The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  The intruder moved.

  “Who are you?” I rasped. “What do you want?”

  A voice came from the shape, a strained, hoarse voice.

  “I’m looking for Captain Silton.”

  Unaccountably blood thumped in my ears. My collar was suddenly tight.

  “I’m Silton,” I grunted.

  “But I mean Gurd Silton, commander of the Terra.”

  Long shivers ran through me, and a mad, impossible thought clamored. That voice!

  “I am Gurd Silton,” I croaked. “And once I commanded the Terra.” I was no longer afraid. The ague that shook me was not of fear.

  “You—you Gurd Silton!” The other’s arm came up. Shrouded by the fabric of his cloak it pointed at me like a bat’s wing. “You—impossible. You are an old man, and—”

  I heaved from my chair.

  “Who are you?” I said. “In God’s name, who are you?”

  I hurled myself across the space between, ripped the cloak away before he could stop me, jerked the hood from his head. And then I saw him—tousled yellow hair, a long strand dipping across his clear brow; frank grey eyes, small now in puzzlement; broad-planed, youthful face. I saw wide shoulders and thick legs planted in an old, familiar stance. Sound ripped from my throat. “Jay!”

  He warded me off.

  “I’m Jay Silton, all right. But you’re white-haired, wrinkled! You’re an old man. You can’t be Gurd!”

  A queer rage thickened my utterance.

  “What did you expect? Thirty years don’t leave a man’s hair black.”

  And then it hit me! Jay wasn’t changed at all. He was still, apparently, a youth of twenty!

  He was staring at me with wide, incredulous eyes.

  “Thirty years,” he whispered. “Why, it’s only a month since—”

  Chaos whirled within my skull. Was I still in the delirium that had followed his vanishing, my long Calvary only a nightmare? I saw the space-chart, saw the date imprinted at its upper edge. November 16, 2048! I pointed to it.

  “Look!” I said huskily.

  My brother stared at the paper. A vein pulsed in his neck. He drew the back of a closed fist across his forehead and words dripped from his working mouth.

  “But I swear it’s not a month since we—lost our way. Why, there’s still food left on the Luna and we had only a month’s supply.”

  His hand came out in a gesture of utter bewilderment.

  “Gurd! Where have all the years gone?” His voice was edged with hysteria, a long shudder ran through him: “Sanders is lost,” he muttered, “and Hollivant. And there are thirty years gone from my life!”

  Madness flamed in his eyes. I must ease him somehow, say anything to divert his thoughts from the horror.

  “By the way, Jay, I didn’t see the Luna land. Where is she?”

  “Hidden in the Adirondack Pleasure Park, in a glen where nobody goes. I didn’t dare land her here.”

  I was startled.

  “Why? Of what are you afraid?” I recalled his furtive entrance, his close-swathed hood cloak and low-drawn hood.

  “Afraid? I told you my mates are gone. Have you forgotten Rule Forty-nine?”

  A chill ran through me. Rule Forty-nine is the most rigorously enforced of all the Space Code. In case of disaster to a vessel; her commander must be the last to seek safety. If he return minus crew or passengers the penalty is—death in the lethal chamber!

  Severe this may be, but justified. Too often, in the early days, did space madness seize crew and master alike. Too often did craft land, with one, only, alive of those who had blasted-off.

  It was the one solution, to place all weapons in control of the master, and hold him straightly accountable for the safety of an aboard.

  “Jay!” my voice cracked. “You didn’t—”

  “No.” There was utter truth in the grey eyes. “Of course not.”

  “But where are they? Are they alive?”

  “That’s the hell of it, Gurd. I don’t know whether they are dead or alive. I don’t know where they are.”

  If I was to help him I must get him talking sense.

  “Come now, Jay,” I rapped out, sternly. “You must have some idea of where in the universe you have been.”

  I could see that he was trying to pull himself together, trying to phrase something unphrasable. His hands fisted at his sides. Then, “Gurd! It sounds insane. But I don’t think it was anywhere in the universe.”

  “What! You—”

  Cold, rasping words, interrupted me. Toneless words from across nine hundred thousand miles of space. “Newyork, Newyork, Newyork,” the speaker disc above my desk blared. “From Lunar Observatory. Ether eddy is fading. Ether eddy is fading. Corrections need not be made. From Lunar Observatory. Newyork, Newyork, Newyork…”

  Jay’s arms flung above his head, and he shouted incredible things.

  “That’s where they are! In that eddy or beyond it! That’s where I carne from; It’s going, and my last chance is gone! My last chance to find them, to save them!”

  In a flash I knew what must be done. I grabbed Jay’s arm.

  “Come on, quick!” Without his mates or a witness to his non-culpability for their loss, death was certain for him. “We still have time!” What happened to me did not matter. “Hurry!”

  We were out of the room, were darting across the tarmac. The Phobos loomed its dark bulk over us, and, praise be, its entrance hatch was open. I plunged through, Jay after’ me.

  “Close down,” I shouted. “Close down!” The first command of a space flight. How long since I had uttered it!

  CHAPTER II

  Into a New Universe

  I hurtled up the companionway, followed by the clangor of the shutting airlock hatch. Thirty years since I had flown, yet all the old, hard-won spacemanship tingled at my finger-tips as I burst into the control room and saw before me a gleaming bank of levers and fuel wheels.

  Jay’s staccato report met me, from the speaker disc above the gauge-board. “All tight, sir.” Just as in the years when I taught him the secrets of the void.

  “Make it so, mister,” I acknowledged in the unforgotten jargon. “Stand by for the blast-off.” Not for nothing had I conned the plans of this latest product of the spaceship engineers, assuaging nostalgia in vicarious flight. There was no lost motion now As I dived for the protective couch, snapped straps around me, and jammed down the main-feed lever. I functioned almost automatically, thrown back a third of a century to the old routine.

  The surge of sudden vast power, the down-thudding of acceleration’s weight, was a trip-hammer blow to my unaccustomed flesh. For an instant I knew the agonies of the damned, then merciful oblivion took me.

  I do not know how long I was unconscious, nor what awesome speed the Phobos attained before the Thorson electro-spring cut off fuel flow. But when sight and thought returned, I saw, in the visi-screen, the blackness of space, the wide-spread panoply of stars infinite in distance and number that I had thought never to set my eyes upon again, and the ominous shimmer of the ether eddy, straight ahead.

  Terror jerked my unwilled hand to the braking valve, but it was too late. The Phobos plunged straight into the heart of the mystery from whence my brother had come.

  In that instant livid fingers reached, twisting, into my brain!

  The Phobos jarred. That jar seemed repeated in every atom of my being. Light poured in, a vivid, red light that paled the gleam, of our argons, a crimson light that smote all color from the cabin. I whirled to the visi-screen.

  And then I was at the lever-bank, furiously, frantically active. I had seen a great orb blotting out the sky, a gigantic, scarlet sphere toward which we hurtled headlong.

  The Phobos vibrated, screeched protest at the forces that tore at her.

  Great, whirling, scarlet clouds became distinct, blanketing the strange world that had us in its grip. A craggy spire thrust above the vapor, spearing to impale our vessel.

  The nose-tubes were o
n full force and they couldn’t brake her! In minutes, in seconds, we should crash against the red world into infinitesimal fragments. It wasn’t thought, it was sheer instinct unforgotten after thirty years that guided my flashing hands among the wheels and levers. There was no time for thought.

  I swung her! I swung the Phobos half about as she hurtled to her doom, and with the maximum blast of her main tubes I turned her into a sideward path, parallel to the rounding surface of the strange planet.

  That held her! By the horns of Taurus, that held the craft in a circling orbit, made her a satellite of the cloud-shrouded crimson world!

  I slumped, breathless, and stared at the five-fold visi-screen. In one division I saw the mist-clothed, incarnadined bulk of the world whose attraction had nearly done for us. To the side, and far off, an immense sun sent scarlet streamers writhing out from a scarlet, dazzling disc. In the other sectors the firmament was revealed; a black firmament, star-studded. In all that vast panoply of worlds and suns there was not one familiar constellation! They were strange, all strange.

  A voice, a blessed human voice, broke the stillness.

  “Gurd! Are you all right?” Jay leaned against the hatch, his face ghastly in the weird red light, his pupils unnaturally enlarged, the corner of his mouth twitching.

  “A little dazed, but whole. And you?”

  His lips tried to twist into a smile. “I? Oh, I’ve been through this before.”

  “Then this is what we are looking for. This is where you lost Hollivant and Sanders.’”

  He nodded. “If they’re still alive, they’re down there. We broke through, like this. Just as you just did, I swung the Luna about and forced her into a circling orbit.

  “I did more. I turned my ship again, so that her stern was toward that world and tried to blast her away. But I couldn’t, Gurd: The attraction was too great. We were held tight.”

  “But the Luna was powered to escape from Jupiter,” I exclaimed, “against five times Earth’s gravity!”

  “It wasn’t enough. We were chained here, eternally doomed. I dared not land, not knowing what lay under those clouds and not being equipped for interplanetary exploration. We circled endlessly, seeing below nothing but those rolling mists, now scarlet in the light of the crimson sun, now black as we passed over the night hemisphere. I refused to attempt a landing, hoping without reason that patience would bring release.

  “At length Hollivant and Sanders demanded permission to take space suits and make the attempt. I did not feel justified in refusing. I opened the air-lock for them, watched their bulky shapes spiral down, black against the red-lighted clouds, the long-darting flames of their gas-tubes streaming ahead of them to brake their descent. I saw them land on that peak we glimpsed, the only evidence that the strange planet is solid. And then—”

  “What?”

  “And then the Luna jarred. The crimson light was gone, and in the visi-screen I saw Orion with his sword, I saw White Rigel and topaz Betelgeuse blazing in splendor. The white blaze of our own Sun warmed me, and little Earth was a green disc calling me home.”

  “You had plunged through the ether eddy again!”

  “I guessed that. But, Gurd. What does it all mean? What is this strange universe, and what became of the thirty years that seem to me less than a month?”

  Somehow I knew the answer, must have reasoned it out subconsciously as he spoke. “Science has moved while you were gone, Jay. We know now that the ether eddy is the manifestation Of a fourth dimensional tangency between two spatial hyperspheres. You remember your high school Einstein, don’t you?”

  The figure in four-dimensional geometry that is analogous to a sphere in three-dimensional i.e., the figure described by a sphere rotated through the fourth dimension, as a circle is rotated through the third dimension to describe a sphere.

  “Of course. I get it. Einstein said space, our space, is unbounded but finite, the three-dimensional surface of a hypersphere within which, and without, nothing exists that is in any way related to anything in our space. What’s happened is that we’ve—”

  “Broken through into another space. Another universe. And since, as you said, nothing in this space has any relation to anything in ours, their Times are different, so that it is perfectly reasonable that while you, here, were living only a month I, there, aged thirty years.”

  “Yes, but—” He didn’t finish his sentence. At least I didn’t hear him finish it. For I had kept my eyes on the electelscope viewplate as we talked, and just then, the Phobos having completed a circuit of the red planet, the black peak came into its field. And I had caught a flicker of movement on its surface.

  It was an Earthman, his space suit unmistakable! He seemed to be struggling with something. A billow of cloud spurted upward and he was lost to view.

  “They’re alive,” I blurted. “One of them is alive. We’ve got to go down there.”

  I managed it. With a gentle side discharge of the rocket flares I changed our level circling to a slow, tightening spiral. Each circuit we made through the shifting changes from black night to crimson day brought us nearer and nearer the clouds, and then after an interminable time, we were among them.

  We were through them! We were over a great, almost level plain, black as the belly of Jonah’s whale. We landed, gently as thistledown, right at the base of the needlelike spire that pierced the clouds.

  “How’s that for navigating?” I grinned. “The old boy hasn’t lost his skill.”

  “Swell,” Jay applauded. “But what’s to do now? We can’t climb that mountain. It must be fifty miles high.”

  “Into space suits,” I snapped. “And the Phobos carries a small stratocar as a lifeboat. If there’s any atmosphere at all, and there must be or there wouldn’t be any clouds, that will take us up there quicker than we came down.”

  “Let’s get going then. The fellows need our help, bad.”

  “We’ll get going, but I’m afraid we’re too late. Time’s all mixed up, Jay, by our circling, but I figure a week at least has passed here since we saw him, although only minutes in the time of this universe elapsed while you came back to Earth and we returned.”

  “Never mind that. We’ve got to make a try.”

  “Okay. I’m with you,” I responded. “Don’t forget these trinite guns. I’ve got a hunch we’re going to need them badly.”

  The buzzing hum of the stratocar’s hydroxy motor battered against the side of that incredible mountain as we lifted straight up to its summit. Suddenly, just under the cloud ceiling I saw a hole in the rampart, underlined by a narrow ledge. And on that ledge—the broken off hand-claw of a space suit.

  “In there! They’re in there,” I shouted. It was with an effort that I controlled my shaking hand sufficiently to land our little conveyance on the ledge. Bulky in our space suits, we squeezed out; stood precariously on the rock shelf.

  The cave that confronted us seemed shallow, a blank wall closed it only six feet back. But a tunnel angled off to the left, so sharply that light, reflected not at all by the dull surface of black rock, did not enter it. My tentative, testing step felt a level floor in that Stygian darkness, and in the sensitive ear of my space suit I heard the scrape of Jay’s feet following me.

  The jointed metal of my garment made sudden, echoing clangor as I thumped into vertical stone. I froze. Surely that clumsy sound would arouse the mysterious denizens of this cave would bring them in sudden attack upon us! My hand-fork closed about my weapon’s butt.

  The stillness was ripped by a long wailing cry, packed with terror; a thin, hopeless, human wail that rose and fell, rose and fell, somewhere ahead It snapped short. The following, intensified silence was vibrant with horror.

  I jumped forward. The ground dropped away from beneath me, and I was falling, falling—

  CHAPTER III

  The Turtle Men

  There was sound now, sound aplenty. The crash of my own sheathed body, jerking from side to side. The crash of Jay dropping too, above
me. Rattle of loosened stones, following us down. I dropped, dropped endlessly.

  The sensation of falling ceased, but not the noises. I seemed to be floating free in the eyeless dark. My flung-out hand touched the side wall, was thrust away with terrific force. I knew then that I was still falling, but not at an increasing rate, as I should have if gravity alone were acting. Some intangible force was holding the speed of my descent steady, so that, with nothing by which to judge, I seemed to be at rest.

  Precisely as if I were in a spaceship, zipping along at a thousand miles a minute, with, nil acceleration. But this was in the bowels of a world, not in the free leagues of space. Sooner or later we’d hit something solid.

  The blackness grayed slightly. I felt myself moving upward, slowly. But so sudden a change of direction, at the speed I must have attained, should have torn me to bits. It dawned on me that my fall was merely slowing gradually. Queer! What could be causing this gentle deceleration?

  In a sort of drab dusk I could now see the glass-smooth, curved walls blurring past. I twisted and saw Jay’s queerly distorted form below—no, above me. It must be above. I had fallen first, and he had not passed me. Sensation was chaotic. As a space pilot I should have been familiar with apparent changes of direction, deceptively due to misinterpretation of changes in acceleration, in rate of motion, by the monitors in our nervous system. But it was so long since I had flown.

  The light grew brighter. It was white light. White light! Brighter and brighter it was, dazzling after the dark. Abruptly the walls of the shaft were gone!

  We had dropped through the roof of a tremendous cavern, its boundaries miles away! Below, straight below us, five hundred feet or more, a circular pool of what seemed white-hot, shining metal blazed. I glimpsed forms moving about its edges, a road bordering it, low-lying buildings. Beyond them fields, green fields. We were falling straight for that white blaze!