Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  “Last, if—and we all pray that it won’t happen in this or any other generation—but, if war should come—if some unsuspecting midnight it should suddenly erupt (and such eruption would be on both our shores, smashing all of our greatest cities even as we retaliated) if this happens, gentlemen, you must not forget one thing. You must not forget for an instant that in such a war, all the Enemy must die.

  “If I sound melodramatic forgive me, and bear with me. You both realize, I’m certain, that any Next War would be a war to the death. After which—” the skillfully-modulated voice lowered, softened, paused, softened again . . . “After which, there will be only one of us left. Because there will be no time for armistice, for truce . . . It will be Our Side, or Theirs. Gentlemen, it must be Ours! So if there is war, I repeat, all the Enemy must die!

  “That’s all I have, except to say good luck and God-speed.”

  Very firm hand-shake for each of them, and Final Briefing was over.

  Even yet Joshua Thorn could remember that first emotion shared by himself and Streeter after the effects of the four-G blast-off had worn away, after the tension of establishing orbit was eased, the first report made to Home Plate, and they were at last granted a moment’s rest, a moment’s respite to look back, to realize . . .

  Done it. Done it . . . They had done it!

  They could almost see themselves, the National Emblem emblazoned brilliantly on their chalk-white metal skin, riding in dignified, silent triumph over all of the Earth. Now let anybody—anybody, anybody anywhere (for weren’t they above all of anywhere?) shake a fist, rattle a sabre!

  First Men in Space. Like God, somehow . . .

  They thudded each other on the back, they yelled things they could not remember, they let the tears flood down their cheeks without noticing, and they laughed; they laughed long and loudly with words and wordlessly, and then they watched again, watched mighty Earth below them turning by some power that was not theirs to see on an invisible spit over Infinity.

  It was at the end of the fourth month that Streeter died.

  “Josh? Josh what’s our trouble?” Young, earnest. Wiry and pinkcheeked and an eternal glint of excitement in his light blue eyes.

  Thorn kept studying the instruments as he answered, slowly, and without alarm in his voice. It wasn’t much, but the Punching of his thick eyebrows had given him away. It always did.

  “Port reflector’s all, I guess, Johnny. Been watching it; a hair off, so we’re down just enough BTU’s to make a dent in power supply. Must have come out a little cockeyed when we popped it. Want to watch the panel a few minutes while I—”

  “Second-guessed you, Skipper—” Johnny Streeter was already halfway into a pressure-suit. “Just zip me up the back and check my petticoat . . .”

  Josh Thorn grinned, closed Johnny’s suit, secured his soap-bubble helmet. They’d both been Out before so it wasn’t as if this was the first time. It was just that this was the first time it had to be done.

  “Suit-check, Johnny . . .”

  “I read you—” crackled the bulkhead audio.

  “Air?”

  “Fourteen point seven psi, oxygen 26 per cent, nitrogen . . .”

  They finished the check; all the complex machinery of Baggy-Drawers was functioning perfectly.

  Then Instrument Check—Methodically, Johnny’s gauntleted mitts touched each magnetic hook on the wide girdle, named each implement suspended from it, replaced it.

  “Can I go out and play now?”

  “Be a good boy, Johnny.”

  The lock hissed, cycled down, and then Thorn was hearing the metallic noises of Johnny’s feet striding ponderously like some story-book Colossus along the “upper” hull, sternward, and then to port.

  “Be a cinch, Josh,” the audio crackled. “If they’re all this easy I’ll feel like a draft-dodger! Maybe if I swab the deck while I’m ou—” A sound that wasn’t Johnny but it was.

  “Johnny? Johnny, do you read me?” Josh Thorn could feel sweat dripping on his stomach. “Johnny—”

  He left the mike, made his way aft in clumsy haste, the simulated gravity confusing long-conditioned reflexes. And he listened beneath the hull section over which Johnny would be. Listened for a thump, a scrape of metal on metal, a vibration of life . . .

  Nothing.

  His own Baggy-Drawers seemed built for a midget with one leg as he struggled into it. Cursory check—enough, she worked, she’d have to . . .

  Out. Aft. Port. Johnny . . .

  Johnny Streeter was still standing, but it was an odd kind of stance; the stance of a marionette on slack strings. Motionless. Standing by the reflector mast, some of his magnetized instruments clinging to it.

  And then he saw Johnny Streeter’s helmet, and saw that it was no longer transparent. Josh tasted vomit on his lips.

  A chance in how many million, how many billion? What was it the statisticians had said? About the same chance as a fatal auto accident, having a meteor hit you . . .

  EQUIPMENT CONVERTED, recalibrated for Earthside observation. Equipment checked. Emergency reflectors out (power drain still damned heavy) and radar full out; close-down scanners on, recording equipment humming, ready . . . Coast coming up in—oh-nine minutes, three-seven seconds. Tapes ready at play-back, UHF set. Now wait.

  You can watch while you wait . . . His eyes hurt, their sockets hurt as he pressed them too hard into the binocular eye-piece.

  Damn the fogging! Damn the blue fogging—blue?

  No

  It filled the object-lens; it swirled, it calmed, it coalesced, it thinned, and there was a second’s sight through it, and then Josh Thorn was swinging the refractor in near-abandon on its panhead . . . there! Clear! Clear, you could see—at the edges! Coming in again, drifting, drifting slowly, drifting . . . blind.

  His fingertips slipped, grabbed again, swung the telescope too violently, steadied.

  Blue fog, moving slowly, deliberately, and yet so fast, so unbelievably fast, why, they said it if it ever happened it would take weeks, months, maybe years, but they could’ve been wrong, so many things they couldn’t have known . . .

  Blue.

  Cobalt blue.

  With some force of sheer power of reason, Joshua Thorn forced himself from the refractor; forced himself past the blue-faced scanners (maybe it was only an Enemy trick; an Enemy screen, the biggest blue smoke-screen ever made!) to the UHF. Maybe. Sure. He was overdue. Minutes overdue; they were waiting for him down there, waiting for his call, wondering if perhaps the screen had really fooled him, or if it were really effective in blocking his sight, or if . . .

  They were right down there, right underneath him, waiting under the blue smoke-screen.

  “Home Plate Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy over . . .”

  Crackling.

  “Home Plate Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy. Home Plate Home Plate what’s the matter can’t you read? Home Plate Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy, over . . . Over!”

  Crackling.

  The meters . . . All right—on the nose, right. What were they, asleep down there? Maybe the smokescreen reflected even UHF. He could try a bounce and see. Narrow beam. Tight. Watch the screen . . .

  Pip. Pip. Pip.

  Getting through. Lousy smoke, just couldn’t see through it . . .

  “Home Plate Home Plate Home Plot——”

  He had beep around fifty times; he had counted. It had taken one hundred hours; he had counted. He had transmitted steadily since the twentieth time, in the few languages he knew beside his own, for sixty hours; he had counted.

  He had only a whisper for a voice now, and only aching places where his ears were.

  But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.

  “Home Plate, this is Mrs. Grundy—

  “Can anyone read me? Does anyone read me down there?

  “Kann jedermann mich hören? Antworten-Sie, bitte . . .

  “Repondez, repondez si vous m’ fentendrez . . .

  “Damn you can’
t you hear me? CAN’T YOU HEAR ME?”

  He’d tried to keep track of the time.

  He thought it had been a month; maybe more, but a month anyway.

  And now the blue was solid over Earth, over all of it. There were still little swirls, little eddies of it here and there, but most of it—already, most of it had settled like a fixed shell, like the quiescent sutt face of a stagnant pool.

  And somehow he’d accepted it.

  They were all dead down there.

  Cobalt blue had killed them all, killed them all . . .

  Funny. It had a rhythm to it. Cobalt blue had killed them all, killed them all, Cobalt bombs had killed them all—

  STOP IT!

  But if they were all dead . . .

  And if he were not dead . . .

  Then he was the last human being left alive.

  That was crazy.

  Nobody could be—nobody could be the last—

  But there was nobody.

  Except him. So, it followed: therefore—ergo: logically, if there was nobody, and if . . .

  God it was dark.

  God, it was quiet.

  And if . . .

  If you laugh you’ll go crazy.

  If you don’t laugh, if you don’t laugh, if you—hell, only one dose of barbiturate left in the First Aid stores . . . big thing, hard to swallow . . . and if there’s nobody left, then . . .

  Sleep.

  He hadn’t touched the UHF in three months, but he’d left it on regardless of the power drain just in case.

  He had divided the hours off into sleeping and eating periods, and he had just slept, and just eaten, and he’d shaved, and put on a fresh uniform. He had knotted the tie perfectly; his collar insignia were shined and pinned in place without a single wrinkle.

  He had it figured out.

  He could die of oxygen, if not food, starvation in five more months, three and one-half more days. And that would be the end of it.

  The hell it would! Who the hell did they think they were to do this to him . . .

  But he had his computers. He had his reference-tapes. He had his refractor and his scanners, and his star-charts, and his store of fuel for orbital correction (ninety percent of which remained, because it had beejp, an almost perfect shot) and he had his brains.

  If you threw a stone off the rear of a moving train at a speed less than the train’s speed forward, the stone would of course leave the train, but in relation to the ground would still be travelling in the train’s direction.

  If you threw a satellite away from its path around Earth and directly into Earth’s wake, but at a speed less than Earth’s forward speed in its orbit, the satellite would break free, but would continue in Earth’s orbital direction. And then with a brief side-blast, you could warp into an orbit around the Sun all your own, or—into that of the planet Venus, if you chose . . .

  And beneath that eternal shell of cloud—who knew?

  He had his computers. He had his reference-tapes. He had his refractor and his scanners, and his star-charts and his precious store of fuel. (Three-score years and ten, the Good Book said. Better than five months. Better than sitting and waiting. So he would fail—no worse than what was Below.) And he had his brains.

  He worked methodically. He drew schedules: four hours of work, one for eating and relaxation; five hours more of work, and another for food and rest; six hours more of work, then seven for sleep, and then the cycle began again. By making a rhythm of it, he thought, rather than a program of perfectly equal work-periods, he would avoid monotony. With monotony would come despair, and with despair . . . Despair of course would kill him.

  And there was the thing in him that would not be killed; a thing that had been rooted as deep within his kind as Life itself, since the first Man had shambled erect on the face of the still-steaming Earth. He would survive.

  As Joshua Thorn, and as Man. He would not let Man die yet. Not out here. Not in the cold dark, alone. Somehow, Thorn thought, Man had earned a better way, a better place to die . . .

  But of course it was silly to think that Man should ever die, that he could ever die . . .

  Ridiculous.

  Baloney. Oh, you could kill a lot of people, certainly. Sure. But the whole race of Man—nuts to the philosophers! The only thing they knew how to do was think!

  He worked methodically, ascertaining first that at the present point in her orbital swing, Venus approaching as she was from aphelion, would be in close enough proximity as she passed by to be met within the time limit set by his remaining store of food and oxygen. And he ascertained secondly that he had sufficient “emergency” fuel (and this, he assumed, might be classified as an emergency of sorts?) to blast him out of orbit and into Earth’s wake with barely sufficient speed to assure him of not falling back. If the computers weren’t lying, there’d even be enough after that to warp him into the gradual, drifting arc that would intercept Venus in her path around the Sun, and then—perhaps enough to effect landing. Barely, if at all. His taut mouth twitched in a humorless little smile. What an irony to actually succeed—to make it all the way, across the millions of miles of Space, first human in history to accomplish it—and then, maybe one or two hundred feet above surface, to have the final drop of fuel run out . . .

  So . . . what was there to lose but the race of Man . . . And that anyway, eventually. Thirty-five more years (if he were lucky; he smiled again) appended to—how many? Half a million?

  But half a million years was only a nervous twitch on the skin of Time. A spark in an eternal, allconsuming fire; a spark that died even as it flared its little second and then crumbled into ashes.

  HE SMILED a grim little smile, and made a note of the date; it was 1800 hours, October 21. He did not even glance at the pale-blue thing that rolled and shimmered grotesquely a scant thousand miles on his left. Be damned to you! But you are damned already. So goodbye.

  His fingers finished the business of tightening the heavy buckle of his seat-belt, and then the punched the red firing-studs, and Vanguard-I broke her bondage.

  The ferroelectric brains of the computers considered silently; acted.

  The organic brain of the man hazed red, hazed darkly, and trusted, for it was powerless to do more save fight a primal struggle for consciousness. It could not regard the situation. It could not think: I am the first human being to fly Space. It could not think, of all the things that all the humans in all of history have ever done, I alone have done this.

  Roll the drums for Agamemnon, Roll the drums for Hercules!

  Roll the drums for Caesar, Alexander, for Amenhotep, Rameses . . . drum the drums for Khan, for Suleiman, for Plato, Aristides—drum your drums for York and Tudor, Bacon, Michelangelo . . . For Austerlitz. For Yorktown. Chickamauga, Ypres, and Anzio . . .

  Roll the drums. Roll the drums for me . . .

  Motors off.

  Click-hum, computers . . .

  Silently.

  Wheel your eternal wheeling, stars.

  Darkly.

  Cold.

  The screens showed white, thick white, and the fuel-pumps disgorged the remainder of Vanguard I’s life-blood into the roaring combustion chambers. The muted complaining of heavy atmosphere keened up the scale to a banshee’s lament and sweat poured from Josh Thorn’s half-nude body as his tiny metal cell grew stifling.

  Power—how much power to keep from becoming a vagrant meteorite in Venus’ milky skies? From flaring, white-hot, and falling . . . a cinder from nowhere, with nowhere to go, the last of Earth’s ashes . . .

  One hundred miles.

  Fifty. Thirty. Twelve . . .

  Cooler, now. He shivered in 105 degrees Fahrenheit, shivered in 99, in 87 . . . His sweat was cold.

  Ten thousand feet! Slowing, slowing, a century of time to drop to nine thousand, ease off the power, eight thousand, steady; fuel, barely, six thousand, steady . . . Steady

  Watch your screens! Green. Brown, yellow, blue-veined green; low-rolling magenta mountains westw
ard, cloud-shadows rippling, mingling with tenuous wisps of steam . . . steam from the jungles of tall forest . . .

  One thousand feet. No sign of mobile life on this planet, in this valley into which Vanguard-1 lowered. But all sign—all sign, indeed, of the rich lushness that would support it, embrace it, hold it close like a long-denied lover . . .

  Thorn sweated again—hot sweat, now—at his scanners, his control panel. Temperature again hovering past 100, but there was no time to notice or to feel. One hundred feet . . . gently . . .

  And then Vanguard-I was down, and at rest.

  Josh Thorn hesitated. Baggy-Drawers? Or not? Beneath the white, tenuous outer atmospheric shell of methane and ammonia, what? Air he could breathe? Or poison that would strangle him—

  He swung the inner air-lock open.

  If poison, then death would be but a matter of days; the bubble of Made-in-U.S.A. atmosphere that he’d brought thirty million miles across Space had supplied him for the nearly four months the journey had taken. It had done its job, he could demand no more than that. Two weeks more, at best, and it would tye spent forever.

  Two weeks, thirty-five years, five thousand centuries—

  He swung the outer air-lock open.

  And breathed. And breathed. And breathed deeply again.

  Joshua Thorn wanted to cry. There was a hurt in his throat, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to laugh great peals of laughter even as the unchecked salt tears streamed across the deep valleys of his cheeks.

  He walked, he ran. He stopped, he turned his face to the sky, he spread his arms wide and let the great bellows of laughter roll from his lips in the lusty prayer of thanks that only the living who are full with life and amid the teeming fullness of life can know.