Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

"Something. Nothing. Just escape--"

  "But I see no women--how could you begin again, as you suggest?"

  "Women? Too weak; they would not have lasted. We brought along eggs and machines--enough for our needs."

  Mr. Greypoole clucked his tongue. "Mr. Waldmeyer certainly did look ahead," he muttered, "he certainly did."

  "Will we be honest now? Will you help us?"

  "Yes, Captain, I will help you. Let us go back to your rocket." Mr. Greypoole smiled. "Things will be better there."

  Captain Webber signaled. They left the building and walked by the foot of a white mountain.

  * * * * *

  They passed a garden with little spotted trees and flowers, a brown desert of shifting sands and a striped tent; they walked by strawberry fields and airplane hangars and coal mines; tiny yellow cottages, cramped apartments, fluted houses and Tudor houses and houses without description....

  Past rock pools and a great zoo full of animals that stared out of vacant eyes; and everywhere, the seasons changing gently: crisp autumn, cottony summer, windy spring and winters cool and white....

  The six men in uniforms followed the little man with the thin hair. They did not speak as they walked, but looked around, stared, craned, wondered....

  And the old, young, middle-aged, white, brown, yellow people who did not move wondered back at the men with their eyes....

  "You see, Captain, the success of Mr. Waldmeyer's plan?"

  Captain Webber rubbed his cheek.

  "I don't understand," he said.

  "But you do see, all of you, the perfection here, the quality of Eternal Happiness which the circular speaks of?"

  "Yes ... we see that."

  "Here we have happiness and brotherhood, here there have never been wars or hatreds or prejudices. And now you who were many and left Earth to escape war and hatred, who were many by your own word and are now only six, you want to begin life here?"

  Cross-breezes ruffled the men's hair.

  "To begin, when from the moment of your departure you had wars of your own, and killed, and hurled mocking prejudice against a race of people not like you, a race who rejected and cast you out into space again! From your own account! No gentlemen, I am truly sorry. It may be that I misjudged those of you who are left, or rather, that Happy Glades misjudged you. You may mean well, after all--and, of course, the location of this asteroid was so planned by the Board as to be uncharted forever. But--oh, I am sorry." Mr. Greypoole sighed.

  "What does he mean by that?" asked Mr. Friden and Lieutenant Peterson.

  Captain Webber was gazing at a herd of cows in the distance.

  "What do you mean, you're 'sorry'?" demanded Mr. Friden.

  "Well...."

  "Captain Webber!" cried Mr. Chitterwick, blinking.

  "Yes, yes?"

  "I feel queer."

  Mr. Goeblin clutched at his stomach.

  "So do I!"

  "And me!"

  Captain Webber looked back at the fields, then at Mr. Greypoole. His mouth twitched in sudden pain.

  "We feel awful, Captain!"

  "I'm sorry, gentlemen. Follow me to your ship, quickly." Mr. Greypoole motioned curiously with his hands and began to step briskly.

  * * * * *

  They circled a small pond where a motionless boy strained toe-high on an extended board. And the day once again turned to night as they hurried past a shadowed cathedral.

  When they were in sight of the scorched trees, Mr. Milton doubled up and screamed.

  "Captain!"

  Mr. Goeblin struck his forehead. "I told you, I told you we shouldn't have drunk that wine! Didn't I tell you?"

  "It was the wine--and we all drank it. He did it, he poisoned us!"

  "Follow me!" cried Mr. Greypoole, making a hurried gesture and breaking into a run. "Faster!"

  They stumbled hypnotically through the park, over the Mandarin-bridges to the rock.

  "Tell them, Captain, tell them to climb the ladder."

  "Go on up, men."

  "But we're poisoned, sir!"

  "Hurry! There's--an antidote in the ship."

  The crew climbed into the ship.

  "Captain," invited Mr. Greypoole.

  Captain Webber ascended jerkily. When he reached the open lock, he turned. His eyes swept over the hills and fields and mountains, over the rivers and houses and still people. He coughed and pulled himself into the rocket.

  Mr. Greypoole followed.

  "You don't dislike this ship, do you--that is, the surroundings are not offensive?"

  "No; we don't dislike the ship."

  "I am glad of that--if only I had been allowed more latitude! But everything functions so well here; no real choice in the matter, actually. No more than the Sealing Film. And they would leave me with these human emotions! I see, of course, why the communications system doesn't work, why my calendar is out of commission. Kind of Mr. Waldmeyer to arrange for them to stop when his worst fears finally materialized. Are the men all seated? No, no, they mustn't writhe about the floor like that. Get them to their stations--no, to the stations they would most prefer. And hurry!"

  Captain Webber ordered Mr. Chitterwick to the galley, Mr. Goeblin to the engineering chair, Mr. Friden to the navigator's room....

  "Sir, what's going to happen? Where's the antidote?"

  Mr. Milton to the pilot's chair....

  "The pain will last only another moment or so--it's unfortunately part of the Eternifier," said Mr. Greypoole. "There, all in order? Good, good. Now, Captain, I see understanding in your face; that pleases me more than I can say. My position is so difficult! But you can see, when a machine is geared to its job--which is to retain permanence on HAPPY GLADES--well, a machine is a machine. Where shall we put you?"

  Captain Webber leaned on the arm of the little man and walked to the open lock.

  "You do understand?" asked Mr. Greypoole.

  Captain Webber's head nodded halfway down, then stopped; and his eyes froze forever upon the City.

  "A pity...."

  The little man with the thin hair walked about the cabins and rooms, straightening, dusting; he climbed down the ladder, shook his head and started down the path to the wooden house.

  When he had washed all the empty glasses and replaced them, he sat down in the large leather chair and adjusted himself into the most comfortable position.

  His eyes stared in waxen contentment at the homely interior, with its lavender wallpaper, needle-point tapestries and tidy arrangement.

  He did not move.

  * * *

  Contents

  VANISHING POINT

  By C. C. Beck

  That? Oh, that's a perspective machine. Well, not exactly, but that's what I call it. No, I don't know how it works. Too complicated for me. Carter could make it go, but after he made it he never used it. Too bad; he thought he'd make a lot of money with it there for awhile, while he was working it out. Almost had me convinced, but I told him, "Get it to working first, Carter, and then show me what you can do with it better than I can do without it. I'm doing pretty well as is ... pictures selling good, even if I do make 'em all by guesswork, as you call it." That's what I told him.

  Y'see, Carter was one a them artists that think they can work everything out by formulas and stuff. Me, I just paint things as I see 'em. Never worry about perspective and all that kinda mechanical aids. Never even went to Art School. But I do all right. Carter, now, was a different sorta artist. Well, he wasn't really an artist—more of a draftsman.

  I first got him in to help me with a series of real estate paintings I'd got an order for. Big aerial views of land developments, and drawings of buildings, roads and causeways, that kinda stuff. Was a little too much for me to handle alone, 'cause I never studied that kinda things, ya know. I thought he'd do the mechanical drawings, which shoulda been simple for anybody trained that way, and I'd throw in the colors, figures and trees and so on. He did fine. Job came out good; client was real happy. We made a pre
tty good amount on the job, enough to keep us for a coupla months without working afterwards. I took it easy, fishing and so on, but Carter stayed here in the studio working on his own stuff. I let him keep an eye on things for me around the place, and just dropped in now and then to check up.

  The guy was nuts on the subject of perspective. I thought he knew all there was to know about it already, but he claimed nobody knew anything about it, really. Said he'd been studying it for years, and the more he learned about it the more there was to learn. He used to cover big sheets of paper with complicated diagrams trying to prove something or other to himself. I'd come into the studio and find him with thumb tacks and strings and stuff all over the place. He'd get big long rulers and draw lines to various points all over the room, and end up with a little drawing of a cube about an inch square that anybody coulda made in a half a minute without all the apparatus. Seemed pretty silly to me.

  Then he brought in some books on mathematics and physics and other things, and a bunch of slide rules, calculators, and junk. He musta been a pretty smart guy to know how to handle all those things, even if he was kinda dopey about other things. You know ... women and fishing and sports and drinking; he was lousy at everything except working those perspective problems. Personally, I couldn't see much sense to what he was doing. The guy could draw all right already, so I asked him what more did he want? Lemme see if I can remember what he said.

  "I'm trying to get at things as they really are, not as they appear," he said. I think those were his words. "Art is an illusion, a bag of tricks. Reality is something else, not what we think it is. Drawings are two-dimensional projections of a world that is not merely three- but four-dimensional, if not more," he said.

  Yeh, kind of a crackpot, Carter was. Just on that one subject, though; nice enough guy otherwise. Here, look at some of the drawings he made, working out his formulas. Nice designs, huh? Might make good wall paper or fabric patterns. Real abstract ... that's what people seem to like. See all those little letters scattered around among the lines? Different kinds of vanishing points, they are. Carter claimed the whole world was full of vanishing points. You don't know what a vanishing point is? Lemme see if I can explain. Come over to the window here.

  Ya see how that road out there gets smaller and smaller in the distance? Of course the road doesn't really get smaller—it just looks that way. That's what we call a vanishing point in drawing. Simple, isn't it? Never could understand why Carter went to so much trouble working out all those ways to locate vanishing points. Me, I just throw 'em in wherever I need 'em. But Carter claimed that was wrong. Said they were all connected together some way, and he was gonna work out a method to prove it.

  Here ... here's a little gadget he made up to help his calculations. Bunch of disks all pivoted together at the center; you're supposed to turn 'em around so the arrows point to the different figures and things. Here's the square root sign, I remember Carter telling me that. This one is the Tangent Function, whatever that means. Log, there, is short for logarithm. Oh, he had a bunch of that scientific stuff in his head all the time; dunno whether he understood it all himself. He built this thing just before he put together the perspective machine there.

  Silly-looking gadget, huh? All them pipes and wires and that little cube in the center ... don't try to touch it, it ain't really there. You just think it is. It's what Carter called a teteract, or a cataract ... no, that ain't the right word. Somepin' like that—tesser something or other. There's a picture like it in one of Carter's books. Hurts your eyes to look at it, don't it?

  That's what Carter thought was going to make him a lot of fame and money, that perspective machine. I told him nobody'd ever made a drawing machine yet that worked, but he said it wasn't supposed to make drawings. It was just supposed to give people a view of what reality really is, instead of what they think it is. I dunno whether he expected to charge money to look through it, or whether he was gonna look through it himself and make some new kinda drawings and sell 'em.

  No, I can't tell you how it works—I said before I don't know. Carter only used it once himself. I came in here the day he finished it, just as he was ready to turn it on. He was just putting the finishing touches on it.

  "In a few minutes," he told me, "I'll have the answer to a question that may never have been answered before: what is reality? Is the world a thing by itself, and all we know illusion? Why do things grow smaller the farther away from us they appear? Why can't we see more than one side of anything at a time? What happens to the far side of an object; does it cease to exist just because we can't see it? Are objects not present nonexistent? Because artists draw things vanishing to points, does that mean that they really vanish?"

  A wack, that's what he was. Nice guy, but sorta screwy. He kept saying more goofy things while he was finishing up the machine, about how he'd figured out that all we knew about vision and drawing and so on must be wrong, and that once he got a look at the real world he'd prove it.

  "How about cameras?" I asked him. "Take a picture with a camera and it looks just about the same as a drawing, don't it?"

  "That's because cameras are built to take pictures like we're used to seeing them," he said. "Flat, two-dimensional slices of reality, without depth or motion."

  "Even 3-D moving pictures?" I asked.

  "They're closer to reality," he admitted. "But they are still only cross sections of it. The shutter of a movie camera is closed as much of the time as it is open. What happens in between the times it's open?

  "You know," he went on, "people used to think matter and motion were continuous, but scientists have proved that they are discontinuous. Now some of them think time may be, too. Maybe everything is just imaginary, and appears to our senses in whatever way we want it to appear. We are so well-trained that we see everything just as we are taught to see it by generations of artists, writers, and other symbol-makers. If we could see things as they really are, what might happen?"

  "We'd probably all go nuts!" I told him. He just smiled.

  "Well, here goes," he said. "It's finished. Now to find out who is right, the scientists and philosophers who say reality is forever unreachable, or the artists who say there isn't any reality—that we make the whole thing up to suit ourselves."

  He moved one of those pointers you see there, and squinted around at the different scales and dials, and then stepped back. That little tessy-thing appeared, real small at first. Just a point; you could hardly see it. I couldn't see anything else happening, and thought he was gonna do somepin' else to the machine. I turned to look at Carter, and saw his face was white as a sheet.

  "Good Gawd!" he says, just like that: "Good Gawd!" That's all.

  "Well," I says to him, "who was right, the scientists or the artists?"

  "The artists!" he sorta screeches. "The artists were right all the time ... there is no reality! It's all a fabric of illusion we've created ourselves! And now I've ripped a hole in that!"

  He gives a strangled hoot and goes hightailin' outta here like somepin' was after him. Jumps in his car and roars off down the road and disappears.

  Naw, I don't mean he really disappeared—are you nuts? Just roared on down the road till he got so small I couldn't see him no more. You know—the way things do when they go farther and farther away. Happens every day; that's what us artists mean by perspective.

  The machine? Well, I dunno what to do with it. If Carter ever comes back he might not like my getting rid of it. I was thinking mebbe I'd put it in the hobby show at the county fair next week, though. Ya notice how that funny-looking cube inside there gets bigger every time you look at it? There ... it just doubled its size again, see? People at the fair oughtta get a big kick outta that. No telling how big it'll get with all those people looking at it.

  But come on, let's go fishing. We'd better hurry or it'll be too late.

  * * *

  Contents

  DR. HEIDENHOFF'S PROCESS

  By Edward Bellamy

  Th
e hand of the clock fastened up on the white wall of the conference room, just over the framed card bearing the words "Stand up for Jesus," and between two other similar cards, respectively bearing the sentences "Come unto Me," and "The Wonderful, the Counsellor," pointed to ten minutes of nine. As was usual at this period of Newville prayer-meetings, a prolonged pause had supervened. The regular standbyes had all taken their usual part, and for any one to speak or pray would have been about as irregular as for one of the regulars to fail in doing so. For the attendants at Newville prayer-meetings were strictly divided into the two classes of speakers and listeners, and, except during revivals or times of special interest, the distinction was scrupulously observed.

  Deacon Tuttle had spoken and prayed, Deacon Miller had prayed and spoken, Brother Hunt had amplified a point in last Sunday's sermon, Brother Taylor had called attention to a recent death in the village as a warning to sinners, and Sister Morris had prayed twice, the second time it must be admitted, with a certain perceptible petulance of tone, as if willing to have it understood that she was doing more than ought to be expected of her. But while it was extremely improbable that any others of the twenty or thirty persons assembled would feel called on to break the silence, though it stretched to the crack of doom, yet, on the other hand, to close the meeting before the mill bell had struck nine would have been regarded as a dangerous innovation. Accordingly, it only remained to wait in decorous silence during the remaining ten minutes.

  The clock ticked on with that judicial intonation characteristic of time-pieces that measure sacred time and wasted opportunities. At intervals the pastor, with an innocent affectation of having just observed the silence, would remark: "There is yet opportunity. . . . . Time is passing, brethren. . . . . Any brother or sister. . . . . We shall be glad to hear from any one." Farmer Bragg, tired with his day's hoeing, snored quietly in the corner of a seat. Mrs. Parker dropped a hymn-book. Little Tommy Blake, who had fallen over while napping and hit his nose, snivelled under his breath. Madeline Brand, as she sat at the melodeon below the minister's desk, stifled a small yawn with her pretty fingers. A June bug boomed through the open window and circled around Deacon Tuttle's head, affecting that good man with the solicitude characteristic of bald-headed persons when buzzing things are about. Next it made a dive at Madeline, attracted, perhaps, by her shining eyes, and the little gesture of panic with which she evaded it was the prettiest thing in the world; at least, so it seemed to Henry Burr, a broad-shouldered young fellow on the back seat, whose strong, serious face is just now lit up by a pleasant smile.