Beyond the End of Time (1952) Anthology

by Frederik Pohl (ed. )

  "In addition, there are a number of transmissions of a different kind, neither sound nor vision. They seem to be purely scientific--possibly instrument readings or something of that sort. All these programs were going out simultaneously on different frequency bands.

  "Now there must be a reason for all this. Orostron still thinks that the station simply wasn't switched off when it was deserted. But these aren't the sort of programs such a station would normally radiate at all. It was certainly used for interplanetary relaying--Klarten was quite right there. So these people must have crossed space, since none of the other planets had any life at the time of the last survey. Don't you agree?"

  Alveron was following intently.

  "Yes, that seems reasonable enough. But it's also certain that the beam was pointing to none of the other planets. I checked that myself."

  "I know," said Rugon. "What I want to discover is why a giant interplanetary relay station is busily transmitting pictures of a world about to be destroyed--pictures that would be of immense interest to scientists and astronomers. Some one had gone to a lot of trouble to arrange all those panoramic cameras. I am convinced that those beams were going somewhere."

  Alveron started up.

  "Do you imagine that there might be an outer planet that hasn't been reported?" he asked. "If so, your theory's certainly wrong. The beam wasn't even pointing in the plane of the Solar System. And even if it were--just look at this."

  He switched on the vision screen and adjusted the controls. Against the velvet curtain of space was hanging a blue-white sphere, apparently composed of many concentric shells of incandescent gas. Even though its immense distance made all movement invisible, it was clearly expanding at an enormous rate. At its centre was a blinding point of light--the white dwarf star that the sun had now become.

  "You probably don't realise just how big that sphere is," said Alveron. "Look at this."

  He increased the magnification until only the centre portion of the nova was visible. Close to its heart were two minute condensations, one on either side of the nucleus.

  "Those are the two giant planets of the system. They have still managed to retain their existence--after a fashion. And they were several hundred million miles from the sun. The nova is still expanding--but it's already twice the size of the Solar System."

  Rugon was silent for a moment.

  "Perhaps you're right," he said, rather grudgingly. "You've disposed of my first theory. But you still haven't satisfied me."

  He made several swift circuits of the room before speaking again. Alveron waited patiently. He knew the almost intuitive powers of his friend, who could often solve a problem when mere logic seemed insufficient.

  Then, rather slowly, Rugon began to speak again.

  "What do you think of this?" he said. "Suppose we've completely underestimated this people? Orostron did it once--he thought they could never have crossed space, since they'd only known radio for two centuries. Hansur II told me that.

  Well, Orostron was quite wrong. Perhaps we're all wrong. I've had a look at the material that Klarten brought back from the transmitter. He wasn't impressed by what he found, but it's a marvellous achievement for so short a time. There were devices in that station that belonged to civilizations thousands of years older. Alveron, can we follow that beam to see where it leads?"

  Alveron said nothing for a full minute. He had been more than half expecting the question, but it was not an easy one to answer. The main generators had gone completely. There was no point in trying to repair them. But there was still power available, and while there was power, anything could be done in time. It would mean a lot of improvisation, and some difficult manoeuvres, for the ship still had its enormous initial velocity. Yes, it could be done, and the activity would keep the crew from becoming further depressed, now that the reaction caused by the mission's failure had started to set in. The news that the nearest heavy repair ship could not reach them for three weeks had also caused a slump in morale.

  The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible. Very slowly, over many hours, the great ship began to discard the speed its main drive had given it in as many minutes. In a tremendous curve, millions of miles in radius, the S9000 changed its course and the star fields shifted round it.

  The manoeuvre took three days, but at the end of that time the ship was limping along a course parallel to the beam that had once come from Earth. They were heading out into emptiness, the blazing sphere that had been the sun dwindling slowly behind them. By the standards of interstellar flight, they were almost stationary.

  For hours Rugon strained over his instruments, driving his detector beams far ahead into space. There were certainly no planets within many light-years; there was no doubt of that. From time to time Alveron came to see him and always he had to give the same reply: "Nothing to report." About a fifth of the time Rugon's intuition let him down badly; he began to wonder if this was such an occasion.

  Not until a week later did the needles of the mass-detectors quiver feebly at the ends of their scales. But Rugon said nothing, not even to his captain. He waited until he was sure, and he went on waiting until even the short-range scanners began to react, and to build up the first faint pictures on the vision screen. Still he waited patiently until he could interpret the images. Then, when he knew that his wildest fancy was even less than the truth, he called his colleagues into the control room.

  The picture on the vision screen was the familiar one of endless star fields, sun beyond sun to the very limits of the Universe. Near the centre of the screen a distant nebula made a patch of haze that was difficult for the eye to grasp.

  Rugon increased the magnification. The stars flowed out of the field; the little nebula expanded until it filled the screen and then--it was a nebula no longer. A simultaneous gasp of amazement came from all the company at the sight that lay before them.

  Lying across league after league of space, ranged in a vast three-dimensional array of rows and columns with the precision of a marching army, were thousands of tiny pencils of light. They were moving swiftly; the whole immense lattice holding its shape as a single unit. Even as Alveron and his comrades watched, the formation began to drift off the screen and Rugon had to recenter the controls.

  After a long pause, Rugon started to speak.

  "This is the race," he said softly, "that has known radio for only two centuries--the race that we believed had crept to die in the heart of its planet. I have examined those images under the highest possible magnification.

  "That is the greatest fleet of which there has ever been a record. Each of those points of light represents a ship larger than our own. Of course, they are very primitive--what you see on the screen are the jets of their rockets. Yes, they dared to use rockets to bridge interstellar space! You realise what that means. It would take them centuries to reach the nearest star. The whole race must have embarked on this journey in the hope that its descendants would complete it, generations later.

  "To measure the extent of their accomplishment, think of the ages it took us to conquer space, and the longer ages still before we attempted to reach the stars. Even if we were threatened with annihilation, could we have done so much in so short a time? Remember, this is the youngest civilization in the Universe. Four hundred thousand years ago it did not even exist. What will it be a million years from now?"

  An hour later, Orostron left the crippled mother ship to make contact with the great fleet ahead. As the little torpedo disappeared among the stars, Alveron turned to his friend and made a remark that Rugon was often to remember in the years ahead.

  "I wonder what they'll be like?" he mused. "Will they be nothing but wonderful engineers, with no art or philosophy? They're going to have such a surprise when Orostron reaches them--I expect it will be rather a blow to their pride. It's funny how all isolated races think they're the only people in the Universe. But th
ey should be grateful to us; we're going to save them a good many hundred years of travel."

  Alveron glanced at the Milky Way, lying like a veil of silver mist across the vision screen. He waved toward it with a sweep of a tentacle that embraced the whole circle of the Galaxy, from the Central Planets to the lonely suns of the Rim.

  "You know," he said to Rugon, "I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don't like our little Federation?" He waved once more toward the star-clouds that lay massed across the screen, glowing with the light of their countless suns.

  "Something tells me they'll be very determined people," he added. "We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one."

  Rugon laughed at his captain's little joke.

  Twenty years afterward, the remark didn't seem funny.

  It was a child’s dream, and a child’s silly toy. Strange that it could be used to murder

  STEPSON OF SPACE

  By Raymond Z. Gallun

  Scared? That was hardly the word. Andy Matthews’ bristly, dust-grimed cheeks felt stiff; and there was a sensation inside him as though his heart was trying to

  He couldn’t get it all at once. To do so, fortunately, would have been impossible. He only knew that there was something fearfully and incomprehensibly wrong about his eight-year-old son, Jack!

  Andy just stood there in the tool room over the granary, and stared, like a big, dumb ox, frightened, confused, pathetically grim, yet helpless. Oh, he would have died for his boy a hundred times over, if the danger was something he could really approach and fight. But this was different. It made him want to crawl into a dark comer with a loaded shotgun, and wait for a masked mystery to reveal itself. But he knew right away that this wouldn't be any good either!

  The apparatus had looked so very harmless when he had first accidentally uncovered it. A peach box base. Tin cans nailed in a circle on top of it. A length of fine-gauge wire from an old radio set, was wrapped around each can, in a clumsy yet patiently involved design. The lengths o( wire converged toward the center of the circle of cans, to form a kind of wheel-like net, each strand of which was stapled to a heavy central block of wood. The exposed upper surface of the latter, bore a deep, elongated indentation, as though some object had struck it with terrific force. Except for an old fashioned double-throw electric switch, nailed to the side of the box, that was all.

  The thing looked like any of the various contraptions that kids pound together while playing inventor. Andy had chuckled fondly when he'd dragged the rigamajig out of its place of concealment, and had begun to fuss with the switch; for he remembered the hammering he had heard here in the tool room every time he had come in from the fields. Jack had been working on his "invention" for almost a month.

  So Andy had been entirely unwarned. But when he had closed that switch, he had received the surprise of his life. His fingers had been a little off the insulated handle, and had touched the metal. Blue sparks had snapped across Andy's calloused palm. His whole body had recoiled under the staggering blow of a high-tension shock. It might have killed him, had he not stumbled backward.

  That was the point now—the reason for his fearful confusion—the focus of an incredibly incongruous mixture of facts. Jack was just eight. This rigamajig—peach box, cans, and wires—was kid stuff. And yet the shock that had struck Andy, was like the wallop of a high-voltage line! Nor was there any source, within half a mile or more, from which the contraption might draw the power

  The thought that he was perhaps the father of a child genius, got Andy nowhere. Jack was smart, all right; but

  certainly no eight-year-old, no matter how brilliant his mind might be, could ever invent a miracle like this.

  The apparatus was still active there on the floor, (or the switch was closed. A greenish fluorescence, like worms of turbid light, had crept along each of the radiating wire strands. In the brown shadows of the tool room, that soft witchfire burned wickedly, to the accompaniment of a low murmur, that seemed to threaten and predict un-guessable developments. In the dusty air, there was a slight odor of scorched insulation.

  Moved by instinct, Andy Matthews picked up a small wooden splinter from the floor, and tossed it toward the apparatus.

  Even as the chip flew toward its goal, he regretted his impulsive act with a cold doubt as to its wisdom. Me ducked and crouched back, as the splinter landed on those glowing wires.

  The splinter seemed hardly to touch the wires at all. But the cold emerald light flashed around it. Instantly it seemed to rebound, as if from rubber. Whisking speed increased to a point beyond the range of living retinas. There was a twanging, almost melodious note, and the chip seas gone. But in the low-raftered roof above, there was a little hole, as neatly punctured as if made by the passage of a bullet. The splinter had been hurled fast enough to make that hole. . . .

  Andy Matthews gulped with the strain of his tightened nerves. His big head, with its dose-cropped black hair, swung this way and that, in bewildered belligerence. He hadn't been able to go to school much, but he'd read a lot, and he was shrewd. The kid had made the contraption, all right; but he couldn't have thought it out— alone! And who else was there?

  From the back porch of the farmhouse, Jane, Andy's pretty wife, was calling for him to come in to supper. But he hardly heard her. He hardly heard anything at all, as his brain (ought with a mystery far beyond the knowledge of any person that he knew.

  But he wheeled about like a burglar, caught with the goods, when the door behind him opened.

  Jack stood in the entrance. He just stood there, not saying anything, his face lighted up hy the green glow. He looked petulant and startled, sure of punishment.

  Andy had no idea at all what to say at first. But then love tangled with fear of the unknown to produce fury. Andy’s teeth showed. His slitted eyes snapped. His voice, when lie spoke, was a hoarse, unsteady growl.

  "Come here, you!” he commanded.

  Just for a moment the kid hesitated, his gray eyes vague and clouded in the green flicker. Then he came forward timidly, his scuffed shoes scraping in the untidy litter on the floor. He looked so pathetically little in his soiled overalls. Andy's heart longed to melt, as it always had, for his son. But this was no time to give way to sentiment.

  Andy clutched a small shoulder, and shook it violently. “What's this thing, here?" he snarled, pointing to the miracle beside them. “Who showed you how to make it? Come on! Out with it! Or, so help me. I'll break every bone in your body! Hurry up! Who showed you?”

  Again there was that timid hesitation, which required more violent shaking to dissipate; but the kid spoke at last:

  “Mister Weefles— He showed me. . .

  Whereat. Andy snorted in sheer, boiling exasperation. "Mister Weefles!" he growled. “Always Mister Weefles! Thai’s no answer at all!" Andy swung a hard palm. With a sharp snap, it landed on the side of Jack's cheek.

  "Now will you tell me?" Andy roared.

  The kid didn’t let out a whimper. That was maybe a little funny in itself. But then those gray eyes met Andy’s levelly, and Andy felt a dim, deep consternation. There was something warning and hard and strange, looking out of those eyes. Something that wasn’t his son!

  “I said. Mister Weefles,’’ the kid told his father quietly. “He hasn't got any name of his own, so I started calling him that long time ago.”

  Andy had released his grip on the boy, and had moved back a step. The answer seemed to be nothing but pure, childhood fantasy. But its tone, and that level, warning stare, told a much different story. So Andy’s mind seemed to tumble swiftly back through the years, to the time when Jack had been little more than a baby.

  Almost since he had first learned to talk, it had been the same. Always there had existed that shadowy individual, Mister Weefles.

  Andy remembered himself asking on many different occasions: "What did you do today, son?”

  And Jack's answer had so often been something like this: �
��Oh, I was thinking about Mister Weefles. I dreamed about him last night again. He's a nice old guy, but he’s awful lonesome and awful funny looking, and he knows an awful lot. Only he lives all by himself. All his folks are dead. . . .’’

  A kid story, Andy had thought. Lots of imaginative youngsters made up dream worlds for themselves, and imaginary characters. So Andy had accepted the fanciful friend of his son as a matter of course, with tolerant hu—

  But now? In that green-lit, flickering twilight of the dusty tool room, a kid’s unimportant legend had suddenly assumed an aspect of real danger!

  Andy Matthews began to sweat profusely. Mister Weefles was only a name his boy had given to something— true! Tin cans, wires, a peach box. an unknown source of terrific electric power; and the bullet-like flight of a splinter cf wood, going—where? All this was plain evidence of its truth!

  Suddenly Jack moved forward toward the busy contraption on the floor. Andy gave a choked exclamation of warning, and made a grab to stop him. But then he only watched, with the intentness of a cat watching a mouse. Because Jack's movements were so skillful, so practiced, showing that he’d somehow been taught, and knew how to do—everything.

  His fingers touched the tip of the insulated handle of the switch. With an expert lightness of touch, he swung it open quickly. The turbid light that had enveloped the radial wires of the apparatus, died out. A completer darkness, alleviated only by the evening afterglow from the window, settled over the cluttered room.

  But the sharp, muddled concern that screamed in Andy Matthews' heart, could not be extinguished so easily.

  They faced each other again, then—father and son— as though across an abyss which seemed to separate them forever. But Andy Matthews' anger was dissolved, now, by his overshadowing fear. He was ready to grope and plead, in the hope that thus he might find a loose end— a tangible means of approach to the sinister presence that had enmeshed itself with his child’s personality. His blood throbbed with frustrated, fighting courage.