A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  But Dan Madoc had the advantage. The creature could not see his movements. The steel bar swung at great speed and the bear-creature tried in vain to ward off the blow.

  The first swing stunned the Iskarite. The guard fell, sprawled. Dan Madoc went on grimly to finish the job. Another blow and revolting green blood flowed from the cracked skull of the creature.

  Dan rushed away from the scene to overtake Alix as she circled invisibly to tackle another guard. The two Iskarites were bristling with sense of danger. They barked “Pog” sounds. One was about to reach for an alarm bell when Dan rushed forward.

  The creature saw only a swinging steel bar which glinted terribly as it flashed forward. A snarly sound grated from the Iskarite’s jaw. It was the last sound before death struck fast and brutally.

  The last guard backed, tried to reach the alarm bell. Electronic sparks snapped from the creature’s furry coat as the hairs bristled under the sense of danger.

  Dan Madoc brought his green-tipped steel bar into play. He shouldered Alix to one side. This was not work for a girl, however courageous.

  The rattle and whine of machinery, mingled with the unearthly groans of the tortured slaves, rose above the snarl of the Iskarite.

  Then Dan struck. The bar crashed through the creature’s waving paws. A horrible snapping sound ended the snarly voice of the Iskarite.

  Dan stared for a second. He drew deep at the musty air of the machine jail. He dropped the steel bar. He whipped around and took Alix by the arm.

  “We haven’t time to waste. The other guards must have gone out to eat. We’ve got to work while there is time.”

  It would not do for them to stop the plant machinery. That would show as a warning light in the control-rooms outside the jail.

  Dan went to one Earthian prisoner. Alix hurried over to another—a girl she had known.

  Dan worked grimly at releasing the man. The man’s arms were strapped to moving rods which dipped and swerved every few seconds to perform an operation on the moving belt below the prisoner’s chest. The man had to work with the grinding regularity of inhuman metal. His fingers were free. The parts which moved before him had to be clipped and punched unless he wanted the attention of the overseer.

  Dan applied grimly working fingers to the straps. The moving rods continued on their courses all the time. But the man was freed in a few seconds. He staggered up, rubbing the harsh weals on his arms. Then, with Dan and Alix, he staggered off to free the other prisoners.

  The word got around that Dan Madoc and Alix Denyer were back in the machine jail—but as free, invisible agents this time and not slaves. The Earthian prisoners could not see their rescuers, but Dan and Alix spoke reassuringly as they worked to free the machines’ slaves.

  Within a few minutes the Earthians were free. Dan and Alix carried light metal discs so that the prisoners could identify their position. The conveyor belts, moving from the machines, carried a jumble of ruined and incompleted parts.

  “Won’t be long before the polecats in the control room find out something is wrong!” exclaimed a man.

  “We’ll be rounded up again—like the last time!” wailed a woman. “Some will be killed! How can we get away from here?”

  Dan Madoc moved the metal disc impatiently. The murmur of voices died away and heads turned to the disc expectantly.

  “Alix and I will have to slip out,” he said grimly. “We intend to get the stratoship. You will have to watch the door and kill any Iskarite that tries to enter. Then we shall bring the ship down into the yard beside the door to this jail. If we achieve that, we are all as good as free from Iskar.”

  “A good thing, too!” growled a man. “Any planet would be better than this!”

  “We’ll have to work fast!” urged Dan. “The Iskarites will soon discover something is wrong, but you should be able to keep them out of this machine jail. There is only one door.”

  And then he and Alix slipped out of the jail door and made across the yard. They heard sounds of the Earthians as they prepared to guard the door. There were no windows, and so the place should be easily defended.

  Dan led the girl to the outskirts of the town. They passed groups of Iskarites as they carried on business at the mouths of their caves. The two humans took care to give the creatures a wide berth.

  Then, past the caves, they came to the location of the ship. Stratoship X9 lay like some alien thing. It was a product of another civilisation. The Iskarites had no real interest in the ship. Even their best engineers were not qualified to handle it. Stealing the ship had been one of the bear-people’s most extraordinary exploits. They were a fumbling sort of people, vainly trying to imitate the machine civilizations of Earth and Mars and the other worlds of the Solar System.

  The ship was deserted. Not one of the Iskarites was anywhere near. Dan sought the door to the globular ship and found to his grim satisfaction that the door was not locked. The panel slid smoothly and he and Alix climbed inside the craft and pushed the door back again.

  Dan thought the interior of the ship looked mighty satisfying to a man who had had enough of Iskar. Release from the cold planet was at hand!

  He went to the control room and stared at the panel. He saw that the ship had been built on Cirees IV, according to the nameplate. Cirees IV was a small world of the Cireesian group and was reputed to be an energetic colony of Earthians. Well, they had built a nice ship.

  Dan Madoc had arrived at Iskar to prospect, but he was a trained enginneer. A few glaces at the controls and he figured he could handle the stratoship.

  He tried the contactor. The atomic motor hummed into life at once. Evidently the bad landing made by the Iskarites had not damaged anything in the motive power.

  Quickly, now that the motor was throbbing, he set the vernier for a slow lift. He pressed the appropriate button on the bank. The craft lurched.

  X9 rose vertically but with a bad list to starboard. Dan guessed a control fin or the mechanism working it had been damaged in the bad landing. Well, he thought that could be fixed. Possibly adjustments could be made in the controls to compensate for the damage.

  The ship rose high above the town and then Dan set it to “Hover.” In the next minute he made checks of the controls governing lateral movement. Everything seemed all right. With a manual control, he set the ship forward to the position above the machine jail yard.

  He guessed the ship’s movement would have been noticed by the Iskarites. The whole town would be alert. The Brethren would galvanise to action because they did not want to lose their slaves. Without them, the plant would cease to operate because the Iskarites were hopeless at mechanical work.

  Dan Madoc eased the ship down to the yard. He wanted to land the globular ship just beside the door to the jail.

  It was Alix who pointed through a port to the mass of furry Iskarites already in the yard.

  “They’re attempting to get in the jail!”

  “With only one entry, the brutes will find death awaiting them! ” said Dan grijnly. ” And if they don’t get out of the way, this ship will crush some to death.”

  The ship-slid down and at the last moment the grey furry mass of creatures ran for safety. Dan landed the ship, but kept the motor humming.

  He opened the sliding door. He waved a cushion at the door of the machine jail. He guessed the Earthians could see through cracks in the door. He waved the cushion because he was still invisible.

  The machine jail door opened with a slam. The Earthians ran for the ship. At the same moment a number of grey Iskarites leaped forward.

  There was a short, desperate battle. The Earthians had to fight a way to the ship. They were armed with metal bars, but two Earthians found they were hardly a match for vicious claws. The two men went down, slashed to ribbons. Two Iskarites were killed, so that the score was about even. Desperately wielding the metal bars, the Earthmen fought a battle, retreating to the ship all the time.

  Dan and Alix helped them into the craft as fast as pos
sible. The last two men were helped in as they backed, swinging savagely with great metal bars. At the last moment the bars were thrown at the Iskarites, and then the men leaped backwards. Dan slammed the door shut and set the magnetic lock.

  He leaped back to the controls and shot the craft up vertically into the grey Iskar sky. At five hundred feet he set the vernier to ” Hover.”

  He went back to the main lounge to examine the ex-prisoners. He found he was still invisible to the Earthians—like Alix—and so he had to carry a metal rule from the control diagram board.

  The X9 was carrying nineteen Earthians. The others had been killed during the earlier breakout from the jail, and two had died in the last skirmish. Some of the women were weak from fatigue and would need attention. All of the men required rest.

  “I’m going to the control room,” said Dan. He waved the metal ruler. All they could see was the ruler. “I’m going to chart a spacewarp to Earth. It might be a long trip with this crate, but Earth is the place for us.”

  He left them, with Alix tending those who needed attention. Two men, hardier than the others, were exploring the store-rooms. Dan passed them in the corridor and waved his stick cheerfully. The men were looking for food, weapons and any valuable accessory.

  Dan Madoc spent the next fifteen minutes working out a warp to Earth. Looking through the data above the diagram board, he gathered the ship had a maximum speed of one light year an hour. As Iskar was four hundred light years from Earth, the trip would be lengthy.

  At last the warp was planned. He fed the strip of paper into the Automatic Flight. He shunted the power to the Automatic and let it take over.

  The ship vibrated as it gathered speed and tore away from Iskar. The velocity increased steadily with every passing second. Dan made an adjustment to compensate for the damaged control fin. After that there was nothing more he could do. The ship was now on Automatic Flight and would only need checking every period on the warp.

  He rejoined the others in the lounge. A meal had been prepared. Everyone was laughing and overjoyed at the prospect of freedom. Dan looked for Alix and found her in a corner. She was waving her stick for the benefit of the other Earthians, but she was visible to Dan.

  As the ship throbbed on through the blue-black void, there was work for all to do. Things had to be organized. The food had to be checked and rationed, because there was little enough for nineteen people.

  At the end of a period Dan returned to the control room to examine the warp. Alix came with him, her arm in his, a smile on her lips.

  “One thing is certain, we’ll never visit Iskar again,” she joked. “The planet may contain valuable minerals, but I don’t like the people!”

  “If I ever go back to Iskar, it’ll be with plenty of ray guns!” growled Dan.

  His keen eyes stared at the warp graph, puzzled. The recording needle seemed in error. He began to make some calculations in an effort to check. The graph was recording their flight, but he suspected an error.

  After ten minutes of calculation, he knew his warp was correct. The sheet was in the Automatic Flight, and should be controlling the ship, but all the same he knew the X9 was not on a warp to Earth. Already the ship had sliced nearly a billion miles away from the warp.

  Something in the setup of the Automatic Flight was wrong. He inspected the outward checks, such as the dials and graphs, but got no clue as to why the X9 was slicing away from the warp he had fed to the Automatic.

  An hour later Dan Madoc turned the ship manually. He stood at the controls and steered the ship back to the warp he had set for Earth. For some time he held on to this course, and then he switched over to the Automatic again.

  He figured the ship should stick to the warp on the sheet.

  But even as he watched, the needles swung slowly again.

  The Stratoship X9 was swinging in an immense circle to the old warp!

  Then Dan realised the Automatic Flight was preset and had no alternatives. It was impossible to navigate the ship back to Earth. The Automatic was set for some unknow destination, and the ship would fly to that destination. On the trip to Iskar, the Automatic had run its course and then licked over to the other alternative. Now it was immovable. Even a manual course to Earth would have enormous deviations, and someone would have to stand by all the time—all the four hundred hours.

  The more Dan Madoc thought about it, the more he realised it might be better to let the X9 run its course. The ship had a destination. Maybe it was Cirees IV, its birthplace.

  There was not sufficient food on board to run risks. They could not wander all over the vast voids of space, with the Automatic pulling to one destination and the manual control set for another. With such terrible deviations, the ship could surge on for a year and still not come within sight of the Solar System. The Earth’s sun was a tiny star at the best of times. Its light was lost in the void where stars a hundred times its size scintillated.

  Dan let the ship swing back to its present warp. He even took the warp sheet he had prepared from the Automatic. The ship flung forward through space without a change or tremor. Dan realised his warp sheet had never really affected the ship.

  His lips were tight as he swung to Alix.

  “We’re not going to Earth. We’ve got to go with the ship. There is a preset destination, and goodness knows where that is!”

  Later sleep claimed them, for Dan and Alix, and in fact many of the others, had not slept for over twenty hours.

  When Dan Madoc rose from his bunk and went to the control room nearly eight hours later, he realised with a start that he was visible again to the others. He met a man in the corridor, and the way the man looked at him and smiled proved the invisible deposit from the flames of Iskar had worn off.

  It was the same with Alix Denyer. The effect had faded and once more they were normal Earthians.

  Dan stood in the control room and stared at the warp graph. The X9 was still plunging through space, but the graph showed that the warp would take the ship nowhere near the Solar System.

  Dan held a meeting and told the others. He was the only engineer-spaceman in the company. There had been others but they had been killed in the skirmishes with the Iskarites. The men on the X9 were mostly prospectors, miners, who had landed on Iskar. A ship had landed them a long way from the bear-people and then taken off quickly.

  “The X9 is on a warp to some unknown planet. I believe we may be returning to the planet which really owns this ship. If that guess is right, we’ll land at Cirees IV.”

  Exactly twenty-nine hours later Dan Madoc’s guess was proved right. A planet loomed up and grew in size from a pin-point of light to a vast landscape of hills and woods.

  The X9 flew in automatically, and Dan Madoc did not make any move to the controls. He watched the speed drop as the ship hit the atmospheric belt. Then he felt the motor murmur back to a mere whisper of power. The Automatic was certainly nicely set. The ship nosed across the terrain of the planet at a height of about fifty miles and at a mere speed of five hundred miles per hour.

  So this was Cirees IV? This was the world which was colonised by Earthians? Well, they ought to find a welcome, at any rate.

  The X9 slid over a vast basin of sand and rock at one end of which was a city. The roofs and domes gleamed in the sunlight. There was an Earthian atmosphere on the planet and so the city was not roofed and pressurised.

  The ship eased to “Hover” and then slowly dropped. The craft had slid over the basin at a height of less than five miles, so that the descent was not long.

  With the others, now rested and strong again, Dan Madoc and Alix Denyer stood at the lounge ports and watched the terrain. As the ship sank, the city was better seen.

  “Looks a fine change from the caves of Iskar,” commented Dan. “Our own people, too! Maybe this is as good as returning to Earth!”

  “You were right to let the ship take the preset warp,” said Alix.

  The X9 landed softly. For a moment there was silence The mo
tor sighed to nothing.

  “Open the doors,” said Dan. “Let’s get out. I’m hungry and could eat some steak. Queer no one has come forward to greet the ship’s arrival!”

  That was a strange fact. The city seemed dead. No one had crossed the sandy basin. Yet the X9 had arrived on a preset course. Someone had installed that course in the Automatic.

  As the nineteen Earthians moved over the sand, the lack of movement in the city struck them like a stark fear.

  “I don’t like it,” said Dan Madoc. “Where are the people?”

  The party walked on and finally entered the city. The streets were white concrete, spewn into habitations and buildings by the amazing concrete moulder. This moulder could throw up a house in an hour, or lay a ribbon-like road at a mile an hour. New worlds were being created out of primeval conditions every week by the concrete moulder.

  But the splendid little city, alone on the green planet, was deserted. As the party walked down the main street, no one moved from the houses. Nothing human moved. There were only a few Martian dogs, a reminder that Man had lived here.

  And then, all at once, as if a warning, there was movement. It came violently.

  The party of Earthians were amazed to see a number of furry bodies run towards them, down the white road. There came a snarling sound and “Pog” cries.

  “Iskarites!” ejaculated Dan. ” How the devil are they here?”

  At the moment the question of safety was more important than the other question. The Earthians ran to the nearest building.

  The Iskarites hurled after them with animalistic savagery. The pack was nearly a hundred strong, so far as anyone could judge. They seemed to be lusting to fight.

  The Earthians reached the building and slammed doors after them. There were shutters on the windows and these were hurriedly closed. The men grabbed at pokers and anything which might form a weapon and stood by the door and shutters.

  Dan Madoc went to an upstair window to look out.

  He saw the pack of Iskarites moving around the street on their hind-legs. They were bestially angry. They pawed viciously at the air. They were in a snarly mood.