Great Stories of Space Travel

by Groff Conklin (Editor)

  It was all very inconclusive. Suppose, for the sake of argument, one granted the existence of life here. What of that?

  The vast majority of life forms in the Universe were completely indifferent to man. Some, of course, like the gas-beings of Alcoran or the roving wave-lattices of Shandaloon, could not even detect him, but passed through or around him as if he did not exist. Others were merely inquisitive, some embarrassingly friendly. There were few that would attack unless provoked.

  Nevertheless, it was a grim picture that the old stores clerk had painted. Back in the warm, well-lighted smoking room, with the drinks going round, it had been easy enough to laugh at it. But here in the darkness, miles from any human settlement, it was very different.

  It was almost a relief when he stumbled off the road again and had to grope with his hands until he found it once more. This seemed a very rough patch, and the road was scarcely distinguishable from the rocks around. In a few minutes, however, he was safely on his way again.

  It was unpleasant to see how quickly his thoughts returned to the same disquieting subject. Clearly it was worrying him more than he cared to admit.

  He drew consolation from one fact: it had been quite obvious that no one at the base had believed the old fellow’s story. Their questions and banter had proved that. At the time he had laughed as loudly as any of them. After all, what was the evidence? A dim shape, just seen in the darkness, that might well have been an oddly formed rock. Anyone could imagine such shapes at night if he were sufficiently overwrought. If it had been hostile, why hadn’t the creature come any closer?

  “Because it was afraid of my light,” the old chap had said.

  Well, that was plausible enough; it would explain why nothing had ever been seen in the daytime. Such a creature might live underground, only emerging at night. Hang it, why was he taking the old idiot’s ravings so seriously! Armstrong got control of his thoughts again. If he went on this way, he told himself angrily, he would soon be seeing and hearing a whole menagerie of monsters.

  There was, of course, one factor that disposed of the ridiculous story at once. It was really very simple; he felt sorry he hadn’t thought of it before. What would such a creature live on? There was not even a trace of vegetation on the whole of the planet. He laughed to think that the bogy could be disposed of so easily— and in the same instant felt annoyed with himself for not laughing aloud. If he was so sure of his reasoning, why not whistle, or sing, or do anything to keep up his spirits? He put the question fairly to himself as a test of his manhood. Half ashamed, he had to admit that he was still afraid—afraid because “there might be something in it, after all.” But at least his analysis had done him some good.

  It would have been better if he had left it there and remained half convinced by his argument. But a part of his mind was still busily trying to break down his careful reasoning. It succeeded only too well, and when he remembered the plant-beings of Xantil Major, the shock was so unpleasant that he stopped dead in his tracks.

  Now, the plant-beings of Xantil were not in any way horrible; they were, in fact, extremely beautiful creatures. But what made them appear so distressing now was the knowledge that they could live for indefinite periods with no food whatsoever. All the energy they needed for their strange lives they extracted from cosmic radiation—and that was almost as intense here as anywhere else in the Universe.

  He had scarcely thought of one example before others crowded into his mind and he remembered the life form on Trantor Beta, which was the only one known capable of directly utilizing atomic energy. That, too, had lived on an utterly barren world very much like this. . . .

  Armstrong’s mind was rapidly splitting into two distinct portions, one half trying to convince the other and neither wholly succeeding. He did not realize how far his morale had gone until he found himself holding his breath lest it conceal any sound in the darkness about him. Angrily he cleared his mind of the rubbish that had been gathering there and turned once more to the immediate problem.

  There was no doubt that the road was slowly rising, and the silhouette of the horizon seemed much higher in the sky. The road began to twist, and suddenly he was aware of great rocks on either side of him. Soon only a narrow ribbon of sky was still visible, and darkness became, if possible, even more intense.

  Somehow, he felt safer with the rock walls surrounding him. It meant that he was protected except in two directions. Also, the road had been leveled more carefully and it was easy to keep to it. Best of all, he knew that the trip was more than half completed.

  For a moment his spirits began to rise. Then, with maddening perversity, his mind went back into the old grooves again. He remembered that it was on the far side of Carver’s Pass that the old clerk’s adventure had taken place, if it had ever happened at all.

  In half a mile he would be out in the open again, out of the protection of these sheltering rocks. The thought seemed doubly horrible now, and he felt already a sense of nakedness. He could be attacked from any direction, and he would be utterly helpless.

  Until now, he had still retained some self-control. Very resolutely he had kept his mind away from the one fact that gave some color to the old man’s tale— the single piece of evidence that had stopped the banter in the crowded room back at the camp and brought a sudden hush upon the company. Now, as Armstrong’s will weakened, he recalled again the words that had struck a momentary chill even in the warm comfort of the base building.

  The little clerk had been very insistent on one point. He had never heard any sound of pursuit from the dim shape sensed, rather than seen, at the limit of his light. There was no scuffling of claws or hooves on rock, nor even the clatter of displaced stones. It was as if, so the old man had declared in that solemn manner of his, “as if the thing that was following could see perfectly in the darkness, and had many small legs or pads so that it could move swiftly and easily over the rock, like a giant caterpillar or one of the carpet-things of Kralkor II.”

  Yet although there had been no noise of pursuit, there had been one sound that the old man had caught several times. It was so unusual that its very strangeness made it doubly ominous. It was a faint but horribly persistent clicking.

  The old fellow had been able to describe it very vividly—much too vividly for Armstrong’s liking now.

  “Have you ever listened to a large insect crunching its prey?” he said. “Well, it was just like that. I imagine that a crab makes exactly the same noise with its claws when it clashes them together. It was a— what’s the word? A chitinous sound.”

  At this point, Armstrong remembered laughing loudly. (Strange, how it was all coming back to him now.) But no one else had laughed, though they had been quick to do so earlier. Sensing the change of tone, he sobered and asked the man to continue his story.

  It had been quickly told. The next day a party of skeptical technicians had gone into the no man’s land beyond Carver’s Pass. They were not skeptical enough to leave their guns behind, but they had no cause to use them, for they found no trace of any living thing. There were the inevitable pits and tunnels, glistening holes down which the light of the torches rebounded endlessly until it was lost in the distance, but the planet was riddled with them.

  Though the party found no sign of life, it discovered one thing it did not like at all. Out in the barren and unexplored land beyond the Pass they had come upon a tunnel even larger than the rest. Near the mouth of that tunnel was a massive rock half embedded in the ground. And the sides of that rock had been worn away, as if it had been used as an enormous whetstone!

  No less than five of those present had seen this disturbing rock. None of them could explain it satisfactorily as a natural formation, but they still refused to accept the old man’s story. Armstrong had asked them if they had ever put it to the test. There had been an uncomfortable silence. Then big Andrew Hargraves had said, “Hell, who’d walk out to the Pass at night just for fun! ” and had left it at that.

  Indeed, t
here was no other record of anyone’s walking from Port Sanderson to the camp by night, or for that matter by day. During the hours of light, no unprotected human being could live in the open beneath the rays of the enormous, lurid sun that seemed to fill half the sky. And no one would walk six miles, wearing radiation armor, if the tractor was available.

  Armstrong felt that he was leaving the Pass. The rocks on either side were falling away, and the road was no longer as firm and well packed as it had been. He was coming out into the open plain once more, and somewhere not far away in the darkness was that enigmatic pillar that might have been used for sharpening monstrous fangs or claws. It was not a reassuring thought.

  Feeling distinctly worried now, Armstrong made a great effort to pull himself together. He would try and be rational again: he would think of business, the work he had done at the camp—anything but this infernal place. For a while he succeeded quite well. But presently, with a maddening persistence, every train of thought came back to the same point. He could not get out of his mind the picture of that inexplicable rock and its appalling possibilities.

  The ground was quite flat again, and the road drove on straight as an arrow. There was one gleam of consolation: Port Sanderson could not be much more than two miles away. Armstrong had no idea how long he had been on the road. Unfortunately, his watch was not illuminated and he could only guess at the passage of time. With any luck, the Canopus should not take off for another two hours at least. But he could not be sure, and now another fear began to enter his mind, the dread that he might see a vast constellation of lights rising swiftly into the sky ahead and know that all this agony of mind had been in vain.

  He was not zigzagging so badly now, and seemed to be able to anticipate the edge of the road before stumbling off it. It was probable, he cheered himself by thinking, that he was traveling almost as fast as if he had a light. If all went well, he might be nearing Port Sanderson in thirty minutes, a ridiculously small space of time. How he would laugh at his fears when he strolled into his already reserved stateroom in the Canopus and felt that peculiar quiver as the phantom drive hurled the great ship far out of this system, back to the clustered star-clouds near the center of the Galaxy, back toward Earth itself, which he had not seen for so many years.

  One day, he told himself, he really must visit Earth again. All his life he had been making the promise, but always there had been the same answer—lack of time.

  Strange, wasn’t it, that such a tiny planet should have played so enormous a part in the development of the Universe, should even nave come to dominate worlds far wiser and more intelligent than itself!

  Armstrong’s thoughts were harmless again, and he felt calmer. The knowledge that he was nearing Port Sanderson was immensely reassuring, and he deliberately kept his mind on familiar, unimportant matters. Carver’s Pass was already far behind, and with it that thing he no longer intended to recall. One day, if he ever returned to this world, he would visit the Pass in the daytime and laugh at his fears. In twenty minutes, they would join the nightmares of childhood.

  It was almost a shock, though one of the most pleasant he had ever known, when he saw the lights of Port Sanderson come up over the horizon. The curvature of this little world was very deceptive: it did not seem right that a planet with a gravity almost as great as Earth’s should have a horizon so close at hand. One day someone would have to discover what lay at this world’s core to give it so great a density.

  Perhaps the many tunnels would help. It was an unfortunate turn of thought, but the nearness of his goal had robbed it of terror now. Indeed, the thought that he might really be in danger seemed to give his adventure a certain piquancy and heightened interest. Nothing could happen to him now, with ten minutes to go and the lights of the port in sight.

  A few minutes later his feelings changed abruptly when he came to the sudden bend in the road. He had forgotten the chasm that caused this detour and added half a mile to the journey. Well, what of it? An extra half mile would make no difference now—another ten minutes at the most.

  It was very disappointing when the lights of the city vanished. Armstrong had not remembered the hill which the road was skirting: perhaps it was only a low ridge, scarcely noticeable in the daytime. But by hiding the lights of the port it had taken away his chief talisman and left him again at the mercy of his fears.

  Very unreasonably, his intelligence told him, he began to think how horrible it would be if anything happened now, so near the end of the journey. He kept the worst of his fear at bay for a while, hoping desperately that the lights of the city would soon reappear. But as the minutes dragged on he realized that the ridge must be longer than he imagined. He tried to cheer himself by the thought that the city would be all the nearer when he saw it again, but somehow logic seemed to have failed him now. For presently he found himself doing something he had not stooped to do even out in the waste by Carver’s Pass.

  He stopped, turned slowly round, and with bated breath listened until his lungs were nearly bursting.

  The silence was uncanny, considering how near he must be to the port. There was certainly no sound from behind him. Of course there wouldn’t be, he told himself angrily. But he was immensely relieved. The thought of that faint and insistent clicking had been haunting him for the last hour.

  So friendly and familiar was the noise that did reach him at last that the anticlimax almost made him laugh aloud. Drifting through the still air from a source clearly not more than a mile away came the sound of a landing-field tractor, perhaps one of the machines loading the Canopus itself. In a matter of seconds, thought Armstrong, he would be around this ridge, with the port only a few hundred yards ahead. The journey was nearly ended. In a few moments this evil plain would be no more than a fading nightmare.

  It seemed terribly unfair: so little time, such a small fraction of a human life, was all he needed now. But the gods have always been unfair to man, and now they were enjoying their little jest. For there could be no mistaking the rattle of monstrous claws in the darkness ahead of him.

  Isaac Asimov - BLIND ALLEY

  Practically everybody in the world spends more time than he should complaining about the inflexibilities, stupidities, and frustrations of bureaucracies, governmental and otherwise. Few indeed are those who have a kind word to say for them. However, no one who has his head screwed on properly can deny that without bureaucracies our complex societies would simply fall apart. And in the story that follows, it is proved that a really capable bureaucrat can not only preserve the society he lives in, but also achieve some really progressive and, indeed, almost radical actions by working skillfully within the framework of the very system that employs him.

  I

  FROM: Bureau for the Outer Provinces

  To: Loodun Antyok, Chief Public Administrator, A-8

  Subject: Civilian Supervisor of Cepheus 18, Administrative Position as.

  References:

  (a) Act of Council 2515, of the year 971 of the Galactic Empire, entitled, “Appointment of Officials of the Administrative Service, Methods for, Revision of.”

  (b) Imperial Directive, Ja 2374, dated 243/975

  G.E.

  1. By authorization of reference (a) you are hereby appointed to the subject position. The authority of said position as Civilian Supervisor of Cepheus 18 will extend over non-Human subjects of the Emperor living upon the planet under the terms of autonomy set forth in reference (b).

  2. The duties of the subject position shall comprise the general supervision of all non-Human internal affairs, co-ordination of authorized government investigating and reporting committees, and the preparation of semiannual reports on all phases of non-Human affairs.

  C. Morily, Chief, BuOuProv, 12/977 G.E.

  Loodun Antyok had listened carefully and now he shook his round head mildly. “Friend, I’d like to help you, but you’ve grabbed the wrong dog by the ears. You’d better take this up with the Bureau.”

  Tomor Zammo flung him
self back into his chair, rubbed his beak of a nose fiercely, thought better of whatever he was going to say, and answered quietly, “Logical, but not practical. I can’t make a trip to Trantor now. You’re the Bureau’s representative on Cepheus 18. Are you entirely helpless?”

  “Well, even as Civilian Supervisor, I’ve got to work within the limits of Bureau policy.”

  “Good,” Zammo cried, “then tell me what Bureau policy is. I head a scientific investigating committee, under direct Imperial authorization with, supposedly, the widest powers; yet at every angle in the road I am pulled up short by the civilian authorities with only the parrot shriek of ‘Bureau policy’ to justify themselves. What is Bureau policy? I haven’t received a decent definition yet.”

  Antyok’s gaze was level and unruffled. He said, “As I see it—and this is not official, so you can’t hold me to it—Bureau policy consists in treating the non-Humans as decently as possible.”

  “Then what authority have they—”

  “Ssh! No use raising your voice. As a matter of fact, His Imperial Majesty is a humanitarian and a disciple of the philosophy of Aurelion. I can tell you quietly that it is pretty well-known that it is the Emperor himself who first suggested that this world be established. You can bet that Bureau policy will stick pretty j close to Imperial notions. And you can bet that I can’t paddle my way against that sort of current.”

  “Well, m’boy,” the physiologist’s fleshy eyelids quiv- I ered, “if you take that sort of attitude, you’re going to lose your job. No, I won’t have you kicked out. That’s not what I mean at all. Your job will just fade out from under you, because nothing is going to be accomplished here!”