Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  “What can I say?” she pleaded. “I’m only human.”

  He looked up bitterly. The question was in his eyes. He did not need to voice it. Jenna knew what he was thinking. And he knew that she understood, for the hurt was in her eyes.

  “Hey!” came Grant’s voice. “I’ve got us a mascot! C’mere, Ears. Nice fella. ’Tis a woebegone pup, spaniel. Lonely and aching for someone to scratch his tummy. Up, Ears! You’re my good luck! The mutt is sitting on the seat like he knew what it was all about. A sharp little rascal. I’ll bring him home to you.”

  Jack drove on, one hand on the wheel and the right hand on the dog’s head, stroking gently. Who, he wondered, would leave a pet in a contaminated area? Abandoned to something that no dog could possibly understand.

  And he thought, briefly, that he and the dog were in the same boat.

  “You can carry my tool bag,” he told the pup over the rumble of the battle buggy.

  Jenna and Ralph listened to Grant talking to the dog. The man rattled on, speaking lightly, caressingly to the animal, and his words were banal to the tensity in the scanning room.

  “I wish I knew,” said Lindsay.

  “Ralph, stop it!” cried his wife. “Stop playing around the point. If you think I’m guilty, come out and say so!”

  “I’m . . . not certain.”

  “Have you no faith in me?”

  “Jenna, I—”

  “Folks, I’m stopping the buggy, and Ears and I will go over and see that thing right now. So far, there’s been no mental disturbances, Jenna. That’s the one thing I’m watching for.”

  Lindsay looked at her.

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said. He wondered, again, and it was in his face.

  Her voice went out, and Grant answered. “If either of us feel anything—?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she promised.

  “Will you?” muttered her husband.

  “I will,” she blazed at him.

  “Lindsay,” snapped Grant, “get off of it! Jenna has no more treachery in her soul than I have, and I know my own heart!”

  Ralph Lindsay calmed. Jenna looked at him and knew that the man outside was a sort of safety valve. Her husband was on the verge of breakdown, she guessed, and she was in a nervous state herself. The man out there had been holding the group together for hours, now. What would happen if he went—?

  “No!” she pleaded.

  But something inside of her knew that he would go, like the rest.

  “No!” she said with a half-scream.

  “‘No’ what?” asked Lindsay.

  “Grant mustn’t!”

  Lindsay looked at her. “Isn’t that his job?” he said flatly.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Perhaps you can fix it,” said her husband cynically. She looked at him in disbelief. Was this the man she loved?

  Then he turned the knife in the wound. “Or,” he said vindictively, “is that your job?”

  “Lindsay, shut up, you fool!”

  Lindsay opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Trouble with you, Lindsay, is that you’ve a rankle or two in your system which should have been burned out a long time ago. You poor fool, don’t you know that every man reaches a crossroad every day? There’s not one of us who mustn’t give up something to get something else. That’s why we have asylums—for people who can’t make up their minds, or people who dislike their decisions and try to go back, mentally. The normal man accepts his decision and uses that as experience in making the next one, instead of sitting there, spending his life wondering what if he’d taken the other road. Add up your life, Lindsay, and see whether the credits are better than the debits. You can’t have everything!”

  Then the tone of his voice changed.

  “I’m leaving the battle buggy now, and Ears and I are approaching the thing. I have no fear of it, really. I’m . . . curious. What makes these things go off? This, fellers, is a physical phenomenon, developed by human beings—”

  “Martians,” corrected Lindsay.

  “They’re classified as human,” snapped Grant. “And a lot of them are more human than the pure-white Terran. Spinach, I call it. Anyway, there is a simple explanation for all this and when it is uncovered, all of your rantings and ravings will go to pieces like a bit of charred paper. Call it telepathy if you want—I’m not discounting though I’m skeptical—but I don’t feel any warnings yet.”

  Jenna sat down, closed her eyes, and composed her body into a relaxed pose. She said nothing. Lindsay noted, and said: “Keep it coming, Grant.”

  “Well,” said Grant, “we’re at the critical hundred feet, Ears and I. Come here, mutt! That thing is dangerous! Dog doesn’t care, folks. Y’know, there’s nothing like having a mutt around to teach you faith. Jenna?”

  She opened her eyes. “Yes?”

  “I’m going in! You’re Martian and you’re sensitive. Maybe you can catch the backwash if there’s any mental shenanigans.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Believe it now?” called Lindsay.

  “Not entirely. But I’m not missing any bets. Now, I am taking my little hatchet in one hand and I’m going out to . . . Jenna! You—!”

  The storm burst, the sky flared bright, and the waves of sheer energy beat the ship, stormed in through the windows and the radiation counter shrilled madly. The pillar of fire mounted like a rolling cloud, reaching for the sun.

  “Grant,” said Lindsay with a dry throat.

  Jenna sobbed.

  “What did he mean?” demanded Lindsay.

  Jenna shook away her tears, swallowed deeply. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  “You—?”

  “I caught it,” she said.

  “Then it was you,” he snapped harshly. “Tell me, Jenna, what kind of enticement did you use to get him going?”

  “You fool,” she snarled at him. “Blind, stupid fool.” She stood up, blazing. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve taken all you gave me, and took it gladly, happily. And I hoped that I could make up to you for . . . for . . . causing your loss. Yet you’ve never forgotten that I’m Martian, and that if you’d married a Terran you could have the plaudits and the admiration due any fighting officer. That’s rankled in your soul until you hate me!” she screamed. “And what could I do? I’d have made it up to you,” she said, her voice quieting, “but I didn’t know how. And now you think I’m responsible. Well,” she said accusingly, “how do I know but that you are planning revenge on Terra for being blind.”

  “Jenna, you—”

  “Well, I do know. And if you think that I’m—”

  “What do you want me to think?” he asked her. “What were Grant’s last words?”

  “He—”

  “Accused you!”

  Jenna turned quietly. She stopped at the door. “I solved one fuse because I thought Martian,” she said quietly. “I’ll solve the next one for you! You’ve wanted to be free to join the Corps in space. Then follow me close, because when I solve this one there will be no question.”

  “Jenna—what is it?”

  “It is the fuse itself,” she said. “A rudimentary brain that reacts upon receiving any thought of removal when that thought originates within a hundred feet or so.”

  “Utterly fantastic!”

  “Is it?” she asked. “Watch!”

  Jenna passed through the door and left. Moments later, the whine of a skyplane crescendoed and diminished. Jenna was heading for the next site. Lindsay sat for a long time, his mind whirling.

  Jenna was right. He’d been fretting over his denial of the right to command. It hadn’t been fair. A group of psychoneurotics—commanded by one. Himself. Not denied the right to command because of his wife, but because of his psychotic nature. For one, any Terran who would enter a mixed-marriage was not possessed of the normal adjustment, and the same true of any Martian. Secondly, were he normal, fighting in combat would produce a psychotic condition since he’d be set against his wife’s co
untrymen.

  He leaped up and ran to the driving panel. Harshly he threw the autopilot out of gear and took the controls himself. The ship took off raggedly and hissed through the upper air, racing.

  “Jenna!” he called into the radio.

  No answer.

  “Jenna! Turn on your receiver! Please,” he begged.

  No answer.

  His trembling hands turned up the power and the ship shuddered at the overload drive. The upper air shrilled against rivet head and port sill. The burble point came and the ship shook and rattled terribly. Yet he knew that he had but an even chance. For Jenna was driving a superspeed plane that could race as fast as the big ship—with less danger in atmosphere.

  No spacecraft was made to travel horizontally across a planet. But Ralph Lindsay in a frenzy, swore at the sidelong pace, and turned his ship to arrow through the upper air. The burble died, but throughout the ship came the rattle of falling objects, dumped from table and shelf.

  He continued to cry into the microphone, and strained his ears for the answer that was not there.

  He depressed the nose of the ship and went into a steep, screaming dive.

  He—saw her. A minute speck, even through the telescope.

  And at the moment he saw her, she stepped from the plane onto the ground, and spoke to him through the radio.

  “I’ve no receiver on, Ralph. But listen—and stay back!”

  “Jenna!” he screamed.

  “Your duty, remember?” she said quietly. “It is to solve these—things. Your duty, I took away, and now I will return it.”

  “Jenna!” he pleaded. “I don’t want—”

  In futility, he gave up. She could not hear. An hypnosis took him, held him in its grip.

  “Ralph,” she said. “Watch carefully.”

  He shook himself.

  Angrily, he fought the controls. Madly he tried to urge another dyne from the drivers. He would be—too late.

  “Jenna! Don’t!”

  “Ralph, I’m approaching the bomb. I am now seventy feet from it. See?”

  Seventy feet?

  “I’m seventy feet from it, Ralph, because I’ve thought only of you. Not once have I thought of defus—”

  The blast caught the diving ship and stopped it in its tracks, turned it end for end and sent it rocketing crazily away from the mad scene of turbulence. It arched high into the sky, tumbling. Numb, Lindsay reacted automatically. War, hatred, suspicion. All boiled up in his mind.

  The answer? It was clear, finally. The how and the why and the wherefore. His problem—solved.

  But the solution was bitter in his mouth.

  Instinctively driving the ship toward the next site Lindsay’s eyes still saw the pathetic figure silhouetted against that intolerable blast. Solution? She had given him both solutions.

  His mind went back through the years. She’d been his, completely. He’d known all the happiness any man needed. Now he was free to take his place—and he didn’t want it. What was honor? A mind, clinging to its own ideals. Was there more honor in clinging to his choice or in becoming a public figure, abandoning his choice.

  No, Jenna hadn’t given it to him. He’d taken it.

  More balance, more sensible evaluation of his own set of desires would have kept him from driving her—

  He landed his ship flatwise, furrowing the ground. Blindly, he looked across the field toward the—ticking thing.

  “Blast!” he snarled at the thing.

  He selected tools. Then he faced it again. “Go ahead. Explode.” Briefly, he wondered how it would feel—and if any feeling were possible in microseconds.

  “I’m coming,” he told it.

  He hit it a ringing blow with a sledge hammer. “Blast!” he cried angrily.

  Down within the robomb, a lacery lacework of silver in a mass of complex hydrocarbon dielectrics sent impulses along flowing filaments of metal to other shapeless tangles of silver globs. Countercurrents flowed back and the filaments of metal became a tangled highway of multipurposed impulses. Countercurrents canceled and mixed with flowing currents, creating new wave shapes that flowed in both directions from the mixing point, and the silver-shot masses at either end of the multitudinous filamentary transmission lines accepted the false wave shapes, became confused by their unfamiliarity, and sent forth more shapes of meaningless nature.

  It was unable to cope with a situation whereby it was commanded to explode. The right act—upon that stimulus—had not been taught—built into—it.

  And still the thoughts beat upon the rudimentary brain.

  Lindsay climbed atop the thing. “Blast!” he screamed.

  The leering face of a Martian looked up at him, and smiled sneeringly. Lindsay snapped his cutting torch and thrust the white-hot flame in the Martian’s eye, and the face distorted and became Jenna. She lifted a hand and pushed the flame away. It went, cutting the hard metal around her face. Characters were burned in her forehead, and he read them without understanding. Tiny hands came out through the cut in the metal and wiped Jenna’s face from the top of the fuse. They took the white-hot flame in their hands and directed it.

  He lifted. He struck at Jack Grant’s laughing face with a bar and drove it loose.

  “Blast,” he told Jack Grant.

  Violently, he pried upon the thing. It came up slowly, like Circe, rising out of the sea—or was it Venus—or Jenna. It was exquisitely formed, delicately shaped, but his hands took it and crushed the softly curving figure into a geometrical cylinder, and the softness left it as he lifted it out of the body of the bomb.

  From the vacant hole there came a small flow of neutrons and they registered on the counter he wore.

  Lindsay jumped down, the mists clearing. He looked at the thing in his hands and laughed. The laugh welled up and broke into a wild sob. Lindsay crumpled to the ground, holding the fuse in his lap and crying over it.

  He cried with grief, raved at his own madness. He ignored his own loss, for had he admitted that, he would have gone mad once more.

  Paradox, paradox. He—who had tried to force death—was unable to do so. He was alone and a failure. He hurled the fuse at the vast shell of the robomb.

  “Stinking failure,” he snarled at it. Then came clearness. He picked up the fuse once more and looked at it. Somewhere in his cloud of madness he had succeeded in defus—

  The auxiliary detonator went BANG! and startled him from the last hazy mists of madness into cold reality.

  Once back in the loneliness of his ship, he called Haynes. He reported all, in a dull voice and asked for help. Later, the help came to find Lindsay working over the two-ended artificial mind, measuring minute electronic impulses and stimulating the nodules of the filamentary connectors to see what happened. From this sample, he knew that the Terran Technical Corps could devise a means of confusing the mental fuses in other robombs.

  Ralph Lindsay concluded his lecture to the members of his reconstructed Decontamination Squadron. Then he turned away from them and a bitterness twisted his mouth as he looked up into the sky at the flight squadron that was passing overhead.

  It still was not for Lindsay.

  He picked up the counter-menta-path and started the battle buggy across the rough field toward the waiting Martian robomb. In the back of his mind was a half-formed prayer that some day he might find one too complicated for him. But until that day he would search for that peace he knew that he would never find.

  The End

  ***********************************

  A Dog's Life,

  by George O. Smith

  Thrilling Wonder Stories April 1948

  Short Story - 3258 words

  Exploring the future, Jim Forrest finds himself

  wagging along in a different world

  and barking up the wrong tree!

  Ed Knight was scornful of the idea.

  “Time travel?” he jeered. “You can’t make it work!”

  Jim Forrest smiled with a superior tolera
nce. “I didn’t say time travel in the first place, and secondly I don’t hope to travel. If I went far enough ahead to make it interesting, I’d have as much trouble making a living as an ignorant Twelfth Century farmer would in this day. And if I went back, I’d be as equally out of place. Frankly, about all that it seems good for would be to go ahead, and then return with a few things that I can use here to make life more comfortable for myself.”

  Ed Knight nodded. “There’s only one thing that strikes me wrong,” he said. “Supposing you go into the future and find a gadget that will actually intensify a light beam—such as an amplified telescope—enabling you to see the small details of a distant planet, for instance. Fine. You like the gadget and so you bring all the nifty details back with you and you are shortly acclaimed the inventor, and you receive a huge sum of moola, and retire on the proceeds.”

  “Sure, that’s the idea,” said Forrest.

  “Yeah? But then in the year when the thing was really invented, it appears that the thing has been in use for a couple of hundred years as a refined production, not even as crude experimental models. Why should any inventor go through the labor of inventing the thing from the beginning when the thing can be brought back, complete and working, from the future? Therefore it is never invented and you couldn’t bring it back. Whereupon it is not there and the inventor can then invent it, which of course means that you can bring it back, thus making its original concept unnecessary. Whereupon if it was never invented, it wouldn’t be there for you to look over and bring back as a good, money-making idea—”

  “Wooooah!” yelled Jim Forrest. “You’re talking in circles.”

  “Uh-huh. Remember Toynbee’s famous knife? Well, where the devil did that start?”

  “We’re off the track,” said Knight. “I have this gadget, and if nothing else, we can see what kind of an answer Nature has to the Paradox.”

  “Okay, we’ll see. How does it work?”

  Forrest waved his hand at the device.