The Seventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by H. B. Fyfe

  After dealing with the pilot in about two minutes, most of it spent in catching him, Tremont went back along the shaft and found Dorothy in her bunk. Before she could release the netting, he folded the bunk upon her and secured it to the hook. Only then did he allow himself the time to remove his helmet and make free of the ship’s air.

  “What are you going to do?” demanded the girl, rather shrilly.

  Tremont realized that she must have seen the unconscious Peters floating outside in the shaft.

  “You won’t like it!” he promised.

  “Tremont! I didn’t know they’d do anything to you. Can’t…you and I…make some kind of…deal?”

  Tremont stared at her levelly.

  “But I’d have to really sleep sometime,” he pointed out gently. “How can I trust you…?”

  * * * *

  He was hardly a million miles out from the satellite system of Centauri VI when the Space Patrol ship he had called managed to put a pilot aboard to land the Annabel for him on the largest moon.

  Tremont returned wearily from helping the man in the air lock—which he did with a practiced efficiency that surprised the pilot—to resume his talk with the patrol-ship captain waiting on the screen.

  “We could have done it sooner, you know,” said the latter curiously. “Well, now that I see him beside you, perhaps you’ll explain your request to delay, and also what those pips trailing you are.”

  “It’s all the same story,” said Tremont, and explained his difficulties.

  The patrol captain frowned and expressed a wish to lay hands on the highjackers.

  “Well, they’re due back in”—Tremont consulted his watch—“about two hours. I wanted them near the ends of their orbits as you approached.”

  “You mean there are three bodies out there?”

  “Live ones, in spacesuits,” said Tremont. “Experience is a great teacher. As soon as I sighted Braigh coming back, I set up a regular system.”

  He explained how he had removed all tools from the three spacesuits, added extra tanks, and stuffed the trio into them, either unconscious or at gunpoint.

  “Then, having fastened the ankles together and wired the wrists to the thighs so they couldn’t move at all, I launched them one at a time with enough pressure in the air lock to give four-hour orbits. That gave me sleeping time.”

  “And what about them?” asked the captain.

  “Oh, at the end of that period, they’d come drifting in at one-hour intervals. Counting all the necessary operations, each of them got thirty minutes actually out of the suit to eat and so on. Then out he’d go while I fished in the next one. They didn’t like it, but they weren’t so tough one at a time.”

  “Let’s see—” mused the captain. “Every four hours, you’d have to spend…why, only two hours processing them. As a result, you kept complete control and came shooting in here with your own satellite system revolving about you.”

  “And your friends? How have they been passing the time?”

  “Well, either figuring out how to take me next time,” guessed Tremont, “or wishing they were moving in more honest circles!”

  FLAMEDOWN

  Charlie Holmes lost touch with reality amid rending and shattering sounds that lingered dimly. Blackness engulfed him in a wave of agony.

  He was not sure exactly when the possibility of opening his eyes occurred to him. Vaguely, he could sense—“remember” was too definite—much tugging and hauling upon his supine body. It doubtless seemed justifiable, but he flinched from recalling more clearly that which must have been so extremely unpleasant.

  Gently, now, he tried rolling his head a few inches right, then left. When it hurt only one-tenth as much as he feared, he let his eyes open.

  “Hel-lo!” rasped the bulbous creature squatting beside his pallet.

  Charlie shut his eyes quickly, and very tightly.

  Something with a dampish, spongy tip, probably one of the grape-red tentacles he had glimpsed, prodded his shoulder.

  “Hel-lo!” insisted the scratchy voice.

  Charlie peeped warily, was trapped at it, and opened his eyes resignedly.

  “Where’n’ell am I?” he inquired.

  It sounded very trite, even in his confused condition. Sections of the dark red skin before him, especially on the barrel-shaped belly, quivered as he spoke.

  “Surely,” grated the remarkable voice, “you remember something?”

  “The crash!” gasped Charlie, sitting up abruptly.

  He held his breath, awaiting the knifing pain it seemed natural to expect. When he felt none, he cautiously fingered his ribs, and then a horrid thought prompted him to wiggle his bare toes. Everything seemed to be in place.

  He lay in a small room, on a thin pallet of furs. Floor and walls of slick, ocher clay reflected the bright outside light pouring through a wide doorway.

  “What’s all the sand?” he demanded, squinting at the heatwaves outside.

  “You do not recognize it? Look again, Earthman!”

  Earthman! thought Charlie. It must be real: I can still see him. What a whack on the head I must have got!

  “You are in pain?” asked the creature solicitously.

  “Oh…no. Just…I can’t remember. The crash…and then—”

  “Ah, yes. You have not been conscious for some time.” His reddish host rippled upward to stand more or less erect upon three thick tentacles. “Even with us, memory is slow after shock. And you may be uneasy in the lighter gravity.”

  Light gravity! reflected Charlie. This can only mean—MARS! Sure! That must be it—I was piloting a rocket and cracked up somewhere on Mars.

  It felt right to him. He decided that the rest of his memory would return.

  “Are you able to rise?” asked the other, extending a helpful tentacle.

  The Earthman managed to haul himself stiffly to his feet.

  “Say, my name is Holmes,” he introduced himself dizzily.

  “I am Kho Theki. In your language, learned years since from other spacemen, I might say ‘Fiery Canalman.’”

  “Has to be Mars,” muttered Charlie under his breath. “What a bump! When can you show me what’s left of the ship?”

  “There will be no time,” answered the Martian.

  Bunches of small muscles twitched here and there across the front of his round, pudgy head. Charlie was getting used to the single eye, half the size of an orange and not much duller. With imagination, the various lumps and organs surrounding it might be considered a face.

  “The priestesses will lead the crowd here,” predicted Kho. “They know I took an Earthman, and I fear they have finished with the others.”

  “Finished with— What?” demanded the Earthman, shaking his head in hopes of clearing it enough to figure out what was wrong.

  “It has been an extremely dry season.” Kho rippled his tentacles and moved lissomely to the doorway, assuming a grotesquely furtive posture as he peered out. “The people are maddened by the drought. The will be aroused to sacrifice you to the Canal Gods, like the others who survived.”

  “Canal gods!” croaked Charlie. “This can’t be right! Aren’t you civilized here? I can’t be the only Earthman they’ve seen!”

  “It is true that Earthmen are perfectly safe at most times.”

  “But the laws! The earth consul—”

  Kho snapped the tip of a tentacle at him.

  “The canals are low. You can feel the heat and dryness for yourself. The crowds are inflamed by temple prophecies. And then, your ship, flaming down from the skies—”

  He snapped all this tentacle tips at once.

  * * * *

  From somewhere outside, a threatening murmur became audible. It was an unholy blend of rasping shouts and shriller chanting, punctuated by notes of a brassy gong. As Charlie li
stened, the volume rose noticeably.

  Kho reached out with one tentacle and wrapped six inches about the Earthman’s wrist. When he plunged through the doorway, Charlie perforce went right with him.

  Whipping around a corner of the hut, he had time for a quick squint at the chanters. Kho alone had looked weirdly alien. Two hundred like him—!

  Led by a dozen bulgy figures in streaming robes, masked and decorated in brass, the natives were swarming over the sand toward the fugitives. They had evidently been busy. Above a distant cluster of low buildings, a column of smoke spiraled upward suggestively.

  Kho led the way at a flowing gallop over a sandstone ridge and down a long slope toward what looked like the junction of two gullies.

  “The canal,” he wheezed. “With luck, we may find a boat.”

  A frenzied screech went up as the mob topped the ridge and regained sight of them. Charlie, having all he could do to breathe in the thin air, tried to shake his wrist loose. Now that they were descending the slope, he saw where the water was. They slid down a four-foot drop in a cloud of fine, choking dust, and were faced by several puntlike craft stranded on the mudflat beyond. The water was fifty feet further.

  “We should have gone down-stream,” said Kho, “but we can wade.”

  Their momentum carried them several steps into the mud before Charlie realized how wrong that was. Then, as they floundered about to regain the solid bank, it became apparent that they would never reach it in time.

  “They are catching us,” rasped Kho.

  The howling crowd was scarcely a hundred yards away. The heat waves shimmered above the reddish desert sand until the Martians were blurred before Charlie’s burning eyes. His feet churned the clinging mud, and he felt as if he were running in a dream.

  “I’m sorry you’re in it, too,” he panted.

  “It does not matter. I act as I must.”

  The Earthman rubbed sweat from his eyes with the back of a muddy hand.

  “Everything is wrong,” he mumbled. “I still can’t remember cracking up the ship. Why did I always want to be a rocket pilot? Well…I made my bed!”

  The oncoming figures wavered and blurred in the heat. Kho emitted a grating sound reminiscent of an Earthly chuckle.

  “As do all you mortals—who finally have to lie in them,” he rasped. “I will tell you now, since I can carry this episode little farther. You have never piloted a spaceship.”

  Charlie gaped at him incredulously.

  “You…you…what about the wreck?”

  “It was a truck that hit you, Charles Holmes. You have no more sense than to be crossing the street with your nose in a magazine just purchased on the corner.”

  With some dulled, creeping, semi-detached facet of his mind, Charlie noted that the running figures still floated above the sand without actually drawing near.

  “Are you—Do you mean I’m…d-d-d—?”

  “Of course you are,” grated Kho amiably. “And in view of certain actions during your life, there will be quite a period of—shall we say—probation. When I was assigned to you, your reading habits suggested an amusing series of variations. You cannot know how dull it is to keep frustrating the same old dreams!”

  “Amusing?” repeated Charlie, beyond caring about the whimper in his tone.

  The mob was dissolving into thin smoke, and the horizon was shrinking.

  Kbo himself was altering into something redder of skin but equipped with a normal number of limbs, discounting the barbed tail. The constant heat of the “desert” began, at last, to seem explicable.

  “For me a great amusement,” grinned Kho, displaying hideous tusks. “Next time, I’ll be a Venusian. You will lose again. Then we can visit other planets, and stars…oh, we shall see a lot of each other!”

  He cheerfully polished one horn with a clawed finger.

  “You won’t enjoy it!” he promised.

  THE ENVOY, HER

  Despite the concentrated patrol defenses, the Emperor’s space yacht slipped down to the surface of Klo, second moon of Jursa, without incident. Only recently, such a show of force would have drawn a flight of torpedo rockets from the rebellious planet; but the Jursan agitators for a scientific renaissance had at last been beaten to their knees.

  A landing tube was connected between the ship and the transparent dome that had been constructed on this airless satellite for the convenience of the lord of the system. Notables in military posts or present on some other excuse gathered to greet their master.

  “By Pollux!” gasped one onlooker. “Those guards must all be seven feet tall!”

  The file of magnificent soldiers, who gave the impression of being almost entirely armor-plated, deployed on either side of the landing tube exit. They were followed by a figure glittering enough to be an emperor; but since he was attended by only four officials in bejeweled scarlet the crowd recognized him for a chamberlain.

  “His Illustrious Sublimity the Lord Vyrtl, Viceroy for Terra, Emperor of Pollux, and of all its fourteen planets, and of all their thirty-seven satellites, and of all the nations thereon, Co-ordinator of the planet Hebryxid—”

  It went on at some length, but the man who led the next little parade out of the landing tube paid no heed. The part about Terra was a vestige of centuries before communications had lapsed, and served no purpose but to remind him that new contact with the original planet was one of the Jursans’ aims. The rest of his titles he could, by now, recite backwards.

  The crowd of officialdom gaped at him as he stood there. He was a tall man, which conveniently helped conceal a tendency toward obesity. Under the excess tissue, his face had a massive strength, with broad bones and jutting chin and nose; but the gray eyes were weary and cynical.

  “Wilkins!” he ordered in a bored monotone. “Find which yokel is in charge, and burn a jet under him!”

  * * * *

  A resplendent aide hustled forward to where the official in charge of the dome was wetting his lips over his rehearsed greeting. It was quickly made plain that His Illustrious Sublimity desired transportation and a look at the quarters he would have to put up with until the jackals on Jursa came to their senses.

  The official had tried to provide for every known imperial fancy. He smirked delightfully when Vyrtl caught sight of the lozards tethered at one side.

  “By Pollux!” exclaimed the Emperor, his eye brightening. “We hadn’t expected the pleasure of riding till this was over.”

  “He tells me they have built a forest, Sire,” reported the aide. “About half a mile square. At least, you will have some relaxation.”

  “Good! It is all very well playing the soldier and roughing it informally, but a man must have something!”

  He surveyed the reptilian mounts that were led forward and chose one whose eight legs were a trifle longer than average. With reasonable agility, considering his bulk, he hoisted himself into the saddle and set off toward the miniature palace awaiting him. His guardsmen trotted alongside while the rest of his retinue mounted and followed as best they could.

  He drew rein once, to gaze up through the dome at the yellow-green disk of Jursa. Wilkins overtook him.

  “Note the dark line in the southern hemisphere, Sire,” he said. “The result of Marshal Tzyfol’s sweep—the one that broke through their fleets and led to their plea for terms.”

  “Excellent!” said the Emperor. He lowered his gaze and stretched his neck uncomfortably. Vyrtl was unaccustomed to looking up at anything or anybody. “They will bear our mark.”

  “It will teach them the lesson they deserve,” agreed Wilkins dutifully. “Autonomy, indeed!”

  “Quite,” said Vyrtl, urging his lozard forward. “Who are those fools to think they can demand exemption from established imperial laws…they should be satisfied with the standard textbooks and forget their puttering! Ha—what’s this?”
/>
  He pulled up before a small replica of the palace.

  “The dome engineer built it for your wives, Sire.”

  “Our wives?”

  “Twenty of them volunteered to share the rigors of the campaign. Their special transport arrived just before us.”

  “Humph!” grunted Vyrtl, riding past.

  * * * *

  Early the next morning, after the engineers had arranged a dawn for his benefit, Vyrtl called a council of his commanders. Chief-of-Staff Robert Tzyfol reported on the situation.

  The rebellious Jursans were sending a representative to ask for terms. In the Marshal’s strongly expressed opinion, no leniency was necessary. The imperial fleets were slowly but surely stamping out all resistance, making Jursa unlivable.

  “Abject submission is their only course,” he declared.

  It was the sort of declaration with which Vyrtl might have agreed, had he been able to voice it first.

  As it was, he announced that he would keep it in mind when judging the fate of the rebels. He had no inclination to destroy a perfectly good, tax-paying planet if he could whip its inhabitants into line by other means.

  He ended the conference by stating his intention to ride in the artificial forest. He enjoyed the glances of relief among the generals—especially the older and more brittle ones—when he gave them leave to resume their military duties instead of attending him.

  A few hours later, Wilkins found Vyrtl and a small retinue resting beside a pool at the edge of the forest.

  “The rebel envoy has arrived, Sire,” he reported.

  Vyrtl kicked a pebble into the pool and spat after it. “We shall see him immediately,” he announced. “No use wasting ceremony on the villain.”

  Returning to the palace, he strode into the audience chamber and signaled for the envoy to be admitted. Still warm from his ride and insultingly disheveled, he sat in the imitation of the great throne on his capital planet, Hebryxid.

  “If he isn’t brisk,” he muttered to Wilkins, “we may teach him promptness by hunting him through the forest tomorrow.”