by Jerry
Esterbrook shivered in his pressure-suit, almost as if the knifing cold outside had penetrated—which it hadn’t. The cause was much more subtle. Three men at last stood before an example of a non-human’s handiwork, the first men to see a Martian dawn.
“I say, chaps, let’s get at it, shall we?” he said crisply.
“Eight,” Clayton, the American said brusquely, “let’s go.”
Swenson had rigged up an electric hammer. He applied the chisel bit to the crack and touched the stud. The beating throb of the tool carried even through the thin Martian air. The scene was eerie and discomfiting and all three men felt it in their bones. It seemed, in a way, sacrilegious to open this sealed vault. But a thousand thrilled scientists back on Earth insisted over the ultra-wave.
In the lesser gravity Swenson handled the tool skillfully and it’s keen alloy edge point bit rapidly into the disintegrating stone. After a few passes of the machine a gouge sufficient to insert a pry-bar was created and Esterbrook and Clayton wedged in a massive pronged hook. Leaning heavily on it, they levered the moderate-sized sandstone block, and crumbling as it came, it fell to their feet. A vigorous attack on other portions of the opening soon gained them across to the interior.
Like grave-robbers entering the tombs of the Pharoahs, the three Martian explorers walked slowly into the darkness, guided by the brilliant beam of an electric torch. Cryptic symbols covered the carven walls, meaningless to the men. There would be time for analysis later.
Soon, after a short walk along a descending ramp, a cavernous room was reached, a room lined with the strangest products of a culture far older than their own. Strange tools and utensils, odd shapes and figurines of no perceptible relationship caught their amazed eyes.
“It’s unbelievable,” Esterbrook breathed. “What a world this must have been!” Clayton glanced around at the jumbled yet orderly array of exhibits: “Naturally, it’s a museum of some kind,” he stated matter-of-factly. “What else could such a conglomeration be? We’re probably looking at as complete a record of Martian civilization as we’ll ever find.”
“They don’t seem to have had much of a mechanical bend though,” Swenson interjected. “You don’t see much of metal.” Esterbrook wandered a little away from his companions. Suddenly they heard him swear and then:
“My God!” he gasped, “Oh my God!” Swenson and Clayton turned and swung their torches toward the object of Esterbrook’s surprise. And they nearly dropped them.
Covered with dust, but still clearly recognizable, was a glass cylinder, much like a gigantic test-tube. It was filled with a murky yellow liquid, but the object it sheathed was perfectly detectible.
It was the body of a man and at his side a woman!
Perfectly preserved, frozen in the grotesque masque of death the couple stared unseeingly.
Clayton found his voice at a minute’s silence.
“It’s a museum, all right,” he said bitterly, “a museum that tells us a lot. These people were traveling through space while we were still swinging from the trees.”
“It isn’t exactly satisfying to think of one’s self as a specimen,” Esterbrook said with an edged tone.
“I wonder when . . .” Swenson was saying, “I wonder when . . .”
The Sacrifice
June Lurie
YOU CAN never in a thousand years, guess where the heroes come from. That arrant coward there, or that blustering fool—each, under the proper circumstances may show that subtle chemical heroism. Such is the way of the gods . . .
We technicians at Rocket Base Number Three, will never forget that morning when it happened. It happened with such dazzling speed too, that it is somewhat of a blur, even now. But the salient elements are there.
The Sovs threw a war-headed rocket at the base. Auto-radar picked it up. I know that, because I was in Controls when they caught it. I can even remember the startled voice of Blane as he looked at the photo-strip on the scopes, first casually, then with unbelieving astonishment. “They’ve got us!” lie yelled out, “we’re pipped two seconds ago!”
And automatically we waited for the blast hoping that the atomic bomb-carrying rocket would possibly be deflected or would explode at such a distance point as to leave us comparatively unharmed. I looked out the window as did a hundred pairs of eyes.
We caught the blinding glare of an exhaust—coming horizontally it seemed—and then the crazy unpredictable rocket skittered to a weird crashing stop. Its eighty foot length smashed and broken, it lay like some wounded monster. Why didn’t it go off? Who knows? Something must have happened to its delicate automatic controls, for it simply lay there, an atomic bomb in its nose, waiting, waiting . . .
Command recognized the situation and over the speakers came the order to abandon the base—and how it must have wrenched Holder’s heart to realize that a hundred and fifty million dollars worth of rocket defense was about to be shot to hell.
Then our astonished eyes saw a figure walking across the field toward the bomb. Fenner said in a stupid voice: “It’s Coring!” And sure enough it was.
Coring was just a kid, a fair mechanic, but shy and retiring, and mortally afraid of the service. He’d been drafted and stuck here because in private life he’d been a good instrument man. But everyone knew how afraid he was. In fact it was a standing joke his cowardice was. “Coring?—he’s afraid of his own shadow,” they would say. “We’ve put him on radar—he wouldn’t go near a bomb.”
And now this kid walks across five hundred feet of flat field toward a monstrous atomic bomb. He didn’t hurry and in his right hand was a standard bag of tools.
Well, the upshot of it all, was that he disarmed the thing! That’s what I said; he disarmed the bomb, working cool as a cucumber on something he must have been mortally afraid of. He finished the job and Armaments took over, but not before Coring had gotten some nasty radiation burns.
You can’t tell where the heroes come from, I said, and I still say it. Coring is still a mechanic—he didn’t go for the hero stuff—but men look at him under a different light. “There’s the man who saved Base Three,” they’ll say. “Quite some guy . . .”
The Sub-Killer
A.T. Kedzie
“LIEUTENANT Flexner,” the communicator blared, “report to operations. Lieutenant Flexner, report—”
Jake flipped the book away, and rose to his feet. He stretched and yawned. He tugged his jacket down and straightened his collar.
Kleary looked up from the card table. He grinned. “What’s the matter, Jake? Are they sending you on a combat mission?”
“ ‘Lieutenant Flexner,’ ” Jake mimicked.
“ ‘We have an important patrol’—ah, bull!” he finished disgustedly. “This stinking outpost will kill more men of boredom than anything else. I don’t believe Nestor’s seen a Sov-rocket for all his talk.” Angrily Jake stalked toward operations.
Here in this isolated Greenland base, Jake thought, nothing ever has happened or ever will happen. Patrol, patrol—until you were nuts from coaxing a rocket over flat icy seas with nothing, friendly or inimical to see. Well that was war. The monotonous waiting, waiting. Jake wished he’d been put in the Bering action where the pulse of Sov-rockets was fast and furious. He shrugged resignedly and opened the door to operations . . .
Fifteen minutes later, Jake was flat on his belly against the riding board of a slim torpedo of steel and the rocket motors were throbbing behind him. Before him lay the flat, bitter-cold surface of the North Atlantic, a barren space now that the war drove all but heavily escorted freighters and an occasional runner from it.
As he scanned the sea and kept one eye on the radar screen, Jake thought of Nestor’s words. “Somewhere there’s a crippled Sov-sub. You’ve got to nail it. I’m sending time-patrols out until we do get this baby. And remember, she’s dangerous. They’ve probably got a rocket aboard her too, so kill it fast and then watch out!”
It was twenty minutes later that Jake’s radar pipped—and th
en he knew he had her. Following the ’scope coordinates, he skimmed the surface of the icy sea at five hundred feet, the pip getting stronger all the time.
There she lay!
A class D-P 7 Sov-sub lay wallowing in the troughs of the waves! Jake could picture her frantic crew working madly to repair whatever was the trouble. Even as he nosed toward the helpless vessel, he saw the winking flame of rockets. The anti-aircraft were probably automatically triggered, he knew, but his own “pulser” would kill any proximity-fused missiles sent at him.
Already the sub was starting to submerge. Jake laughed: “No you don’t,” he said softly. He touched the firing trips and four missiles sped toward the sub. There was a brilliant orange-red wink of flame and the submarine vanished in the eruption of a hyper-bomb.
“Down one,” Jake called softly into his throat-mike, “nailed her cold at coordinates—” He rattled off the location. Even as the word came out of his mouth, he Was aware of trouble. Thundering flat across the ocean was the defense rocket the sub had managed to launch before the death blow.
Jake jerked savagely at the stick and his needle-nosed craft responded nobly. He shot skyward. And he saw two orange flares as the enemy’s rockets hit the sea.
But the fast defense rocket was on his tail, its pilot cool and collected, knowing he was doomed but determined to kill the sub-killer.
The Sov-pilot was good. Fortunately his rocket wasn’t good enough. Jake opened wide his throttles and in two passes he was coming in toward the Sov. Too late the enemy saw his danger. He nosed seaward, his rockets flaring white. Jake goosed his jets and the rockets thundered. Simultaneously his automatic optical fire-control touched off. The stream eighty-millimeter rockets caught the Sov-jet squarely in the middle. It disintegrated into shattered steel and aluminum.
Jake wiped the sweat from his face and turned his ship towards base. He was trembling from the excitement of the chase and the kill and the counter-chase. “Whew,” he whistled half-aloud, “If that’s action, brother!” The rocket droned basewards . . .
Lorelei of Space
Dan Corliss
THE GREENISH light on the automonitor for the radar-scan started to Wink rapidly. Like all good spacemen, Bill Powers reacted to that plea for help instinctively. The instrument showed the coordinates and the meters indicated distance. The call was almost directly in his line of flight.
He stabbed the forward jets and at the same time locked himself deep in the rubbery air-cushioned seat. The rapidly building deceleration—up to five G’s in seven minutes—pressed his reversed seat forcing him deep into its cushiony mass. Breathing heavily Bill studied his instruments. Somebody had sent out the universal pulse for “help!” and he had to reply.
The thrum of the braking rockets pounded in his ears as his velocity was cut down rapidly. But the powerful little type L-24 was built to take stresses in her frame. She shuddered a little but that was all. Cutting deceleration, Bill scanned his screens looking for the ship which had sent out the emergency.
His eyes riveted on a pin-point of light, like a stellar image itself, but twinkling and varying—a visual call. That must be it!
It took Bill fifteen minutes to bring his vessel into contact with the helpless one. Bill didn’t recognize its features, or its class. It was built peculiarly but then there were plenty of odd-shaped ships scuttling their way through space.
He warped his vessel alongside. Gingerly maneuvering with single pulse-jets Bill was soon ready to board the obviously crippled craft. Her whole rear rocket-section was stove in, much as if a meteor had clipped her before the deflectors could swing her or deflect the object.
The outer lock door was broken. Bill entered the injured ship through an inner door which leaked like a sieve—the air pumps and the converters still laboring to keep the pressure up.
He didn’t expect to see a girl under any conditions—much less these—but there she was, sprawled out in a closely fitting suit, apparently unconscious or dead.
Moving rapidly, Bill dragged her light bulk into his ship, with no gravity to hinder his efforts. The girl, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, began to recover as the warmth and pressure of Bill’s control cabin revived her. She sat up slowly and looked around her. Bill saw that she was extremely attractive. Beautiful face, hair—and figure.
Mentally Bill classified her as a rich man’s daughter out for a private fling in a custom-built high-powered speedster, not likely to be familiar with a hard-working miner.
She smiled:
“Thanks,” she said in a rich throaty voice, “I didn’t think there’d ever be any help. The generators were going fast.”
“You are lucky,” Bill agreed, grinning, “thank the monitor, not me. That spotted your call.”
“The meteor hit me about six hours ago,” the girl said. “I went out, but everything was on automatic so the signals were sent. I must have fainted a dozen times.”
She told her story fast and glibly. Too fast and glibly. A little alarm bell began ringing in the back of Bill’s head. This lush creature just didn’t look like a girl who’d gone through a space wreck. The more Bill listened the more puzzled he became.
He was staring at her eyes now. They were a rich purple and as he looked into them for a minute he felt a pulse of heat sweep through him. The girl’s face blurred. Coraine she called herself.
And then Bill knew.
This was no simple space-wrecked girl. This was was no person crying for help, stranded in a wrecked vessel. This was wrong and alien. This was fearsome and subtly evil.
The girl was looking up at him now and her red lips were parted. Her gleaming white teeth seemed to change, almost resolve themselves into pointed—what?
Summoning up some strength, some awareness deep within himself, Bill forced himself to look away. The minute his eyes left her face he hurled himself at her. But it wasn’t a girl he took in his arms. An alien something writhed beneath him borne backward by the force and ferocity of his abrupt attack. His fists smashed again and again against flesh which was not human. An unearthly shriek tore from the creature’s lips.
Then, without pausing to continue the fight the “girl” fled toward the lock and then through. She wore no space suit and Bill saw her head for the wreck from which she’d just been taken, moving like a wraith, as unsubstantial as the empty-space she breathed.
They called it “hallucinations” back at the base, but the oldtimers knew better. “Lorelei,” they’d whisper, “Bill Powers saw one o’them Lorelei. She almost got him, too . . .”
Magnetic Bomb!
Lee Owen
“I DON’T like it, Frank,” Jim Lenning said to his companion. He turned to the visi-plate and squinted at its graduations more closely. “That baby is gaining on us.”
Frank shrugged.
“What are we going to do? I’ve tried to raise them with a radio beam. They don’t answer.”
“Why should they?” Jim said viciously, “they know what’s aboard. Somebody at the Martian station must have blabbed that we had seven hundred thousand credits worth of panar. Imagine what the stuff would do to the illicit drug trade.”
Frank looked worried. “We don’t have any weapons. We can’t fight them. And we’re out of beacon range of a patrol station. I think we’re caught.”
Jim looked thoughtfully at the dot of the ship on the visi-plate.
“Maybe not,” he said softly, “maybe not.”
Jim left Frank at the controls while he went back to the power room at the stern of the slim rocket. As he passed the cargo chambers holding the powerful drug destined for the government medical agency, he felt almost despairing. Not only would that disappear along with their eight months’ work, but the vicious criminal world would get its hands on the most powerful and potent maddening drug known to man throughout the System.
Frank watched the ever-growing dot flying a straight-line course behind them, straight as an arrow following in their wake.
He
was still staring hopelessly at the screen when a half hour later Jim came into the control room. Jim was dragging a clumsy-looking sheet metal box which appeared quite heavy across the ribbed metal floor.
“I think this may do the trick, Frank,” he said. Now there was a grin on his face. “If it doesn’t, too bad. If it does . . .” He left the unfinished sentence hanging in mid-air.
Frank looked puzzled. “What is it?” he asked.
“That baby,” Jim said proudly, “is a magnetic mine. It’s crude and simple but it may do the trick. I’m going to dump it out the lock. It has a heavy, power-packed coil in it with a lot of junk iron. You’ve noticed that this baby is tailing us hell bent in a strictly linear course. Won’t they be surprised to find themselves running right smack into about two hundred pounds of metal! It’ll split them wide open.”
Frank was staring open-mouthed.
“Brother!” he said finally, “when I think how they’re traveling!” Suddenly he burst out: “But what about kicking it toward them? If you dump out the mine it’ll just cling to us.”
“I’m going to jettison right through the rear rocket tubes,” Jim answered calmly. “That’ll give it a nice velocity component in their direction. O.K.?”
Frank grinned. “That’s it boy. Let’s dump ’er.”
The two of them lugged the heavy mine back toward the rear rocket tubes. In the power room, Frank gingerly swung open a lock and slipped the heavy missile into the cavity with Jim’s help. Then both went back to the control room and waited.
“About seven minutes will tell the tale,” Frank said, putting down the pencil and scratch paper, “assuming the velocity I think they’ve got.”
Grimly, intently they watched the screen. For minutes there was no change except the imperceptibly slight increase in angular size of the unknown space-ship bent on capturing them.
