Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  They weren’t ready for that splat. It took them unaware and tumbled them all head-over. Luck was with them and no one slammed into anything sharp or deadly hard. Dorothy nursed Nick’s bloody nose and a cut over Marquis’ eye which just missed being serious.

  The second time they tried it, it was with less elan and more caution. They figured that if they could cut in at a point, cut in at an angle so close to zero that they were virtually parallel to it, slip in like a hypodermic with the grain, so to speak, they might be able to make it. It was a nice idea but it didn’t work. They were knocked away again. Only this time all hands were prepared and no casualties followed.

  At about then Edgar staggered in wanting to know what was. Briefly they told him. Edgar was amazed. He stood there gaping at them, at, he said, their innocence. Then he raised his hands. “Friends,” quoth Edgar, “like little children shall I lead you. Land at the pole.”

  They made it.

  “IT’S ODD, isn’t it?” mused Dorothy as Nick helped her up an escarpment.

  “What’s odd?” Edgar wanted to know.

  “That, despite the terrific rotation of Hastur, we just don’t notice it now that we’re here. I know why of course. Sheer relativity. But it’s still odd, no matter how well you explain it.”

  “I know,” mused Edgar. “The most common way is that of picturing a caterpillar crawling down the vane of a fan toward the center. The fan is rotating at terrific speed; the fan is on an express liner which is zipping through Earth’s stratosphere like nobody’s business; the stratosphere is following Earth’s rotation, and so on. Yet our caterpillar isn’t conscious of any motion save his own.”

  They stood silent for a moment, surveying the scene before them. Curving horizons could be seen on all sides, the uneven terrain before them now and then pierced by upcroppings of rock. Or perhaps metals. Above them no sky but space, dotted with luminaries. Far away a splotch of brightness—their sun. A world of twilight, this was.

  Behind them lay their ship, a faintly gleaming cylinder, badly scraped and somewhat battered from landing. They’d prepared a sort of berth by splashing the terrain before them with blasts from the emergency rocket tubes, fore and aft, but the landing had still been rough, not the kind which would leave a ship in full dress paint.

  Somewhere before them, precisely how far they could not know, was the lost Orion.

  “I think,” mused Nick, “that the reason for the odd feeling is that we are so vitally aware of the planet’s rotation. After all, Earth is no laggard, either, but it’s so damned big in comparison to this, and so few people, relatively have been off it as yet. What I mean is: if your knowledge of Hastur’s rotation were strictly theoretical, or if you hadn’t seen it from space, the whole thing wouldn’t appear to you as it does now.”

  The going was just a trifle more difficult than covering rocky ground would have been on Earth; Vickers had figured Hastur’s gravity as 125% that of Earth.

  “Hold it,” called out Edgar, punctuating the exclamation by easing himself onto the asteroid’s surface. “Does anyone know where we’re going?”

  “We’re off to find the Hartnetts,” said Dorothy.

  “How nice. And where, pray, may they be?”

  “Right here—somewhere.”

  “Lovely,” drawled Edgar, “just lovely. Have any of you stopped to consider how many days and how many weary miles you can cover on this not-as-small-as-it-looks world without finding anything at all except blisters?”

  “We tried to contact them,” cut in Nick, “but not a peep out of the radio at all. The thing just went dead.”

  “I’ll have to admit,” continued Edgar, “that at the very moment I can’t think of any better procedure than just striking out in any direction at once. But I rest assured that there is a better way. Therefore, I move that we take it easy until we find one.”

  “We could use the ship,” said Dorothy.

  “Inadvisable,” objected Nick. “Something tells me we are going to have trouble getting away from this little fiend of a planetoid.”

  “How about rocket cameras?” cut in Dorothy.

  “Huh?”

  “I can make them. We’ll use just enough fuel to send them up half a mile or so. They’ll take pictures, then glide down. We’ll keep an eye on them and see where they land; Edgar will also take calculations while they’re up—they’ll be sort of periscopic photos. Of course we’ll get our ship, but we may spot the other one.”

  Nick tapped the rocky surface pondering. “Only thing wrong with that is: why didn’t we see the ship on the way down? We had a much bigger perspective.”

  “Perhaps too big. Besides we were too well occupied otherwise.”

  “Okay,” sighed Nick. “I can’t see any reason for not trying it.”

  CHAPTER III

  MENACE UNSEEN

  DOROTHY clasped Nick’s hand as firmly as hands can be clasped when swathed in space-mitts. “If the photo didn’t deceive us, the ship should be over this ridge.”

  Nick nodded, shot an impatient glance at the others straggling up the slight incline. Together he and Dorothy mounted the acclivity, peered anxiously at the sweep below.

  A little scream of delight came from Dorothy’s lips, “There, Nick!” No doubt about it. The lost Orion lay, partly concealed by upcroppings of rock, less than a mile away. Hastily they made their way down the decline, ran in awkward, elephantine steps toward it. As they approached they could see how beaten and scarred it looked.

  They bounded to the port and breathlessly clanged upon it. It was shut tightly. Impatiently they beat upon it until finally it swooshed open and they filed into the airlock. Imperturbably the outer door snapped close behind them, clamlike, and painfully slow the inner port dragged itself open.

  The lost Orion!

  The air was pure—that they noticed first of all when they had doffed cautiously their helmets. Pure and warm. Quickly they took off the clumsy suits and looked about them. No one was in sight; no greeting came to them.

  “Hello!” yelled Nick.

  No answer.

  It was not as large as the Columbia, this ill-fated craft, but a big ship nonetheless. Hearts beating out ill omens, they searched room after room, finding no one.

  “Hello! Hello!” cried Dorothy. Edgar grasped her arm. “Wait,” he murmured. “I think I heard an answer.”

  Silently they followed him, as he led, to a small room. There was a bed, a set of controls—from this point the mechanisms for opening the double doors had been set in motion—a small heating unit, and a large armchair. As their eyes roved about the room, a figure arose unsteadily from the chair and faced them—a tall, gaunt man, white-haired, his eyes looking as if he had been lost for a thousand years.

  Wordlessly he stared at them, as Nick stepped forward, his voice husky.

  “Steve!”

  THE older man looked at him, a sort of dull bewilderment spreading across his face. “Hello, Nick,” ho said softly. “I was sort of wondering when you’d come. Who are your friends?”

  “I’m Dorothy Gilbert,” spoke up that person coming forward, “and I think I’d better fix something for you right away, Steve. You look as if you haven’t had a square meal since Sinbad went sailing.”

  The older man grinned wanly. “Guess I haven’t been eating any too regularly. Haven’t had much company, you see since—”

  “Tell us about it later,” interrupted Dorothy. “Edgar, break out the rations and help me with this thing. Looks like an old model.”

  “Nothing to it,” murmured Vickers. “I’m Edgar Vickers,” he added in Hartnett’s direction; “my brother, Bob, is the slack-mouthed individual you see behind me. There’s three other fellows in the party, but they stayed back in the ship.”

  Hartnett sat down on the bed, his eyes wandering from one to another. “Nice girl you have there, Nick,” he whispered. “You’re not letting any of these other lads get the jump on you, eh?”

  “Not a chance,” replied Do
rothy without looking up, “I’m after the Hartnett fortune because there’s no one else I know who is worth marrying, even for the kind of lab I want.”

  “Did you write the book you always said you would if you were ever marooned, Steve?” asked Nick.

  Hartnett nodded. “Guess that’s all that kept me from going nuts. All alone here—not strong enough to do much more than take care of myself, write, and send signals out. Didn’t go outside much after—” Dorothy faced him, her eyes misty. “Don’t try to soften it Steve—I knew as soon as I came in the ship. Harry’s dead, isn’t he? Like all the others?” Hartnett nodded. “Yes—like all the others.”

  “THERE’S not much to tell,” said Hartnett slowly, after the meal had been finished. “We started out in the Orion much the same as you did in the Columbia, tested the contracels and decided everything was all right. We noticed this little world here and landed to investigate.

  “Only we couldn’t get off.

  “We’d been going virtually at the speed of light and that warped the fourth dimensional fields which were a basic part of the contracels. We found that the only way we had of getting off this planetoid was by rockets, and rockets weren’t enough. We just slid along the surface, battered up the ship, then stopped.

  “Then we began to find out things about this world. Some of them were interesting, and some—” he broke off suddenly. “Nick, you or none of your party have been out without full suits have you?”

  Nick shook his head.

  “Good. Don’t. This little world is full of radiations, a good deal of which are undetectable, but nasty nonetheless. Seven of our party succumbed before we suspected anything was wrong, and five more died within the next fortnight from perfectly innocent things which must have acted as catalysts.

  “So far as we know, an ordinary suit is protection, but we can’t be sure.”

  “What happened to the others?” asked Bob Vickers.

  Hartnett was silent for a moment. “When we landed, one of the rocket fuel tanks was ruptured. Not broken open, just cracked enough to let the stuff vaporize and escape. It started to flood the ship gradually, before we found out. We drew lots to see who would seal off the rooms where it had already penetrated, knowing that the chances were a hundred to one that everyone who went would be blown up. It was a suicide job, but those suicides could keep the entire ship from being blasted to free electrons.

  “They did. If you’d come from the other side, you’d have seen the great gaping crater and the hole in the ship.”

  “I don’t understand . . .” started Dorothy.

  “I do,” spoke up Nick. “When the Orion left, the only rocket fuel which was any good was HZ 7. It had one fault, however. Let any atmosphere get at it and it would vaporize and seep through practically every known substance, except wax. And that vapor was about ten times as touchy as nitro. When it went off you had a terrific explosion.

  “What these fellows did, I take it, Steve, was to seal off the sections from the outside, leaving plenty of room for the vapor to explode, perhaps calculating on its drawing closer while they were at work. Then, they went to work on padding so that the concussion wouldn’t completely wreck the ship. Their only chance of escape was completing the job and getting off before the stuff lit up. And working around it was almost a positive guarantee of setting it off.”

  Hartnett nodded. “That’s just about what happened. Three men were on the job of sealing off. That was the sure death assignment, because they would have to be practically entombed inside. Five others were on the padding job; they had a chance of not being smashed to pieces by the concussion if the blow held off long enough.

  “But it didn’t—not quite long enough. They managed, to get their work almost finished. It was just the sheerest luck that the thing didn’t fill the entire ship, or go off before some of us were out of the way. That was when we didn’t all wait to put on full suits—and it seemed all right outside. Well, the radiation got the ones who survived the blast.”

  He buried his face in his hands. “It seems as if it happened ten years ago at times, then I feel, sometimes, as if it had happened yesterday.”

  DOROTHY slipped her arm around him. “It wasn’t your fault. Come, tell us more—about the things you found out about this planetoid.” He raised his head, brow wrinkled in concentration. “There’s an odd effect at the horizon—maybe you haven’t noticed it yet, eh? The equator of the world seems to be moving, flowing along the ground.”

  “Yow!” exclaimed Edgar. “Lorentz-Fitzgerald stuff!”

  “Huh?”

  “Simple,” he went on. “The speed of rotation of this planetoid at the equator approaches the speed of light, believe it or not. So the equator-contracts. Its diameter remains the same, mind you, since it isn’t moving along the line of the diameter, but the circumference grows smaller. And that my friends,” he concluded, “makes the mathematical ‘pi’ a variable so far as Hastur is concerned. Geometry on this planet must be hot stuff—a veritable purgatory for mathematicians.”

  “How the devil did you figure that out?” exclaimed Hartnett, a note of awed admiration in his voice.

  Edgar grinned. “I’m not staking my life on it,” he said, “but it’s the only explanation I can think of for the phenomenon you described.”

  “Well, you may be right, and then again . . . The important thing, now, is to get off Hastur. These radiations are what got most of us—doesn’t make too much difference with me, because I’m old. But I’m assuming,” he looked at Dorothy and Nick, “that you two will be wanting to pair off pretty soon. And I don’t think Dorothy would care to start knitting little sweaters with holes for three heads in them after she’d had x-rays taken.”

  “We’ll get off,” declared Nick. “Our rockets are powerful enough, I think. We’ll take what we can from the Orion—and I suspect that you and your book, Steve, will be all—then scram away from here fast.”

  He clasped Dorothy’s hand. “I only want a hole for one head in that little sweater.”

  JOE TIMBIE turned to Hartnett and Nick with a despairing gesture. “See? All we do is slide along the ground. I’ve given her the best blasts we have and there’s the result.”

  “A good thing they’ve found a new kind of rocket fuel in these last years.”

  When Dorothy came in, Nick gripped her hands and clung to her. There was no need for words. Silently they looked out of the port onto the scene of their prison, grey twilight world with its sky of starlit black.

  Finally he straightened up, reached out and pressed the call-button which would summon all hands to the control room.

  “There is nothing wrong with the rocket tubes, or the fuel,” he said softly when all had come. “Everything is working as it should work. Our rockets just aren’t strong enough to get us off.”

  “But the contracels?” burst out Marquis bewilderedly.

  Hartnett shook his head. “No good here.”

  Bob Vickers went over to the window and looked out, staring at the landscape as if there lay an answer to their problem. “Edgar,” he called after a moment, “are you sure about what you said about the equator?”

  “No guarantees, but it could very easily be that way.”

  “Then mightn’t an object at the equator be thrown off the planet by centrifugal force?”

  Edgar turned to Nick. “It might—matter of fact, it should.”

  Hartnett bit his lips. “It’s a long chance,” he said, “but still a chance.

  If the ship will hold together under the terrific punishment it would have to take, sliding along the ground on our rocket blasts, then we may be able to do it.”

  “Okay,” declared Nick. “Everybody get into space suits, make sure the air-making apparatus is in order, and take your stations. We’ve got to have lookouts covering all sectors to spot any possible punctures of the hull. As soon as everybody’s checked from their posts, Joe, let her rip.”

  CHAPTER IV

  ORDEAL

  THE
Y clung to the stanchions, watching the rocky surface of Hastur lurch by them, even in the protection of their suits horribly jolted by the choppy acceleration. They clung wondering how long the Columbia would stand up under a type of punishment for which it had never been designed.

  “Something’s wrong,” complained Timbie. “The fire should take place so that, to my limited senses it seems continuous. It isn’t doing that at all.” He pressed a button. “I can sense a distinct interval between the release of the firing apparatus and the explosion, and another interval before the reaction shoves us ahead.”

  “Look at the stars!” cried Bob Vickers.

  They glanced in the direction of his pointing finger and gasped. Above them in the inky blackness were no longer the tiny pin-points that they had been seeing so far; they had become huge globes of multi-colored light. And there was one immense thing which visibly swam in the ether.

  But it was more than just that. Way out beyond the globes, which looked like glowing baseballs, and basketballs, they caught a flashing something. It grew visibly as they watched, swelled until it seemed that it must batter its way through the mass of luminaries around them, send them in flaming ruin down the surface of the little world. Huger and more terrifying it grew, like a movie closeup, until it filled the entire vista of the heavens. The light should have been blinding; it should have burned out their brains, yet they could behold it without so much as being dazzled. Now the size of it was such that no longer could they see its full circle, but only a section of the titanic surface.

  Abruptly the smooth aspect of it faded and sharp prominences began to appear. It was no perfect sphere, this body, but a roughly-circular mass, shot through with enormous cracks, riddled with holes, jagged with mountains. One spire-like protuberance seemed to be pointing directly at them, aiming itself at the ship.

  Paralyzed with mingled amazement and terror they stood, bracing themselves for an impact which would destroy them utterly, volatilize them and the ship with such titanic swiftness that their consciousness would be obliterated before any sensations of it could reach them. They would see the destroyer almost upon them, and that would be all.