The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02

by Anthology

  Stutsman stared at him, his eyes widening, but the gun remained steady in his hand.

  "Look out, Craven," warned Greg. "He's going to fire and it will go right through me and hit you."

  There was the thump of a falling body as Craven hurled himself out of his chair, hit the floor and rolled. Stutsman's gun vomited flame. The spouting flame passed through Greg's image, blasted against the chair in which Craven had sat, fused it until it fell in on itself.

  "Russ," said Greg quietly, "Disarm this fellow before he hurts somebody."

  An unseen force reached out and twisted the gun from Stutsman's hand, flung it to one side. Swiftly Stutsman's hands were forced behind his back and held there by invisible bonds.

  Stutsman cried out, tried to struggle, but he was unable to move. It was as if giant hands had gripped him, were holding him in a viselike clutch.

  "Thanks, Manning," said Craven, getting up off the floor. "The fool would have shot this time. He's threatened it for days. He has been developing a homicidal mania."

  "We don't need to worry about him now," declared Greg. He turned around to face Craven. "Where's Chambers?"

  "Stutsman locked him up," said Craven. "I imagine he has the key in his pocket. Locked him up in the stateroom. Chambers jumped him and tried to take the gun away from him and Stutsman laid him out, hit him over the head. He kept Chambers locked up after that. Hasn't allowed anyone to go near the room. Hasn't even given him food and water. That was three days ago."

  "Get the key out of his pocket,* directed Greg. "Go and see how Chambers is."

  Alone in the control room with Stutsman, Greg looked at him.

  "I have a score to settle with you, Stutsman," he said. "I had intended to let it ride, but not now."

  "You can't touch me," blustered Stutsman. "You wouldn't dare."

  "What makes you think I wouldn't?"

  "You're bluffing. You've got a lot of tricks, but you can't do the things you would like me to think you can. You've got Chambers and Craven fooled, but not me." "It may be that I can offer you definite proof."

  Chambers staggered over the threshold. His clothing was rumpled. A rude bandage was wound around his head. His face was haggard and his eyes red.

  "Hello, Manning," he said. "I suppose you've won. The Solar System must be in your control by now."

  He lifted his hand to his mustache, brushed it, a feeble attempt at playing the old role he'd acted so long.

  "We've won," said Greg quietly, "but you're wrong about our being in control. The governments are in the hands of the people, where they should be."

  Chambers nodded. "I see," he mumbled. "Different people, different ideas." His eyes rested on Stutsman and Greg saw sudden rage sweep across the gray, haggard face. "So you've got him, have you? What are you going to do with him? What are you going to do with all of us?"

  "I haven't had time to think about it," said Greg. "I've principally been thinking about Stutsman here."

  "He mutinied," rasped Chambers "He seized the ship, turned the crew against me."

  "And the penalty for that," said Greg, quietly, "is death. Death by walking in space."

  Stutsman writhed within the bands of forces that held him tight. His face contorted. "No, damn you! You can't do that! Not to me, you can't!"

  "Shut up," roared Chambers and Stutsman quieted.

  "I was thinking, too," said Greg, "that at his order thousands of people were mercilessly shot down back in the Solar System. Stood against a wall and mowed down. Others were killed like wild animals in the street. Thousands of them."

  He moved slowly toward Stutsman and the man cringed.

  "Stutsman," he said, "you're a butcher. You're a stench in the nostrils of humanity. You aren't fit to live."

  "Those," said Craven, "are my sentiments exactly."

  "You hate me," screamed Stutsman. "All of you hate me. You are doing this because you hate me."

  "Everyone hates you, Stutsman," said Greg. "Every living person hates you. You have a cloud of hate hanging over you as black and wide as space."

  The man closed his eyes, trying to break free of the bonds.

  "Bring me a spacesuit," snapped Greg, watching Stutsman's face.

  Craven brought it and dropped it at Stutsman's feet.

  "All right, Russ," said Greg. "Turn him loose." Stutsman swayed and almost fell as the bands of force released him.

  "Get into that suit," ordered Greg.

  Stutsman hesitated, but something he saw in Greg's face made him lift the suit, step into it, fasten it about his body.

  "What are you going to do with me?" he whimpered. "You aren't going to take me back to Earth again, are you? You aren't going to make me stand trial?"

  "No," said Greg, gravely, "we aren't taking you back to Earth. And you're standing trial right now."

  Stutsman read his fate in the cold eyes that stared into his. Chattering frightenedly, he rushed at Greg, plunged through him, collided with the wall of the ship and toppled over, feebly attempting to rise.

  Invisible hands hoisted him to his feet, gripped him, held him upright. Greg walked toward him, stood facing him.

  "Stutsman," he said, "you have four hours of air. That will give you four hours to think, to make your peace with death." He turned toward the other two. Chambers nodded grimly. Craven said nothing.

  "And now," said Greg to Craven, "if you will fasten down his helmet."

  The helmet clanged shut, shutting out the pleas and threats that came from Stutsman's throat.

  Stutsman saw distant stars, cruel, gleaming eyes that glared at him. Empty space fell away on all sides.

  Numbed by fear, he realized where he was. Manning had picked him up and thrown him far into space... out into that waste where for hundreds of light years there was only the awful nothingness of space.

  He was less than a speck of dust, in this great immensity of emptiness. There was no up or down, no means of orientation.

  Loneliness and terror closed in on him, a terrible agony of fear. In four hours his air would be gone and then he would die! His body would swirl and eddy through this great cosmic ocean. It would never be found. It would remain here, embalmed by the cold of space, until the last clap of eternity.

  There was one way, the easy way. His hand reached up and grasped the connection between his helmet and the air tank. One wrench and he would die swiftly, quickly... instead of letting death stalk him through the darkness for the next four hours.

  He shivered and his hand loosened its hold, dropped away. He was afraid to hasten death. He wanted to put it off. He was afraid of death... horribly afraid.

  The stars mocked him and he seemed to hear hooting laughter from somewhere far away. Curiously, it sounded like his own laughter....

  "I'LL make it easy for you, Manning," Chambers said. "I know that all of us are guilty. Guilty in the eyes of the people and the law. Guilty in your eyes. If we had won, there would have been no penalty. There's never a penalty for the one who wins."

  "Penalty," said Greg, his eyes half smiling. "Why, yes, I think there is. I'm going to order you aboard the Invincible for something to eat and to get some rest."

  "You mean to say that we aren't prisoners?"

  Greg shook his head. "Not prisoners," he said. "Why, I came out here to guide you back to Earth. I hauled you out here and got you into this jam. It was up to me to get you out of it. I would have done the same for Stutsman, too, but...."

  He hesitated and looked at Chambers.

  Chambers stared back and slowly nodded.

  "Yes, Manning," he said. "I think I understand."

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  -ONE

  Chambers lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.

  "I wish you could see it my way, Manning," he said. "There's no place for me on Earth, no place for me in the Solar System. You see, I tried and failed. I'm just a has-been back there."

  He laughed quietly. "Somehow, I can't imagine myself coming back in the role of the defeat
ed tribal leader, chained to your chariot, so to speak."

  "But it wouldn't be that way," protested Greg. "Your company is gone, true, and your stocks are worthless, but you haven't lost everything. You still have a fleet of ships. With our new power, the Solar System will especially need ships. Lots of ships. For the spacelanes will be filled with commerce. You'd be coming back to a new deal, a new Solar System, a place that has been transformed almost overnight by power that's practically free."

  "Yes, yes, I know all that," said Chambers. "But I climbed too high. I got too big. I can't come back now as something small, a failure." "You have things we need," said Greg. "The screen that blankets out our television and tele-transport, for example. We need your screen as a safeguard against the very thing we have created. Think of what criminal uses could be made of the tele-transport. No vault, no net of charged wires, nothing, could stop a thief from taking anything he wanted. Prisons would cease to be prisons. Criminals could reach in and pick up their friends, no matter how many guards there were. Prisons and bank vaults and national treasuries could be cleaned out in a single day."

  "Then there's the super-saturated space fields," added Russ, ruefully. "Those almost got us. If I hadn't thought of moving the televisor through time, we would have had to pull stakes and run for it."

  "No, you wouldn't," pointed out Craven. "You could have wiped us out in a moment. You can disintegrate matter. Send it up in a puff of smoke... rip every electron apart and send it hurtling away."

  "Of course we could have, Craven," said Greg, "but we wouldn't."

  Chambers laughed softly. "Not quite mad enough at us to do that, eh?"

  Greg looked at him. "I guess that must have been it."

  "But I'm curious about the green spacefields," persisted Russ.

  "Simple," said Craven, "They were just fields that had more energy packed into a certain portion of space than space could take. Space fields that had far more than their share of energy, more than they could hold. A super-saturated solution will crystalize almost immediately onto the tiniest crystal put into it. Those fields acted the same way. They crystalized instantly into hyper-space the moment they came into contact with other energy, whether as photons of radiation, matter or other spacefields. Your anti-entropy didn't stand a chance under those conditions. When they crystalized, they took a chunk of the field along with them, a small chunk, but one after another they ate a hole right through your screen."

  "SOMETHING like that would have a commercial value," said Greg. "Useful in war, too, and now that mankind has taken to space, now that we're spreading out, we must think of possible attack. There must be life on other planets throughout the Galaxy. Someday they'll come. If they don't, someday we'll go to them. And we may need every type of armament we can get our hands on."

  Chambers knocked the ash off his cigar and was staring out the vision port. The ship had swung so that through the port could be seen the distant star toward which the Interplanetarian had been driving.

  "For my part," said Chambers, slowly, measuring each word, "you can have those findings of ours. We'll give them to you, knowing you will use them as they should be used. Craven can tell you how they work. That is, if Craven wants to. He is the man who developed them."

  "Certainly," said Craven. "They'll be something to remember us by."

  "But you are coming back to us, aren't you?" asked Greg.

  Craven shook his head. "No, I'm going with Chambers. I don't know what he's thinking of, but whatever it is, it's all right with me. We've been together too long. I'd miss someone to fight with."

  Chambers was still staring out the vision port. He was talking, but he did not seem to be talking to them.

  "I had a dream, you see. I saw the people struggling against the inefficiency and stupidity of popular government. I saw the periodic rise of bad leaders. I saw them lead the people into blunders. I read history and I saw that since the time man had risen from the ape, this had been going on. So I proposed to give the people scientific government... a business administration. An administration that would have run the government exactly as a successful businessman runs his business. The people would have resented it if I had told them they didn't know how to run their affairs. There was only one way to do it... gain control and force it down their throats."

  Chambers was no longer a beaten man, no longer a man with a white bandage around his head and his power stripped from him. Once again he was the fighting financier who had sat back at the desk in the Interplanetary building on Earth and issued orders... orders that sped across millions of miles of space.

  He shrugged his shoulders. "They didn't want it. Man doesn't want to live under scientific government. He doesn't want to be protected against blunders. He wants what he calls freedom. The right to do the things he wants to do, even if it means making a damn fool of himself. The right to rise to great heights and tumble to equally low depths. That's human nature and I ruled it out. But you can't rule out human nature."

  They sat in silence, no one speaking. Russ cupped his pipe bowl in his hand and watched Chambers. Chambers leaned back and slowly puffed at the cigar. Greg just sat, his face unchanging.

  Craven finally broke the silence. "Just what are you planning to do?"

  Chambers flicked his hand toward the distant sun that gleamed through the vision port.

  "There's a new solar system out there," he said. "New worlds, a new sun. A place to start over again. You and I discovered it. It's ours by right of discovery. We'll go there and stake out our claim."

  "But there may be nothing there," protested Greg. "That sun is younger than our Sun. The planets may not have cooled as yet. Life may not have developed."

  "In such a case," said Chambers, "we shall find another planetary system around another sun. A system that has cooled, where there is life."

  Russ gasped. Here was something important, something that should set a precedent. The first men to roam from star to star seeking new worlds. The first men to turn their backs on the old solar system and strike out in search of new worlds swinging in their paths around distant suns.

  Greg was saying, "allright, if that s the way you want it. I was hoping you'd come back with us. But we'll help you repair your ship. We'll give you all the supplies we can spare."

  Russ rose to his feet. "That," he said, "calls for a little drink."

  He opened a cabinet and took out bottles and glasses.

  "Only three," said Chambers. "Craven doesn't drink."

  Craven interrupted. "Pour one for me, too, Page."

  Chambers looked at the scientist, astounded. "I never knew you to take a drink in your life."

  Craven twisted his face into a grin. "This is a special occasion."

  The Invincible was nearing Mars, heading for Earth, which was still a greenish sphere far to one side of the flaming Sun.

  Russ watched the little green globe, thinking.

  Earth was home. To him it always would be home. But that would be changed soon. Just a few more generations, and, to millions upon millions of human beings, Earth no longer would be home.

  With the new material energy engines, life on every planet would be possible now, even easy. The cost of manufacture, mining, shipping across the vast distances between the planets would be only a fraction of what it had been when man had been forced to rely upon the unwieldy, expensive accumulator system of supplying life-giving power.

  Now Mars would have power of her own. Even Pluto could generate her own. And power was... well, it was power. The power to live, the power to work, to establish and maintain commerce, to adjust gravity to Earth standard or to any standard. The power to remake and reshape and rebuild planetary conditions to suit man exactly.

  Earthmen and Earthwomen would be moving out en masse now to the new and virgin fields of endeavor--to the farms of Venus, to the manufacturing centers that were springing up on Mars, to the mines of the Jovian worlds, to the great laboratory plants that would spring up on Titan and on Pluto and on
the other colder worlds.

  The migration of races had started long ago. In the Old Stone Age, the Cro-Magnon had swept out of nowhere to oust the Neanderthal. Centuries later the barbarians of the north, in another of those restless migrations, had overwhelmed and swept away the Roman Empire. And many centuries later, migration had turned from Europe to a new world across the sea, and fighting Americans had battled their way from east to west, conquering a continent.

  And now another great migration was on--man was leaving the Earth, moving into space. He was leaving behind him the world that had reared and fostered him. He was striking out and out. First the planets would be overrun, and then man would leap from the planets to the stars!

  For years after America had become a country, had built a tradition of her own, Europe was regarded by millions as the homeland. But as the years swept by, this had ceased to be and the Americas were a world unto themselves, owing nothing to Europe.

  And that was the way it would be with Earth. For centuries, for thousands of years, Earth would be the Mother Planet, the homeland for all the millions of roaming men and women who dared the gulfs of space and the strangeness of new worlds. There would be trips back to the Earth for sentimental reasons... to see the place where one's ancestors were born and had lived, to goggle at the monument which marked the point from which the first spaceship had taken off for the Moon, to visit old museums and see old cities and breathe the air that men and women had breathed for thousands of years before they found the power to take them anywhere.

  In the end, Earth would be just a wornout planet. Even now her minerals were rapidly being exhausted; her oil wells were dry and all her coal was mined; her industry stabilized and filled; her businesses interlocking and highly competitive. A world that was too full, that had too many things, too many activities, too many people. A world that didn't need men and women. A world where even genius was kept from rising to the top.

  And this was what was driving mankind away from the Earth. The competition, the crowded conditions, in business and industrial fields, the lack of opportunity for new development, the everlasting struggle to get ahead, fighting for a place to live when millions of others were fighting for the same thing. But not entirely that, not that alone. There was something else--that old adventuresome spirit, the driving urge to face new dangers, to step over old frontiers, to do and dare, to make a damn fool of one's self, or to surpass the greatest accomplishments of history.