A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Of course. But where will they get the ants? Gall-ants breed only on Ganymede, in Ganymedian cree. To get the ants they’d have to buy our cree and, inasmuch as they’d have to use the ant eggs to get the gallnuts to make the formula to turn their cree blue,” Amherst drew a long breath, “the ants couldn’t reproduce. So they’d have to continue buying our cree to get the ants to get the nuts to get—”

  “I see,” Carol interrupted. “Never mind the rest.”

  “Besides which,” Amherst continued, “even after they succeeded in turning the cree blue—if they succeeded, which they wouldn’t, inasmuch as we wouldn’t sell them the cree to get the ants to get the nuts and so forth—they’d have to keep the methanated air of Io away from it. Otherwise it would turn red again. Think what that means: hundreds of bales of cree vacuum-packed to shield them from contact with the outside air. It would raise the cost of production so enormously, they couldn’t compete with us anyway.”

  “I guess you’re trying to say they can’t use the formula. Anyway, I’m relieved.” Carol sighed.

  “So am I—for another reason, though.”

  “What other reason is there?”

  “That it was only the formula Scaler wanted after all.”

  “What do you mean, only?” She turned to face him before the smooth, round dome of the trading station.

  “For awhile I thought it was you.”

  “Oh that.” Carol scuffed one foot on the ground. “Yes, he wanted me too. I refused him.”

  “But why? You seemed to like him well enough at first.”

  “I did,” she said slowly, “at first. It was that kiss changed my mind—that rough one.”

  1939

  VAST BEYOND CONCEPT

  Hal Remson

  Only one thousand million millionth of the universe was adapted to life as those four earth-creatures knew it—and their tiny hermetical spaceship was hopelessly adrift in an infinite void!

  “VAST beyond concept,” old Thorin Matson was saying.

  “So vast that even the ancient Einstein’s laws wouldn’t admit of its existence. Such a mass would warp light back to its own surface by reason of gravitational attraction, would warp itself out of space.”

  “And yet,” I said eagerly, “there is a ray of hope.”

  “Yes, a ray of hope, intangible and ephemeral,” agreed the old scientist. He stood before the Space porte, and for a moment he seemed incredibly weary, incredibly ancient. His face was leathery and wrinkled, and the purplish toga-like garment fell back across his withered frame. The girl came and placed his arm about her almost unnoticed. She was slender, a diaphanous creature with ovoid features and large ecru eyes with the tint of ancient earth’s skies.

  “The void is so large, so apparently infinite,” she said, possessed of a quiet awe as she stared into the starry firmament. “It seems never to get nearer, though we rush toward Orion at an incredible speed. And it seems that such a tiny part of the great universe is fitted for our life—for human life. It is so strange that only a thousand million millionth of the universe is adapted to life as we know it, and our search for such a tiny portion of the cosmos appears so futile.”

  “Futile,” I amended. “But necessary.”

  Old Thorin Matson nodded his head.

  “Yes,” he agreed wearily. “For that tiny fragment we know will soon be unsuitable. And life must go on, must surge somewhere—somewhere out in that vast space.”

  There was one other in that tiny hermetical space flyer, bulleting across space to the distant stars in a search that seemed as hopeless as the hunt for the proverbial needle in the haystack. One other, whom I had grown to detest. But perhaps, even as Thorin Matson had said, my judgment was tainted with jealousy.

  For there was more than casual admiration that glittered in the eyes of the flaming-haired giant who occupied the pilot’s station before the embanked instruments, more than friendliness when the rust-hued eyes turned with increasing frequency toward the slender form of the woman who had insisted that her place was to accompany her father in the blind, almost hopeless, search for some other fragment of that thousand million millionth of the universe adaptable for human life.

  A few centuries ago we of earth had known no fear. Then in the year 3046 it was discovered that the solar system would soon become uninhabitable for life as we know it.

  Briefly, the trouble was this: the sun was contracting, and as it contracted it was growing hotter, had therefore become brighter as it diminished. The rate of expending energy had increased enormously due to added heat on the atoms. For it was suddenly discovered that Soil was no dwarf star, with a diminishing heat as heretofore supposed, but was in reality a “Giant” star, and as yet in the early stage of a sun’s evolution, during which the heat would gradually increase to the maximum temperature of 36,000° Fahrenheit, at which point life would be impossible on any of the encircling planets.

  A few centuries remained, at the most, during which the solar worlds would be baked to a crisp. And there remained but a scant thousand million millionth of the universe, in which to hope for sanctuary. Futile indeed had their flight seemed, heading out across great space in search of such a pitiably small zone, and yet old Thorin Matson had expressed certain confidence in his mass-calculations and astral balance-men ts. The universe itself was weighed, with his mind drawing it down to a fulcrum expressed in symbols and mathematics, and in the end he had felt sure that some chance lay ahead in a great concentration of mass energy, lying somewhere around the vicinity of the constellation, Orion.

  THE red-haired pilot had left his post. He was creeping forward, his nostrils inhaling the purified atmosphere seeping from the tank decks, and curiously enough he resembled a crouched beast, preparing to spring, as I saw him from the corner of my eye.

  Instinctively I braced to meet his charge. His compact body was packed tightly into the argent space suiting. At his hip the carved holster of a ray-gun projected.

  But his leer did not portend immediate menace. There was an odd expression deep within the brown-flecked eyes.

  “Something wrong,” he said, addressing Thorin Matson. “Some great pull exerting—”

  Thorin turned, his brow clearing miraculously.

  “Then I was not wrong in my solutions!” he exclaimed. “We’re feeling the mass pull, already, Ran Strived But this mass aggregation may be invisible, may warp light rays and space back around it. You realize that, Ran?”

  I nodded, for his eyes were eager and dancing as he glanced toward me, suddenly elated. Elan stood and faced me, her hair streaming back upon her shoulders, dark and lustrous as the black nebula of the Dark Horse Nebula, visible through the transparent space porte in the upper corner. That single look caught my breath, for we had hoped so desperately that we might find some portion of the universe capable of sustaining life, where we might look forward into the future—together. Then—her eyes were gleaming like stars.

  Came a scream of wrenching metal, a shriek of groaning levers. The space ship lurched unevenly, and I saw the mechanisms writhing.

  “My God, Flare!” I shouted hoarsely. “You left the mechanisms at idle. And the attraction of whatever pull we’ve encountered . . .

  I shot a condemning glare in his direction. Rage flared, spontaneously, unreasoningly, in his huge reddish features. His narrow eyes gleamed menacingly, and he made no move to seize the jerking controls. I caught a glimpse of a dark spherical body, lurching up from out of the unseen void, blotting out the stars.

  “Thank the Eternal Creator!” I gritted between set teeth “There’s a dark world there below. An out-of-the-way planet. We’ll have a chance to moor it, till we repair the damage.”

  The oblate sphere of opaquity grew larger, gradually encompassed the abyss, and soon we were floating unsteadily over a rugged surface, with only the light of flickering Betelgeuse, one of the larger stars in the Orion constellation, to light deep gorges and bottomless chasms. Elan clutched my shoulder with a soft hand and
pointed downward. Past her smoothly gleaming arm, covered lustrously with amber vitrisheen, I stared, viewing a bowl-shaped depression in the black terrain. The spacer responded cumbrously, then settled in a lopsided fashion.

  And of a sudden I realized we’d landed squarely in a wasp’s nest. From numerous black grottos in the hemispherical walls that hemmed us in, great bulbous heads were peering, and crystalline orbs were concentrated upon us in a steady, malignant stare. As we made further observations, the great pod-heads were followed by tremendous saw-toothed pinchers. Toadlike bodies followed, with lower webtoed extremities that carried these monstrosities forward in a repulsive, wobbly form of propulsion.

  “Life, of a sort, exists here,” said Thorin Matson, striving to hide the tremulousness of his voice, though his features were blanched and waxen. “But not as we know it. I’ve taken an air test, and it’s poisonous, not to say non-supportive of vegetable life, which alone would make it unsuitable for immigration. Those creatures are some sort of acidulous reaction, resulting from alien chemicals.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t get the wild idea of trying to tear us apart,” I said grimly, though icy hands were clutching at my heart, “for we’ll have to get on some space togs, and go outside the space-ship with a torch and force-driver. One of the rear exhausts has split its sheathing. Elan, you must stay inside the ship, to be ready at the controls.”

  “I’m going with you,” she answered decisively. “You know we couldn’t raise the spacer off of this surface, crippled as it is, anyway. We’d better hurry as it is, for our hosts are losing their first fear of our ship.”

  In space togs, looking somewhat like curious larvae, we left the airlock, carrying power-drivers and torches. Aside from that, we were each armed with ray-guns and short knives.

  HOW unreal, how terrible were those moments, as we gathered at the huge rent in the outer hull. The clanging of the power-drivers against protesting metal, the white-hot heat of molten metal driven across the riven splices, served to keep the unearthly horde of monsters at their distance.

  Flare’s traitorous attack was quite unexpected. The last seam was bending reluctantly into place, when without warning he dealt Matson a terrific blow across the body that felled him instantly, and came lurching toward me. Elan screamed a warning. Stark insanity glittered in his rolling eyes.

  His clenched, gauntleted fist struck the glassite panel of my visor, and I rocked backward, barely able to stumble away from the molten ribbon of metal on the exterior of the scarred, spindular hull. I’d never trusted him, had never really believed that he was sincere in altruistic motive when he wanted to accompany us.

  Again he charged, like a locoed animal. Beyond that panel of his helmet I saw bulging eyes. A frothing mouth. I stepped aside, managed to avoid the main momentum of his charge. Struck him across the chest. He staggered on, gained his balance. Before I could understand his change of tactics, he dived toward Elan.

  It was then that I detected a faint crack along the edge of his helmet, a tiny crooked line. Abruptly I knew. His was no inherent insanity. Rather, he had been too hasty in donning his space paraphernalia. A crooked thread in the screw-piece on the neck had allowed a tiny wisp of outside atmosphere into the helmet. He had sucked it into a nostril. Up into his brain. Noxious vapors had robbed him of sanity.

  Lurching forward swiftly, I thrust forth a steel-ribbed boot. He fell to all fours, and kept crawling toward Elan in the manner of a dazed animal of the jungle. She stood trembling in a paralysis of horror.

  I jerked out the ray-gun then. The vibrating convolutions of my shot lashed across space. Burned through the verilumin space togging. He crumbled awkwardly, lay in a motionless heap.

  “Elan!” I shouted. “Those planet devils! Look! Our struggle has excited them, has aroused their worst qualities.”

  Heavy padded feet that might have weighed half a ton pounded the earth with such terrific force that the terrain shuddered and rolled. Mastodonic shark-toothed pinchers snapped up into the illumination of the Betelgeuse-lighted sky. A phosphorescent exudation gave them the appearance of gigantic ogres, leaping down the inclines toward us. I remember distinctly that the Dark Horse Nebula was clustered beyond a high, ragged cliff, and as one of the monstrosities leaped, it appeared almost as if it had jumped directly from the dark, cloudy formation of the distant dark Nebula.

  Matson still lay prone, where he had fallen. Through the glassite, I saw that his eyes were closed, though his lips moved feebly, as though he were moaning. I clutched the metallic suiting that housed his body, bent erect with its weight across my shoulder.

  Elan came out of her stupor, induced by our unexpected encounter with the unfortunate Flare, and had by this time drawn her ray-gun. She stood at the side of the airlock, and fired upon the nearest of the poison planet’s denizens. The discharge leaped out, but gave no evidence of taking effect upon the advancing horde. Obviously, the physio-chemical transformation that affected terrestrial matter was not manifest here upon a world where the elements themselves might differ to some extent.

  PLUNGING through the airlock with the woman close at my heels, I lowered Thorin Matson to the flooring, hurriedly reached for the wrenched controls. Luckily, I was able to throw the full accelerating force of the rear blasts wide open, and our vessel jerked somewhat erratically out into the depths of space.

  It was with vast relief that we witnessed the dark world vanishing behind us. Elan divested her father of the metallin suiting. He lay in a queer stupor, and the girl began to cry hysterically. That, more than anything, acted to revive him.

  “Vast beyond concept,” he muttered, and came to stand at my side. He peered out at the gathering darkness of the Dark Horse Nebula, and as our space-ship plunged down and on, it seemed that we scarcely lived or breathed. “A mass so vast that even light is warped back. It must be so.”

  Even as he peered the dark curtain of the black nebula rushed upward. What was it to be? What were these dark nebulae, these so-called “coal-sacks” or “sink-holes” in space? Would it be a misty curtain of meteoritic particles? A gaseous screen? Or was it as old Thorin Matson believed?

  Time passed with inexorable slowness. The dark mists of the nebula became ghostly phosphorescent. Tiny motes swam out of the blackness, shimmered for a time, and gradually took on the shapes of new, strange stars. The old familiar universe was gone, had been swallowed into nothingness. Across what seemed an infinite distance, a gigantic sun glowered, like a huge red eye. Yet on the outer edges of the inner circumference, where the light rays bent back upon themselves toward the all-powerful pull of the central mass, swung smaller stars, and most blessed of all, tiny fragmental planets.

  “A universe within a universe,” old Thorin Matson was saying as he stood in a wondrous trance. “Here laws similar to those of outer space prevail. Can it be that the outer cosmos is something such as this, a mass-warped universe in a vastly huger existence beyond?

  “Science has never denied that such tremendous masses exist, but if they do, then surrounding space will be warped, and it will create a new space of itself. The gravitational attraction would be so enormous as to absorb light rays through the dimension-warp.

  “Light, absorbed from large contiguous areas, would appear as blotches of diffuse darkness, and these are what we of earth call dark nebulae.”

  He was as unaware of us two who stood before the outer imminence as we were of him. Arm in arm, we had come into the possession of something that was more precious to us than universe or galaxies—for together we looked out upon habitable worlds—and a future life for creation as we knew it.

  THE MACHINE THAT THOUGHT

  Raymond Z. Gallun

  It was treason for Ned to warn those millions who were to die—and his attempts to save the throngs from annihilation only menaced his own life and that of the woman he loved!

  NED BRAYDEN stared at the little lever that glistened with such deceptive innocence among the instruments before him. He listened t
o the smooth roar of gigantic machines; and he thought of the Plan, and of the death and destruction that it was his duty to bring about. Just a gesture—just a slight movement of that tiny lever, and, within sixty short minutes, all the hell of man’s magic would break loose. Two billion human beings would perish, as if stricken by the blasts of an Armageddon.

  Ned Brayden shut his eyes wearily, but even then he could see that gleaming metal grip that could open the floodgates of catastrophe; for he had been staring at it for a long time, and the impression of it was burned deep into his retinas. It was as though he had been looking too long at a brilliant, incandescent light.

  He could feel his strong young body trembling now; he was weakening. Or was it weakness? There were pictures in his brain—vivid pictures of accusing eyes and of human faces contorted with fear and pleading. He had never seen this thing so clearly before—the horror of it, the brutality. He wondered what it was that had so sharpened his vision. Perhaps it was the whir of machines, so real now to his ears, and the shouts of slaving men, ringing through this buried realm of the Cyclops. He had never known this place so intimately before.

  A rank, oil-tainted draft blew into the little control chamber—but mixed with its scalding smell was the faint aroma of exotic perfume. Ned heard a light footfall behind him. Slowly he turned around.

  “A coward, eh, Ned Brayden? I suspected as much. I followed you here to make sure.”

  THE speaker was slender and pert, and as coldly beautiful as a diamond—or so she seemed. Her hair was blonde. Bits of her life had left their marks on her perfect face, and in the posture of her slight, delicate form. That truculent air spoke of a recklessness that had hurled a gaudy space flier at deathly speed around the moon. That bronzed skin had come from days of lolling and frolicking in bright sunshine. That half-petulant smile of self-esteem, spoke of a childish will accustomed to wield the toys of the gods. And yet there was a certain grandeur about her—borrowed, perhaps, from the towering palaces of quartz and chromium, where, in the pure, clear air of the Upper World, dwelt the ruling class, or Highs, of which both she and the man she had addressed were members.