Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  Three shift changes later they hit lower orange. Their speed was high, but lower than he had estimated. If the instruments were right, and there wasn’t too little unaccounted lag, they might possibly hit Breakout at Lume One. A faint surge of hope swept through him.

  Almost in answer to his thoughts, Jorgenson turned from the board. “It’s gonna be close, Skipper,—damn close. The way I figure the lag, we’ll be hitting Breakout just about on the nose of Lume One.”

  His close-cropped head gleamed red in the ruddy light that filled the main cabin. He fumbled with his safety web, tightening it a trifle as he watched the lightspeed needle drop slowly toward the redline of Lume One. The decelerometer needle calibrated in megakilometers per minute quivered at the upper limit of its arc, registering the fierce thrust of the screaming drives. The other graduated dials had long since disconnected and hung dead in their cases until the insane speed of their slowdown would drop sufficiently for them to register. It was good that there were no acceleration pressures in hyperspace, or the force of their braking would long ago have crushed them to death against the unyielding steel of the hull . . .

  CARLOS BUENAVENTURA looked through a vision port into the blue-violet radioactive hell of the drive chamber, whistled tunelessly between his teeth, and adjusted a too slowly burning fuel tape to deliver maximum energy. His movements were precise, careful, and incredibly fast.

  Buenaventura knew his business, and oddly enough, he was enjoying himself. He was far too busy to think of what might happen if the “Manitowoc” hit Breakout above Lume One. He completed the adjustment and turned back to the converter. Slipping his hands into the handgrips of the slave tongs, he picked up a wrench beyond the safety barrier and began to remove another bolt from the converter housing. He might as well get this job as nearly done as possible. It would save time when they were back in normal space and he could get on with removing the contaminated slug from the reaction chamber.

  He swore quietly in a low monotone, cursing the technician who had loaded that particular piece of plutonium into the fuel hopper. It was a hard task for the slave to manipulate the heavy wrench. Servos whined as he applied power, and the bolt started to turn. If the drive room had a chance to cool off he’d be able to do the job manually in half the time. But that wasn’t in the cards. He removed the bolt and set it aside in a slotted rack and turned again to his inspection of the drives . . .

  Parsons was doing as Adams had suggested. The full extent of their predicament had finally seeped through his Cth deadened brain. And the worst of it was that he could do nothing. In this position, an astrogator was unessential. So he was praying,—inaudibly but fervently. Invocations to a dozen major planetary deities rose to his motionless lips. His choice was catholic,—not knowing which might be the right one he impartially called upon all he knew. He didn’t envy either Adams or Jorgenson. They knew too much.—and their grim faces showed it.

  Suddenly he found his hands shaking. The cabin had turned a deep magenta that was appreciably fading to the darkness and the heat of the infra band. It wouldn’t be long now . . .

  “STAND by for Breakout,” Adams said flatly. He bent over the control board, his eyes lingering for a brief instant on the speed indicator. It was still above the redline, but lag could account for enough,—maybe, to bring them below lightspeed.

  He hesitated, fingers on the controls that would cut the converter and the drives, as he waited for the first premonitory shudder of Breakout, that split instant, half sensed, half felt, that no machine nor electronic brain no matter how delicate could perceive, that split instant that made Breakout a function of men rather than machines.

  Now the sensing was doubly important, for while deceleration must be applied until the last possible instant, it must be off when they entered normal space or the crushing force would smash them all to pulpy boneless smears against the unyielding metal of the hull.

  It was going to be close,—Jorgenson was right,—it was going to be too close. He forced himself to relax, to hold his body and nerves in check as he waited for the feeling of the ship entering the border zone. It came, faint and familiar,—and his hands pressed down on the keys,—and then they were in the wrenching shimmering madness of Breakout . . .

  The “Manitowoc” rammed her way into normal space scant kilometers per second under Lume One!

  The whistling gasp of relief that passed Adam’s lips startled him. He hadn’t realized that he had been holding his breath. His chest and arms ached, there was a painful cramp in his belly, and an involuntary shiver ran through his muscles as the vision screens flashed on and the familiar normal universe flashed its star patterns in long streaks across the hemispherical brightness.

  Their speed was far too great to get an optical fix on their position, and the indicator still quivered in the red-line area, but it was still falling as the resistance of space itself acted as a brake to their enormous speed.

  But their troubles weren’t over. Adams saw it, but already it was too late to do anything about it. Human reflexes in this case simply weren’t fast enough! Centered in the course scanner an orange dot swelled with ghastly rapidity, ballooning into an enormous yellow mass that filled the screen almost before Parson’s choked cry, “Collision course!” was finished.

  But the automatics had instantly taken over, the shields flashed up, and the steering jets blasted in a crushingly violent evasive maneuver that pinned them helplessly to their chairs. Steering jets blasting at maximum aperture, protective shields blazing into the violet, the freighter hurtled at near light speed past the flaming mass of a solitary sun, flashing for an instant through the corona of the star and out again into the blackness of space.

  A wave of intense heat washed against the shields, as the automatics made instantaneous adjustments,—and a moment later the pressure eased. Adams reached for the controls. “Thank God for those shields,” he breathed. “Without them we’d have been burned to a cinder.”

  “Better thank those mechs on Terranova who installed those new relays in the automatics,” Jorgenson added, “Our old style ones would have been too slow to compensate.”

  Adams chuckled shakily. To have escaped the terrors of Cth space and the danger of translume destruction only to be destroyed by collision with a third rate star would have been the ultimate in irony.

  SLOWLY he set up a deceleration pattern on the drives as the “Manitowoc” hurtled away from the star in along hyperbolic curve. The ship shuddered, yawing and swaying in sickening arcs as the axial alignment unbalanced by the star’s gravitational pull, turned the slowdown into a stomach-wrenching series of motions that had even the iron-gutted Jorgenson green and gasping.

  They were still travelling far too fast for safety, and such niceties as true flight had to be sacrificed until their speed was reduced to safe limits. The stout hull groaned in every stressed and welded joint as it lurched and expanded in its slowing, wobbling course through the heavens.

  “This extra weight is useful,” Parsons commented through clenched teeth. “At least it keeps my stomach where it belongs. If it wasn’t for this 4-G’s I’d have lost my lunch a million miles back.”

  Adams grinned briefly, and then grunted with disgust as he flipped the switches controlling the vision screen. “Those service men on Terranova weren’t so hot after all, Hank,” he said. “The screen’s stuck and the shields are still up. Guess something must have jammed when we passed that star.” He jiggled the switch tentatively. For a brief instant a flash of brilliant light blazed across a slitlike opening in the screen to vanish abruptly as the automatics cut in.

  “What in hell was that?” Jorgenson queried in mild surprise.

  “I dunno,” Adams replied, “but I take back what I said about those mechanics. The screens are okay. Maybe we’d better get off to one side and find out what’s happening.” He opened the manuals. “At any rate I can’t do any worse than the automates are doing right now.”

  He energized the port steering j
ets and swung the ship in a long parabola, still decelerating and testing the screens occasionally. Suddenly they lighted, and Adams, staring at the wide panorama they revealed, gave a startled exclamation of surprise. “Well,—I’ll be—” he said wonderingly.

  Stretching behind them, across the darkness of space was a thick twisted filament of flaming gas pointing back toward the tiny yellow dot of the star they had so narrowly missed. The elongate cigar shaped mass was already beginning to condense here and there along its length into whirling vortices of star-bright matter. A thin glowing filament like a comet’s tail faded behind them as their speed continued to drop.

  “Carlos!” Adams barked into the communicator. “Can you get that converter cleared,—in a hurry?”

  “What’s the rush, skipper, ain’t we safe now?”

  “Just answer me,” Adams barked. “Can you or can’t you?”

  “It’ll take about an hour,” Buenaventura said in an aggrieved tone. “If you’re gonna be that way about it, I’ll hurry. But I’m damned if I ever ship on with a slave driver like you again. Next time I’ll pick my berth.”

  Adams laughed. Carlos was normal again.

  “Now Deacon,” he said to Parsons, “Can you get me a line on that star back there?” He indicated the orange sized dot on the screen.

  “Yes sir.”

  “A precise fix?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, get at it then. You have an hour.”

  Parsons bent over his astrogation console and was instantly immersed in the math and formulae need to fix the position of a body in space.

  Adams smiled gently. The kid sounded so Navy that it almost hurt. It was probably reaction . . .

  THE sun with its glowing prominence had faded to an indeterminate speck by the time Carlos’ head appeared through the hatchway to the stern. He looked around the main cabin curiously. “What’s all the rush about?” he asked.

  “I don’t see anything wrong,—or any need for all that hurry.”

  “You’ll find out,” Adams said. “Everything clear back there?”

  “Sure,—I said an hour, and I meant an hour. She’s all ready to go.”

  “Fine. Now then, Parsons, what are those relative coordinates?”

  “They’re on the tape, sir.”

  Adams fed the tape into the automatics. “Stand by for C-shift,” he said. Buenaventura settled himself into his chair and snapped his web in place. Adams started the converter. The shift was made with all the usual disquieting sensations, but instead of climbing through the components, the automatics held the vessel in the lower red and maneuvered at minimum speed. In a short time the ship went into turnover and decelerated. Adams cut the drive at zero speed, killed the converter, and the ship broke out into normal space.

  “Now, Carlos, I’ve got something to show you,” Adams said, half turning in his chair. “You and Parsons were so damned smart rigging that put-up job on me back there in the yellow. Now take a look at something real—” He flicked the vision screen and Carlos stiffened, the shock on his face clearly visible in the flaming light that burst from the screen.

  Before him in all its blazing glory was the filament, stretching entirely across the screen in sparkling gouts of flaming gases, already breaking up into hundreds of whirling masses of incandescent star stuff.

  They swept through a firmament dotted with innumerable pinpoints of glowing stellar debris. Titanic convulsions shook their surfaces as they swept up millions of the fiery dots, adding them to their swelling masses. The automatics flung up the protective shields as the edge of the filament swept about them in the beginning of an orbital pattern, but the vision screen stayed on, revealing more of the fury of the birth agonies of a solar system.

  Adams moved the ship out of danger to a point above the forming ecliptic and shifted the screen, brining the sun into focus in the lower right quadrant. Even as they watched a vast mass of flaming matter fell with ponderous deliberation into the sun’s corona. Enormous pseudopod-like prominences raised themselves from the tortured surface of the star to enfold the mass and draw it back into the parent surface.

  Buenaventura stared wordlessly, as Adams looked at him with an infinitely superior smile on his face. “Take a good look, Carlos,” Adams said, “and then tell me some more about Natural Causes and fellows like Heidenbrink. There’s a perfect Gaseous-Tidal phenomena for you. See those vortices,—some of them are going to be planets someday, and some damn food idiot on them is going to talk about another Heidenbrink unless we’re around to educate him. This is how our systems were formed. You can see it with your own eyes!”

  “But—how?”

  “Can’t you guess, you simple son of a Spanish peasant? We made it!”

  Buenaventura turned helplessly to Parsons. “Yes, the skipper’s right. We did it,” the youngster said. “We passed through the corona of that star.” He pointed to the boiling, prominence-ridden mass in the lower quadrant of the screen. “We were travelling at almost light-speed when we went past, and while our size was negligible, our mass was nearly infinite. Our mass attraction drew out that filament which is now coalescing into planets. The Skipper is giving it to you straight. We made that!” His voice held a note of awe-filled wonder.

  “The tool of Creation,” Adams mused aloud, “a light-speed transmit. And to think that no one ever thought of it except the Centralians.”

  “If they existed,” Buenaventura said, stubborn to the last.

  “They existed all right,” Buenaventura said, stubborn to the last.

  “They existed all right,” Jorgenson said. “They had to exist.”

  “Think of the possibilities!”

  Parsons said. “We can fill the galaxy with worlds.”

  “Habitable after a few million years,” Buenaventura sneered.

  “What Is time with a goal like this to aim at?” Parsons replied.

  ADAMS smiled. The astrogator tossed off epochs like they were days. At that maybe he was right. The original Creators also must have thought in terms like that. Their life spores filtering through space had taken root in the fertile soils which they created, and their descendents were now ready to repeat the pattern. The cycle had come to a full circle, and new worlds would be born. It was inevitable.

  He watched the giant panorama beneath him move silently across the vision screen, until finally he shrugged. “We’ll never be able to see it all,” he said, reluctance in his voice. “It’s too slow. So I suppose that we’d better turn from gods back to working men again. We’ve got a cargo to deliver, and there’s a penalty clause in our contract.” Sighing a little he turned back to the controls.

  The “Manitowoc” slowly drew away from the infant solar system, accelerating with ever increasing velocity until with an eye-straining shimmer, she disappeared into the monochromatic regions of hyperspace.

  It was Buenaventura who finally spoke. For once he sounded almost apologetic. “All right, I’m wrong,—and I admit it.” He said. “Solar systems were made.” He paused but there was no reply. “But there is still one question that’s not answered. I’ll admit that there were Centralians,—and that they created our systems,—but who created them?”

  Wordlessly Parsons picked up the ship’s Bible and waved it under the engineer’s nose. “Want to argue?” he queried finally.

  Buenaventura shook his head.

  THE END

  THE SWORD

  Arn was shocked and sympathetic—and appalled. A two-thousand-year-old quest was finally ended.

  The quiet life of Dr. J.F. Bone began at the age of ten when he showed a “distressing tendency to read Freud and Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories.” Continued when he “commanded a border station on the Burma-China border,” managing “to get shot at a few times but never hit.” Now he is teaching, doing research, rebuilding decrepit houses, and writing science fiction.

  DESPITE its utilitarian shape and the fact that someone long ago had sharpened the blade, the sword was a toy—a sy
mbol of authority carried by some forgotten officer before the days of fission, fusion and nuclear energy. It lay beneath what once had been the officer’s quarters of an advance missile base, bright and unharmed under the thick glassy crust left by the exploded bomb. The blade and scabbard of stainless steel and the hilt of black bake-lite were untouched by the force that had destroyed the base. Protected by the glassy slag and its own inherent resistance to corrosion, it lay quietly entombed, a buried reminder of the Last War, the war that ended before it had really begun.

  In time the glassy soil was reclaimed. The greenish glow that filled the area ultimately disappeared. And, in time, the forest returned to cover the seared scar of thermonuclear destruction. By chance a tree grew over the spot where the sword lay buried, rising from an undigested seed in the droppings of a passing bird. And, in time, the tree grew until it dwarfed its neighbors, rising tall among its fellows in the blast area.

  And as ever happens to individuals greater than the mass, it was cut down with brutal abruptness. A thunderstorm swept across the forest, and from the gray-glowing masses of storm clouds a bolt of lightning flashed to earth and struck the tree. With a rending noise of ripping wood, the tree split along its length as though struck by a gigantic axe, swayed on its root base for a moment, leaned—and fell crashing to the ground, destroying a dozen of its lesser neighbors as it fell.

  Clutched in its root system, the sword was torn from its resting place in the dry concavity beneath the trunk and brought again to the light of day. It lay quietly in the rain gleaming with untarnished luster as the fat drops washed the dirt from its surface . . .

  Harl walked blindly through the forest, his normal caution lost in the helpless rage that consumed him. He walked unheeding, careless of the storm that racked the tree trunks and roared with the angry voice of the Thunderbird. The lesser animals of the forest had long since sought shelter from the fury of the Sun’s messengers and the Bird who bore them, but Harl was oblivious. Compared to his anger, the flash of lightning and the violence of thunder were puny things.