A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  When he straightened up, with the seventy-pound pack settled on his shoulders, there was simply a lake of lava where the crater had been. The fiery area spread even as he watched; and without further delay he set off on his own back trail. He could see easily, by the light diffused from the inferno behind him; and he made fairly good time, considering his burden and the fact that he had not slept since the preceding night.

  The rock beneath Akro’s craft was, as we have said, extremely hard. Since there was relatively free escape upward for the constantly liberated energy, this stratum melted very slowly, gradually letting the vessel sink deeper into the earth. What would have happened if Akro’s power supply had been greater is problematical; Aller can tell us only that some five hours after the landing, as he was resting for a few moments near the top of a rocky hillock, the phenomenon came to a cataclysmic end.

  A quivering of the earth beneath him caused the surveyor to look back toward his erstwhile camp. The lake of lava, which by this time was the better part of a mile in breadth, seemed curiously agitated. Aller, from his rather poor vantage point, could see huge bubbles of pasty lava hump themselves up and burst, releasing brilliant clouds of vapor. Each cloud illuminated earth and sky before cooling to invisibility, so that the effect was somewhat similar to a series of lightning flashes.

  For a short time—certainly no longer than a quarter of a minute—Aller was able to watch as the activity increased. Then a particularly violent shock almost flung him from the hilltop, and at nearly the same instant the entire volume of molten rock fountained skyward. For an instant it seemed to hang there, a white, raging pillar of liquid and gas; then it dissolved, giving way before the savage thrust of the suddenly released energy below. A tongue of radiance, of an intensity indescribable in mere words, stabbed upward, into and through the lava, volatilizing it instantly. A dozen square miles of desert glowed white, then an almost invisible violet, and disappeared in superheated gas. Around the edges of this region, great gouts of lava and immense fragments of solid rock were hurled to all points of the compass.

  Radiation exerts pressure; at the temperature found in the cores of stars, that pressure must be measured in thousands of tons per square inch. It was this thrust, rather than the by no means negligible gas pressure of the boiling lava, which wrought most of the destruction.

  Aller saw little of what occurred. When the lava was hurled upward, he had flung an arm across his face to protect his eyes from the glare. That act unquestionably saved his eyesight, as the real flash followed; as it was, his body was seared and blistered through his clothing. The second, heavier shock knocked his feet from under him, and he half crawled, half rolled down to the comparative shelter of the little hill. Even here, gusts of hot air almost cooked him; only the speed with which the phenomenon ended saved his life.

  Within minutes, both the temblors and the hot winds had ceased; and he crawled painfully to the hilltop again to gaze wonderingly at the five-mile-wide crater, ringed by a pile of tumbled, still-glowing rock fragments.

  Far beneath that pit, shards of neutronium, no more able to remain near the surface than the steel pieces of a wrecked ocean vessel can float on water, were sinking through rock and metal to a final resting place at Earth’s heart.

  “The glow spread as we watched, still giving no clue to the nature of the substance radiating it,” continued Kron. “Most of it seemed to originate between us and Akro’s ship; Akro himself said that but little energy was being lost on the far side. His messages, during that last brief period as we swept by our point of closest approach, were clear—so clear that we could almost see as he did the tenuous light beyond the ever-thinning walls of his ship; the light that represented but a tiny percentage of the energy being sucked from the hull surface.

  “We saw, as though with his own senses, the tiny perforation appear near one end of the ship; saw it extend, with the speed of thought, from one end of the hull to the other, permitting the free escape of all the energy in a single instant; and, from our point of vantage, saw the glowing area where the ship had been suddenly brightened, blazing for a moment almost as brightly as a piece of Sun matter.

  “In that moment, every one of us saw the identifying frequencies as the heat from Akro’s disrupted ship raised the substance which had trapped him to an energy level which permitted atomic radiation. Every one of us recognized the spectra of iron, of calcium, of carbon and silicon and a score of the other elements—Sirian, I tell you that that ‘trapping field’ was matter—matter in such a state that it could not radiate, and could offer resistance to other bodies in exactly the fashion of a solid. I thought, and have always thought, that some strange field of force held the atoms in their ‘solid’ positions; you have convinced me that I was wrong. The ‘field’ was the sum of the interacting atomic forces which you are trying to detect. The energy level of that material body was so low that those forces were able to act without interference. The condition you could not conceive of reaching artificially actually exists in Nature!”

  “You go too fast, Kron,” responded the Sirian. “Your first idea is far more likely to be the true one. The idea of unknown radiant or static force fields is easy to grasp; the one you propose in its place defies common sense. My theories called for some such conditions as you described, granted the one premise of a sufficiently low energy level; but a place in the real universe so devoid of energy as to absorb that of a well-insulated interstellar flier is utterly inconceivable. I have assumed your tale to be true as to details, though you offer neither witnesses nor records to support it; but I seem to have heard that you have somewhat of a reputation as an entertainer, and you seem quick-witted enough to have woven such a tale on the spot, purely from the ideas I suggested. I compliment you on the tale, Kron; it was entrancing; but I seriously advise you not to make anything more out of it. Shall we leave it at that, my friend?”

  “As you will,” replied Kron.

  THE END.

  THE MAN WHO TURNED TO SMOKE

  Don Wilcox

  Jap bombs fell on Chungking and a strange thing happened to cameraman Virgil Lamstead

  BOMBS were dropping over Chungking. They were blasting yellow rocks up in fountains of death.

  I, Virgil Lamstead, an American cameraman, stood near the entrance of a public bomb shelter. I saw the stream of explosions coming straight toward me. If I kept on taking pictures I would be blown to bits. I grabbed my camera and the package of chemicals I had brought to leave at a laboratory. I ran down the shelter steps.

  “Let me in!” I shouted in my best Chinese. Then I screamed it. “Let me in!”

  An iron clank sounded against the din of bombs. The door was closed, locked. I was on the outside.

  Then it happened, and there was no escape. The bomb explosion blew me high into the air.

  “So this is death!”

  It would have been, under ordinary circumstances. But once in ten million—or maybe ten billion—times, the forces of nature conspire to do strange things. I turned into living smoke.

  At first I couldn’t believe it. I was shooting up through a smudgy cloud of smoke, dirt, and debris. Broken rocks were flying past my body. My camera had been knocked out of my hands.

  The package of chemicals was gone too. In fact, the chemicals and I had gone together. They had saved me—or changed me—or was this death?

  It was not. It was some new amazing form of life. I was endowed with a completely altered body. I had the most curious sensations of fluffiness and weightlessness.

  Yes, I had turned into living smoke. I wasn’t exactly breathing. I was just rolling and swelling in the air. The big smoke cloud from the bomb explosion pressed against me as lightly as a baby’s kiss.

  I was still rising.

  The smoke thinned around me and began spreading in all directions. I began to spread too.

  Horrors! My arms and legs—if such they were—were trailing after me like pipe smoke.

  As I floated over the Yangtze
River I looked down and saw my gray reflection in the muddy waters. That puffy blotch of cloud was me.

  Then I saw something else. Another squadron of bombers was coming over. Soon bombs rained down. I squirmed to get out of their path. Yes, I could move!

  Though I climbed around rather sluggishly, I gradually succeeded in drawing what I called my arms and legs closer together. Soon I was such a compact wad of smoke that I felt crowded. I was no bigger than a ricksha.

  Then a bomb dropped through me, squarely through what should have been my stomach.

  “This ends me!” I thought.

  FAR from it. The bomb made my smoky body spread out and I felt better, actually. What strange sensations of breeziness.

  In a few minutes I learned. When the winds spread me too thin I could easily draw myself together. By growing smaller I changed my specific gravity. Then by taking advantage of the air currents I could move anywhere I desired.

  By this time the raid was over, and people were filtering out of the hundreds of bombshelters, bringing back their valuables and office supplies and shopping bags, to resume their day.

  In many places over the city the fire fighters were working like Trojans to get the blazes under control. The helmeted firemen were still tearing through the streets aboard motors cars, and everywhere were volunteer bands of coolies. I floated over to see how they were doing.

  I sifted down between some buildings to watch.

  A Chinese boy who was on fire guard duty saw me. He jumped over a pile of rubbish and streaked down the hillside. I couldn’t think what was wrong with him until I heard him whooping a fire alarm.

  Some civilian firefighters heard him and came racing up the hillside carrying buckets of water. They manned a hand pump and turned a hose on me.

  The cool water felt wonderful while it lasted, and I mentioned to myself then and there that I was going to spend my idle hours right down on the surface of the Yangtze to take advantage of those cool soothing sensations.

  But now—well, I couldn’t stand to see those people work so hard for nothing. I rose into the air and spread myself thin. The fire fighters muttered with grim satisfaction that they had made short work of that one. They ran on the other blazes.

  Now I felt very despondent.

  Anyone would feel the same way if he found himself in my plight. For as matters appeared, I was doomed to a lonely life. If I’d try to mix with people I’d be sure to cause a fire alarm.

  For awhile I was very blue smoke.

  I watched the other smoke clouds melting into the sky. I did some heavy thinking. Was there anything in the world I could do besides making a nuisance of myself? Did I have any chance to be useful?

  I remembered what George Leahman had said after the first Chungking bombing we took in together. “Where there’s smoke, there’s waste.”

  I turned that over in my thoughts and grew bluer. “But at least I’m alive,” I said to myself. “Not even a bomb could kill me now.”

  I was sure of that much, because one had gone through me. What a state to be in. Half dead, you might say. In fact, to all the people I had known I would be dead and gone. And still, I might be doomed to live forever, since bullets couldn’t—

  I heard the cry of a girl beside a wrecked and burning building.

  I knew that cry. It was the little nineteen-year-old Chinese girl that George Leahman and I had called Chestnut Eyes. She was an errand girl for the medical supplies department. I swooped down to her.

  IN that moment I felt new powers. You will doubtless smile that I should mention a sensation of new powers at this particular juncture. But you can scarcely conceive of the extreme helplessness and clumsiness that had at first possessed me upon my transformation to smoke. And now, for the first time, I had a purpose looming vaguely before me, urging me to try my new capacities to the limit.

  Yes, gradually I was gaining a much stronger control of my faculties of twisting and squirming and combating air currents.

  Coming closer, I saw the dangerous situation that surrounded Chestnut Eyes. The sight made me turn into little whirling eddies of smoke. She had been wounded. She lay near the burning house, sobbing with pain.

  I swept down as swiftly as I could. The breeze I created only fanned the flames. That would never do.

  I crowded close to the girl trying to blanket her with protection. Her clothes had been partially torn from her body, her left foot was losing blood from an ugly gash. Her eyes were nearly closed. Obviously she did not know the danger she was in.

  The flames licked the air within a few inches of her head.

  Now I drew part of my smoky body over her face. I cut off her breathing. She fought for air. I hovered as tightly as I could between her and the fire. And then success began to reward my efforts. She turned instinctively away from the blaze.

  I followed. I forced her to keep turning for air. Soon she was well away from the flames, breathing easily.

  In a few moments the firemen came running up. The sight of smoke near her—for in my sympathy, I had lingered near her—had attracted them. They called for a stretcher. And so as I thinned into the upper air I knew she was being cared for, I had found one way, at least, of being useful.

  Darkness came over Chungking.

  Most of the fires had been soaked into smoldering heaps. The job of searching the wreckage for salvage and dead bodies would go on all night. I drifted back to the bomb shelter where I had been blown to smoke.

  George Leahman was there. So was Bill Washmore. And several coolies were there looking for me.

  Now I felt more helpless than at any time since the change.

  “Don’t be troubled about me!” I shouted it—but my shout was nothing they could hear. My efforts at speech didn’t carry to them in the slightest. I wasted my smoky breath.

  “Here’s some scraps of his camera,” Washmore said.

  “I don’t think so,” said George. “He wouldn’t run off from his camera.”

  “He might get blown off. Look.”

  “You’re right, Bill. That was his camera. He’s been blown to hell.”

  THEY kicked around over the stones and rubbish. They decided I might be under it. They got shovels and started digging. I tried to stop them. I coiled around them and threatened their eyes and nostrils with smoke.

  “Can you imagine it? There’s fire under this rock,” George said. “What could it be?”

  “We won’t find Lam alive,” said Bill. “But we’ll keep looking. Anyway I’ve got nothing better to do. If it takes all day tomorrow what’s the difference?”

  “We’ll find him,” said George.

  The way they said it tore my spirit to shreds. It’s an awful thing to have to see a fellow’s friends fighting for him that way, digging and sweating all the night through, even when they know he can’t possibly be alive. I couldn’t endure it. I drifted away.

  The raids on Chunking came and went, and the millions of people that were threatened everytime the planes hummed high, higher and higher over the city established themselves in the routine. It took a lot of courage to defy those savage air-birds.

  Take Chestnut Eyes, for instance. She was a regular little dynamo of courtage. When she wasn’t busy on errands she would get groups of children together and teach them patriotic songs.

  She made up a little catchy melody about the whistles that blew after the air-raid alarms were over. The tune began to spread, and soon thousands of people were singing it.

  “Whooo—OOO—ooo—we’re still fighting!”

  That was the way it started, opening like the after-raid whistle. And when raids were over you would hear it all up and down the streets. Children would sing it, and so would the shopkeepers and merchants trudging back from their shelters, and the civilian street menders as they went to work clearing debris.

  But Chestnut Eyes’ most urgent job was to keep the medical supplies moving to all the branch stations. Before her foot had healed she was back at work, sometimes using children
to help her, but more often accepting the good-natured assistance of George Leahman and Bill Washmore. The three of them were often together after George and Bill had finished their news reports for the day.

  Then came a fatal night when everything changed. Bill and George were to be transferred. They packed their goods, they said their farewells to Chestnut Eyes. And the three of them talked of me.

  I had thought I was best forgotten; but now, as I listened, I knew my supposed tragedy had always been close to the surface.

  “Virgil Lamstead left a few things,” George said to Chestnut Eyes. “They’re still in that shaky old stone laboratory, and now—they’re yours—if you want them.”

  “He was a bit goofy about you, you know,” Bill added.

  The two newsmen got away safely, but that evening the bombings came. And Chestnut Eyes, who had gone straight to the old stone laboratory building, fell into a trap.

  Or to be more accurate, the trap fell upon her. For she had failed to heed the warnings of a coming air raid. When a,shower of bombs began dropping in that vicinity the jolt loosened the seams of the building and shook its walls and ceilings like an earthquake.

  A WINDOW frame caught her, and a ton of debris rolled down to fasten her under it.

  I tried to blow the dust away so she could breathe. It was awful to see her there trapped. What could I do? Nothing—not unless I could somehow attract some rescue workers.

  She put up a valiant struggle until she succeeded In freeing herself, all except her ankle. But there she was caught in an unbreakable vise.

  At that moment the fuller peril became evident. The wall hung above her like a tower of blocks. With every distant bomb-jolt it swayed. She saw, and then her eyes closed. Her lips were tight together and her fingers crushed into her cheeks.