The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack(r)

by Robert Silverberg

  I blinked. Then the fog in my head cleared and I got out of my cradle. The stowaway turned around. He was quite a mess. The capillaries of his face had popped during the brief moments of top acceleration, and fine purplish lines now wriggled over his cheeks and nose, giving him a grade-A rum blossom, and bloodshot eyes to go with it. He had some choice bruises that he must have acquired while rattling around during blastoff, and his nose had been bleeding all over his shirt. It was the little Venusian fanatic who had threatened me at the hotel.

  “How the hell did you get aboard?” I demanded.

  “Slipped through the security checkers…but the ship took off ahead of schedule. I did not expect to be on board when blastoff came.”

  “Sorry to have fouled up your plans,” I told him.

  “But I regained consciousness in time. Your ship is ruined! You refused to heed my warning, and now you will never reach Ganymede alive. So perish all enemies of the Venusian Republic! So perish those who have desecrated our noble shrines!”

  He was practically foaming at the mouth. I started toward him. He swung the crowbar and might have bashed my head in if he had known how to handle himself under nograv conditions, but he didn’t, and the only result of his exertion was to send himself drifting toward the roof of the cabin. I yanked on his leg as it went past me and dragged him down. The crowbar dropped from his numb hand. I caught it and poked him across the head with it.

  There isn’t any hesitation in a spaceman’s mind when he finds a stowaway. Fuel is a precious thing, and so is air and food; stowaways simply aren’t allowed to live. I didn’t feel any qualms about what I did next, but all the same I was glad that Erna Vanderweghe wasn’t awake and watching me while I went about it.

  I slipped into my breathing-helmet and sealed off the cabin. Opening the airlock, I carried the unconscious Venusian out the hatch and gave him a good push, imparting enough momentum to send him out on an orbit of his own. The compensating reaction pushed me back into the airlock. I closed the hatch. The Venusian must have died instantly, without ever knowing what was happening to him.

  Then I had a look-see to determine just how much damage the stowaway had been able to do before I woke up and caught him.

  It was plenty.

  All our communication equipment was gone, but permanently. The radio was a gutted ruin. The computer was smashed. Two auxiliary fuel tanks had been jettisoned. We were hopelessly off course in asteroid country, and the odds on reaching Ganymede looked mighty slim. By the time I finished making course corrections, we’d be down to our reserve fuel supply. Ganymede was about 350 million miles ahead of us. I didn’t see how we were going to travel more than a tenth that distance before air and food troubles set in, and we weren’t carrying enough fuel now for a safe landing even if we lived to reach Ganymede.

  It was time to wake Miss Vanderweghe and tell her the news, I figured.

  * * * *

  She was lying curled up tight in her acceleration cradle, asleep, with a childlike, trusting expression on her face. I watched her for perhaps five minutes before I woke her. She sat up immediately.

  “What—oh. Is everything all right? Did we make a good blastoff?”

  “Fine blastoff,” I said quietly. “But everything isn’t all right.” I told her about the stowaway and how thoroughly he had wrecked us.

  “Oh—that horrible little man from Venus! I knew he had followed me to Mars—that’s why I wanted to leave for Ganymede so soon. He made all sorts of absurd threats, as if the things I had bought were holy relics—”

  “They are, in a way. If you worship Macintyre and his fellow rebels, then the stuff you carried away is equivalent to the True Cross, I suppose.”

  “I’m so sorry I got you into this, Sam.”

  I shrugged. “It’s my own fault all the way. Your Venusian friend approached me at the hotel this afternoon and warned me off, but I didn’t listen to him. I had my chance to pull out.”

  “Where’s the stowaway now? Unconscious?”

  I shook my head, jerking my thumb toward the single port in her cabin. “He’s out there. Without a suit. Stowaways aren’t entitled to charity under the space laws.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly, turning pale. “I—see. You—ejected him.”

  I nodded. Then, to get off what promised to be an unpleasant topic, I said, “We’re in real trouble. We’re off course and we don’t have enough fuel for making corrections—not without jettisoning everything on board, ourselves included.”

  “I don’t mind if the cargo goes. I mean, I’d hate to lose it, but if you have to dump it—”

  “Uh-uh. The ship itself is the bulk of our mass. The problem isn’t the cargo. If there were only some way of jettisoning the ship—”

  My mouth sagged open. No, I thought. It wouldn’t ever work. It’s too fantastic to consider.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “We will jettison the ship. And we’ll get to Ganymede.”

  Luckily our saboteur friend hadn’t bothered to rip up my charts. I spent half an hour feverishly thumbing through the volume devoted to asteroid orbits, while Erna hovered over my shoulder, not daring to ask questions but probably wondering just what in blazes I was figuring out.

  Pretty soon I had a list of a dozen likely asteroids. I narrowed it down to five, then to three, then to one. I missed the convenience of my computer, but regulations require a pilot to be able to get along without one in a pinch, and I got along.

  I computed a course toward the asteroid known as (719)-Albert. Luck was riding with us. (719)-Albert was on the outward swing of his orbit. On the basis of some extremely rough computations I worked out an orbit for our crippled ship that would match Albert’s in a couple of hours.

  Finally, I looked up at Erna and grinned. “This is known as making a virtue out of necessity,” I said. “Want to know what’s going on?”

  “You bet I do.”

  I leaned back. “We’re on our way to a chunk of rock known as (719)-Albert, which is chugging along not far from here on its way through the asteroid belt. (719)-Albert is a rock about three miles in diameter. Figure that it’s half the size of Deimos—and Deimos is about as small as a place can get.”

  “But why are we going there?” she said, puzzled.

  “(7I9)-Albert has an exceedingly eccentric orbit—and I mean eccentric in its astronomical sense: not a peculiar orbit, just one that’s very highly elongated. At perihelion (719)-Albert passes around 20 million miles from the orbit of Earth. At aphelion, which is where he’s heading now, he comes within 90 million miles of the orbit of Jupiter. Unless my figures are completely cockeyed, Jupiter is going to be about 150 million miles from Albert about a week from now.”

  I saw I had lost her completely. She said dimly, “But you said a little while ago that we hardly had enough fuel to take us 50 million miles.”

  “In the ship,” I said. “Yes. But I’ve got other ideas. We’ll land on Albert and abandon the ship. Then we ride pickaback on the asteroid until its closest approach to Jupiter—and blast off without the ship.”

  “Blast off—how?”

  I smiled triumphantly. “We’ll make a raft out of your blessed logs,” I said. “Attach one of the ship’s rocket engines at the rear, and shove off. Escape velocity from Albert is so low it hardly matters. And since the mass of our raft will only be six or seven hundred pounds—Earthside weight, of course—instead of the thirty tons or so that this ship weighs, we’ll be able to coast to Ganymede with plenty of fuel left to burn.”

  She was looking at me as if I’d just delivered a lecture in the General Theory of Relativity. Apparently the niceties of space travel just weren’t in her line at all. But she smiled and tried to look understanding. “It sounds very clever,” she said with an uncertain grin.

  * * * *

  I felt pret
ty clever about everything myself, three hours later, when we landed on the surface of an asteroid that could only be (719)-Albert. It had taken only one minor course correction to get us here. Which meant that my rule-of-thumb astrogation had been pretty good.

  We donned breathing-suits and clambered out of the ship to inspect our landfall. (719)-Albert wasn’t very impressive. The landscape was mostly jagged upthrusts of a dark basalt-like rock. But the view was tremendous—a great backdrop of darkness, speckled with stars, and, much closer, the orbiting fragments of other lumps of rock. Albert’s horizon was on the foreshortened side, dipping away almost before it began. Gravitational attraction was so meager it hardly counted. A healthy jump was likely to continue indefinitely upward, as I made clear to Erna right at the start. I didn’t want her indulging in the usual hijinks that greenhorns are fond of when on a low-gravity planetoid such as this. I could visualize only too well the scene as she vanished into the void as the result of an overenthusiastic leap.

  We surveyed our holdings and found that there was enough food for two people for sixteen days—so we would make it with some to spare. The air supply was less abundant, but there was enough so we didn’t need to begin worrying just yet.

  We set about building the raft.

  Erna dragged the logs out of the cargo hold—their weight didn’t amount to anything, here, though I had to caution her about throwing them around carelessly; mass and weight aren’t synonymous, and those logs were sturdy enough to knock me for a loop regardless of how little they seemed to weigh. She fetched, and I assembled. We used the thirteen longest logs for the body of the raft, and trussed a couple across the bottom, and a couple more at the top. To make blastoff a little easier, we built the raft propped up against a rock outcropping, at a 45° angle.

  I unshipped the smallest rocket engine and fastened it securely to the rear of the raft. I strapped down as many fuel tanks as the raft would hold.

  Then—chuckling to myself—I asked Erna to help me haul the cannon out.

  “The cannon? Whatever for?”

  “To mount at the front of the raft.”

  “Are you figuring on meeting space pirates?”

  “I’m figuring on using the cannon as a brake,” I told her. We fastened it at the front of the raft, strapped down the supply of cannonballs and powder nearby it. The cannon would make an ideal brake. All we needed was something that would eject mass in a forwardly direction, pushing us back by courtesy of Newton’s Third Law. Why waste fuel when cannonballs would achieve the same purpose?

  It took us forty-eight standard Earthtime hours to build the raft. I don’t know how many thousands of (719)-Albert days that was, but the little asteroid spun on its axis like a yo-yo, and it seemed that the sun was rising or setting every time we took a breath.

  After I had bound the last thong around the rocket engine, Erna grinned and dashed into the ship. She returned, a few moments later, waving a red flag with some sort of blue-and-white design on it.

  “What’s that?”

  “The flag that flew over Macintyre’s cabin,” she explained. “It’s a rebel flag, and we’re not strictly insurrectionists, but we ought to have some kind of flag on our ship.”

  I was agreeable, so she mounted the flag just fore of the rocket engine. Then we returned to the ship to wait.

  We waited for three days, Earthtime—maybe several centuries by (719)-Albert reckoning. And in case you’re wondering how we passed the time on the barren asteroid for three days, just one reasonably virile ferry pilot and one nubile museum curator, the answer is no. We didn’t. I have an inflexible rule about making passes at passengers, even when we’re stranded on places like (719)-Albert and when the passengers are as pretty as this one is.

  That isn’t to say I didn’t feel temptation. Erna’s breathing-suit was of the plastic kind that looked as though it was force-molded to her body. I didn’t have to do much imagining. But I staunchly told Satan to get behind me, and—to my own amazement—he did. I resisted temptation and resisted it manfully.

  Meanwhile Jupiter swelled bigger and bigger as (719)-Albert plunged madly along its track toward its rendezvous with Jove. If luck rode with us—translated, if my math had been right—we would find Ganymede midway in her seven-plus day orbit round the big planet.

  Time came when the mass detectors in my ship informed me that Jupiter had stopped getting closer and was now getting farther away. That meant that (719)-Albert had passed its point of aphelion and was heading back toward Earth. It was time to get moving.

  “All aboard,” I told Erna. “Make sure everything we’re taking is strapped down tight—food, fuel, air tanks, cannonballs, flags.”

  She checked off as if we were running down meters and gauges at a spaceport. “Food. Fuel. Air tanks. Cannonballs. Flag. All set to blast, Captain.”

  “Okay. Get yourself flattened out and hang onto the raft while we blast.”

  Blastoff was a joke. I had computed the escape velocity of (719)-Albert at approximately .0015 miles/sec. We could have shoved off with a good rearward kick.

  But we had fuel to burn. “Allons!” I cried, slamming the rocket engine into action. A burst of flame hurled us upward into the night. “A la belle Ètoile!” I shouted. “To the stars!”

  The raft soared off into space. Erna laughed with delight. As (719)-Albert slowly sank into the sunset, we plunged forward toward giant Jupiter. The only thing missing was soft music in the background.

  * * * *

  We rode the raft for three days at constant acceleration. Jupiter grew, and grew, and grew, and gleaming Ganymede became visible peeking around the edge of the great planet. Erna became worried when she saw it.

  “Shouldn’t we head the raft over toward Ganymede?” she asked. “We’re pointed much too far forward.”

  I sighed. “We aren’t going to reach Ganymede for another couple of days,” I said. “We want to head for where Ganymede’s going to be then, not where it happens to be right now. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “I suppose so,” she said, pouting.

  We were right on course. Two days later we were heading downward toward the surface of Ganymede. It was like riding a magic carpet. I controlled our landing with the rockets, while Erna gleefully fired ball after ball to provide the needed deceleration. If Ganymede had had an atmosphere, of course, we’d have been whiffed to cinders in a moment—but there was no atmosphere to contend with. We made a perfect no-point landing, flat on the glistening blue-white ice. Lord knows what we must have looked like approaching from space.

  We had landed a hundred miles or so from the nearest entrance to the Ganymede Dome. I was dourly considering the prospect of trekking on foot, but Erna was certain we had been seen, and, sure enough, a snowcrawler manned by three incredulous colonists came out to fetch us. I never saw human eyes bulge the way those six eyes bulged at the sight of our raft.

  Part of the service I offer is guaranteed delivery, and so, a couple of weeks later, I rented a ship and made a return journey to (7I9)-Albert to pick up the remaining historical relics we had been forced to leave behind—some tattered uniforms and a few boxes of pamphlets. A week after that, a repair ship was despatched to pick up my ferry, and she was hauled to the dockyard on Ganymede and put back in operating condition at a trifling cost of a few thousand megabucks.

  These days I run a ferry service between the colonized moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and Erna is head curator of the Ganymede Museum. But I don’t take kindly toward getting employment, because it means I have to spend time away from home—and Erna. We were married a while back, you see.

  It’s a funny thing about General Macintyre’s log cabin. Despite Erna’s careful diagram, the cabin never got put back together. It seems that the people of Ganymede decided it was of no great value to display the cabin of some Venusian rebel when they could be s
howing an item of much more immediate associations for Ganymedeans.

  So they wouldn’t let Erna take the raft apart, and I had to buy myself a new rocket engine. You can see the raft in the museum on Ganymede, any time you happen to be in the neighborhood. If the curator’s around, she won’t mind answering questions. But don’t try to get playful with her. I’m awfully touchy about guys who make passes at my wife.

  THE DESSICATOR

  Originally published in Science Fiction Stories, May 1956.

  Mirnish brought the machine into the other room, where Scrodlee was busily bent over the ledgers, and sadly put it down. “I’ve finished it,” he said. “You can start Promoting.”

  Scrodlee leaped to his feet. “Antigravity! You have it! A marvelous feat, Mirnish, marvelous! This redeems all of your old blunders.”

  The inventor sat down heavily and caressed the small green box with his tentacles, looking at it with rue. “No. Not so, Scrodlee; I’m sorry, but I didn’t quite invent antigravity this time.”

  Scrodlee contemplated his partner with a cosmic patience born of long experience. “You finished it, you say, and you were working on antigravity. But you didn’t invent antigravity?”

  “No.”

  The Promoter spoke slowly, choosing his words with care. “Then—what—did—you—invent?” He looked expectantly at the other, remembering a long history of Mirnish’s inventions.

  Mirnish assumed a humble countenance. “I seem,” he said, “to have invented a Desiccator.” He waited for Scrodlee’s reaction, and it was not long in coming.

  “A Desiccator?” the Promoter repeated, standing up and beginning to pace up and down the little room. “That is just in line with some of your other things. You mean a machine that dries things out, don’t you? Just what we’ve all been waiting for—here on Mars, the dryest planet in the Galaxy, if not the Universe, what does Mirnish the inventor invent but a—a Desiccator!”