do you hear me?”

  And then the loud-speaker bellowed with the joyous uproar with which Buck replied to his master. He barked and bayed and yelped and whined all at once, and then barked crazily like a creature gone quite mad with joy.

  “He ... he heard me, sir,” said Holden unsteadily. “They didn’t hurt him! I ... I think, sir—”

  “Quite so, Mr. Holden,” said the skipper sedately. “I was about to order you to take a lifeboat and take another chance to learn something of these people. Suppose you go over and make contact with them? A race which knows a good dog when it sees one, and is honest enough to return him to his master, can’t be the race that massacred half a million people on Capella Three!”

  The Masan scientist who’d tried to replace Holden in Buck’s affections nevertheless grew rather friendly with Holden after the Kennessee landed on Masa Four.

  A message torp, sent back to base, had explained the situation and the reason for friendly contact with the Masan civilization. Of course, if the Kennessee vanished, the Masans would be known to be definitely responsible, but that did not seem to bother them. And it did not bother the humans, either.

  The Masan scientist explained to Holden:

  “It has worked out very well. With your atomic power, you can put any amount of energy into the power beam we’ve showed you, for battle with our common enemy. It is odd that we made power beams to fuel our interplanetary ships because we didn’t have atomic energy, and you made atomic energy because you didn’t have power beams!”

  “There’ll be a lot of stuff that will fit together like that,” said Holden. “Our civilization will mesh nicely, as long as we trust each other.”

  “Yes,” said the Masan, somehow ruefully. “We intended to blast you to atoms, because we were afraid, and you intended to destroy our planets, because you were, also. I think both our races owe much to Buck.” “I still,” said Holden uncomfortably, “can’t see how you were able to trust us so completely. I don’t think we’d have trusted strangers as you do us. Just because of Buck—”

  “But it is because of Buck,” said the Masan wisely. “We could extract all of his memories. All of them. His kind adores men. He would accept any cruelty from you. But you are not cruel. He would give his life gladly, but no man would ask it. He is yours, unreservedly, but you do not accept from him without giving in return. Do you know when the policy of the Planetary Council, to trust men without limit, was finally decided?”

  “Why . . . no,” said Holden.

  “When you entered the airlock of our ship,” said the Masan, smiling, “and Buck met you. He had told us every secret he could impart. He had been almost a traitor, without knowing it. He had told us everything he knew of men. But when you entered our ship he leaped joyfully at you and you rolled on the floor together—you hugged him! You did not think of possible harm he had done. You were as glad to see him as he was to see you. That was when our policy was decided. Then we knew that men will always repay trust with loyalty.” Then the Masan added, “That is, most men.”

  Holden said uncomfortably:

  “Well—that’s something that has worried the skipper. You people act as if all of us were as decent as our dogs think us. We aren’t. You’ll hav
e to be . . . well . . . a little cagey, sometimes . . .”

  “So,” said the Masan, “we learned from Buck. But also we learned that there will always be men to trust.”

  Buck came dashing madly up the dark-green lawn. Holden and the Masan scientist sat on a sort of terrace of the Masan’s home. Buck came racing up, panting happily, and thrust his muzzle into Holden’s hand. He gave the Masan a brief tail-wag and went dashing off again.

  “That,” said the Masan, “is something he would never do to me, though I . . . yes ... I think I like him as much as you do.”

  “That’s because he’s my dog,” said 'Holden. “But he treats you like a man. Didn’t you notice?”

  “True! I had not realized! But it is true! Listen! We must have dogs, we Masans! Dogs to like us as they like men! And then no man who likes dogs can ever distrust a Masan who likes them also, and no Masan—” The Masan laughed. “We could not despise a man an honest dog had for a master! Our two races will be brothers!”

  That is all of the story about this one part of the hunt for the Space Assassins. Everybody knows that their home system was found, and everybody knows that when we tried to open negotiations with them their ships attacked us in a raging ferocity, and that there was no possible end to it but the extermination of men—and Masans—or of the Assassins. The battle was the first that was ever fought with power beams in Earth ships with Masan gunners. That’s history that everybody knows.

  But not everybody knows that there is a statue of Buck before the Planetary Council building on Masa Four. The Masans think it quite natural. They like dogs enormously, and dogs like them, too. The Masans already have a proverb that a dog is a Masan’s best friend. There’s no statue of Buck on Earth, though. But he doesn’t mind. Buck is a very happy dog.

  He’s with Holden. He follows him everywhere.

  Damon Knight - CABIN BOY

  First we ran into the problem of Future Man meeting Ancient Man (i.e., us) in Van Vogt's story. Next we encountered Murray Leinster’s other-star race of humanoid people, enough like us to be able to communicate, after some rather extraordinary difficulties. And now we meet a totally, impossibly alien type of living and obviously thinking protoplasm, and find ourselves at a stand-off. For the most part we have, in this delightful tale, the opportunity of seeing the aliens from their own point of view. (Or, rather, their point of view as we understand it, through Damon Knight’s vivid interpretation. Maybe he has it all wrong—who knows?) Whether the point of view is accurate or not, no one can deny that the result, in this tale, is thoroughly delightful.

  I

  The cabin boy’s name was unspeakable, and even its meaning would be difficult to convey in any human tongue. For convenience, we may as well call him Tommy Loy.

  Please bear in mind that all these terms are approximations. Tommy was not exactly a cabin boy, and even the spaceship he served was not exactly a spaceship, nor was the Captain exactly a captain. But if you think of Tommy as a freckled, scowling, red-haired, willful, prank-playing, thoroughly abhorrent brat, and of the Captain as a crusty, ponderous old man, you may be able to understand their relationship.

  A word about Tommy will serve to explain why these approximations have to be made, and just how much they mean. Tommy, to a human being, would have looked like a six-foot egg made of greenish gelatin. Suspended in this were certain dark or radiant shapes which were Tommy’s nerve centers and digestive organs, and scattered about its surface were starshaped and oval markings which were his sensory organs and gripping mechanisms—his “hands.” At the lesser end was an orifice which expelled a stream of glowing vapor—Tommy’s means of propulsion. It should be clear that if instead of saying, “Tommy ate his lunch,” or, “Tommy said to the Captain . . we reported what really happens, some pretty complicated explanations would have to be made.

  Similarly, the term “cabin boy” is used because it is the closest in human meaning. Some vocations, like seafaring, are so demanding and so complex that they simply cannot be taught in classrooms; they have to be lived. A cabin boy is one who is learning such a vocation and paying for his instruction by performing certain menial, degrading, and unimportant tasks.

  That describes Tommy, with one more similarity —the cabin boy of the sailing vessel was traditionally occupied after each whipping with preparing the mischief, or the stupidity, that earned him the next one.

  Tommy, at the moment, had a whipping coming to him and was fighting a delaying action. He knew he couldn’t escape eventual punishment, but he planned to hold it off as long as he could.

  Floating alertly in one of the innumerable corridors of the ship, he watched as a dark wave sprang into being upon the glowing corridor wall and sped toward him. Instantly, Tommy was moving away from it, and at the same rate of speed.

  The wave rumbled: “Tommy! Tommy Loy! Where is that obscenity boy?”

  The wave moved on, rumbling wordlessly, and Tommy moved with it. Ahead of him was another wave, and another beyond that, and it was the same throughout all the corridors of the ship. Abruptly the waves reversed their direction. So did Tommy, barely in time. The waves not only carried the Captain’s orders but scanned every corridor and compartment of the ten-mile ship. But as long as Tommy kept between the waves, the Captain could not see him.

  The trouble was that Tommy could not keep this up forever, and he was being searched for by other lowly members of the crew. It took a long time to traverse all of those winding, interlaced passages, but it was a mathematical certainty that he would be caught eventually.

  Tommy shuddered, and at the same time he squirmed with delight. He had interrupted the Old Man’s sleep by a stench of a particularly noisome variety, one of which he had only lately found himself capable. The effect had been beautiful. In human terms, since Tommy’s race communicated by odors, it was equivalent to setting off a firecracker beside a sleeper’s ear.

  Judging by the jerkiness of the scanning waves' motion, the Old Man was still unnerved.

  “Tommy!” the waves rumbled. “Come out, you little piece of filth, or I’ll smash you into a thousand separate stinks! By Spore, when I get hold of you—” The corridor intersected another at this point, and Tommy seized his chance to duck into the new one. He had been working his way outward ever since his crime, knowing that the search parties would, do the same. When he reached the outermost level of the ship, there would be a slight possibility of slipping back past the hunters—not much of a chance, but better than none.

  He kept close to the wall. He was the smallest member of the crew—smaller than any of the other cabin boys, and less than half the size of an Ordinary; it was always possible that when he sighted one of the search party, he could get away before the crewman saw him. He was in a short connecting corridor now, but the scanning waves cycled endlessly, always turning back before he could escape into the next corridor. Tommy followed their movement patiently, while he listened to the torrent of abuse that poured from them. He snickered to himself. When the Old Man was angry, everybody suffered. The ship would be stinking from stem to stem by now.

  Eventually the Captain forgot himself and the waves flowed on around the next intersection. Tommy moved on. He was getting close to his goal by now; he could see a faint gleam of starshine up at the end of the corridor.

  The next turn took him into it—and what Tommy saw through the semi-transparent skin of the ship nearly made him falter and be caught. Not merely the fiery pinpoints of stars shone there, but a great, furious glow which could only mean that they were passing through a star system. It was the first time this had happened in Tommy’s life, but of course it was nothing to the Captain, or even to most of the Ordinaries. Trust them, Tommy thought resentfully, to say nothing to him about it!

  Now he knew he was glad he’d tossed that surprise at the Captain. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be here, and if he weren’t here . . .

  A waste capsule was bumping automatically along the corridor, heading for one of the exit pores in the
hull. Tommy let it catch up to him, then englobed it, but it stretched him so tight that he could barely hold it. That was all to the good; the Captain wouldn’t be likely to notice that anything had happened.

  The hull was sealed, not to keep atmosphere inside, for there was none except by accident, but to prevent loss of liquid by evaporation. Metals and other mineral elements were replaceable; liquids and their constituents, in ordinary circumstances, were not.

  Tommy rode the capsule to the exit sphincter, squeezed through, and instantly released it. Being polarized away from the ship’s core, it shot into space and was lost. Tommy hugged the outer surface of the hull and gazed at the astonishing panorama that surrounded him.

  There was the enormous black half-globe of space— Tommy’s sky, the only one he had ever known. It was sprinkled with the familiar yet always changing patterns of the stars. By themselves, these were marvels enough for a child whose normal universe was one of ninety-foot corridors and chambers measuring, at most, three times as much. But Tommy hardly noticed them. Down to his right, reflecting brilliantly from the long, gentle curve of the greenish hull, was a blazing yellow-white glory that he could hardly look at. A star, the first one he had ever seen close at hand. Off to the left was a tiny, milky-blue disk that could only be a planet.

  Tommy let go a shout, for the sheer pleasure of its thin, hollow smell. He watched the thin mist of particles spread lazily away from his body, faintly luminous against the jet blackness. He shivered a little, thickening his skin as much as he could. He could not stay long, he knew; he was radiating heat faster than he could absorb it from the sun or the ship’s hull.

  But he didn’t want to go back inside, and not only because it meant being caught and punished. He didn’t want to leave that great, dazzling jewel in the sky. For an instant he thought vaguely of the future time when he would be grown, the master of his own vessel, and could see the stars whenever he chose; but the picture was too far away to have any reality. Great Spore, that wouldn’t happen for twenty thousand years!