Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "God!" exclaimed "Swoop" Martin, up in his plane above range of the damage. "All of that to pay for a couple of ounces of radium!"

  As he circled around to head for safer regions, he could see repair proceeding rapidly in the holes in the side of the Martian vessel.

  AIRPLANES from the Tenth Army Corps Area were on the spot in the morning, practically hitting their "ceiling" in order to keep out of the way of the Martians' destructive reach. They had expected to arrive and find the thing gone. But it was still there, and the shell-holes all repaired.

  So, the Tenth Division moved up to fill the place of the Eighth. A few scouts first took their posts. As nothing happened, more and more men trickled in, and were slowly followed by heavy equipment. In a few days the line was again complete, among the blackened ruins of their predecessors. Their orders were:

  "Surround the Martians. Keep quiet. Take no action against them unless they try to rise."

  Now, those men who had filtered up to their positions at night with pounding hearts, expecting to be suddenly wiped out at any moment, were getting tired of week after week of inactivity. Army discipline, always irksome, was doubly so in the heat and the sand. There was sand in their clothes, sand in their hair, sand in their ears, sand in their food. There were hot winds, and nothing to do but wait all day and wonder what the airplanes above had to report. The enlisted personnel were not the only ones who were restless. There were constant, worried conferences in the General Headquarters tent.

  "I have an idea!" exclaimed General Johnson, Commander of the Tenth Army Corps, one hot day, when weariness was at its height.

  The headquarters staff deliberated long and carefully before the officers finally dispersed, each to his own sandy quarters. There was much tapping of the Royal Portable typewriter and sealing of secret orders during the next few days. There was code communication with Washington by radio.

  Finally, one dark night, the men were overjoyed by orders to get up and move. A few moments later they were dismayed to find that their progress was going to be backwards. They were going away from the enemy. They pounded through the sand until they reached a paved highway, and were then whisked away by trucks. By daybreak the Division was comfortably making camp in a country that was not sandhills. Eventually it was discovered that the little city in the distance was Ravenna.

  "Swoop" Martin, transferred to the Tenth Division, saluted General Johnson, as the latter stepped out of his car.

  "Ready for orders, Sir," he said.

  "Lieutenant Martin, there are no orders. You may do this if you care to volunteer, but you will not be ordered to do it."

  "Instructions, I meant, Sir," said "Swoop" Martin.

  In a few moments he was on the run for his plane, which stood ready for him.

  The Attack on the Martians

  "Swoop" Martin in his monoplane made circles around over the Martian space-ship like a hawk. He swept around lower and lower. At a height of about 3,000 feet, he flew away to the distance of a half mile, and then dived steeply downward, toward the Martian vessel. A few hundred feet above it, he turned sharply upward again, making a sort of V. At the bottom of the V, a small black object left the scout plane, and described a parabola, striking the Martian vessel amidships. A ragged hole appeared, and then a dull explosion.

  "Swoop" Martin was climbing fast, and thinking every moment was his last one; expecting to be blown to atoms any second. But until he was, he determined, he would go through with it. He guided his plane, watched his board, and went steeply upwards.

  Finally, when he was gasping for breath, he leveled off, and put on his oxygen mask. He looked down below. Everything was the same as before. He was puzzled.

  He cruised around awhile, thinking things over, and shook his head. He swiftly reported what had happened and asked for further orders. The General's message was to the effect that he did not wish to give an order of that kind; but that if Lieutenant Martin wished to volunteer to repeat his maneuver, it might be a good idea.

  Down, down, the plane swooped again, toward the tiny globule nestling in the sand, and sent another bomb hurtling down from the front of its V-shaped path, and again fled upwards into the heights. Again a jagged hole was torn in the top of the space ship; again "Swoop" Martin expected the worst as he climbed his way back to the height; again he waited in vain for something to happen, and nothing happened.

  Back at the camp near Ravenna, a group of men stirred. In fifteen minutes, a dozen swift cars filled with officers and men, two high-speed tanks, and two high-speed four-inch field-pieces, were headed toward the Martian ship. They covered the ground rapidly, and by noon were on the site of the previous camp from which they had besieged the Martian vessel. The field-guns were set up and trained; a dozen men climbed into the two tanks, loaded with machine guns and hand grenades. Above, a dozen airplanes droned, and made swooping circles, much like hawks.

  The tanks started off, throwing up clouds of sand, and dashed at high speed, straight toward the shining side of the Martian vessel. Their crews were tense, expecting to be blotted out instantly. But nothing happened. The old General sat at the front porthole of one of the tanks, watching ahead, gazing at the narrowing space between the tank and the Martian ship. Those gleaming walls began to seem very close, and the General expected the catastrophe any moment. But they roared and clanked onward, and still nothing happened. The airplanes came lower, till the roar of their motors was heard above the noise of the tanks. Still nothing happened. Behind, the men at the cannons watched through field glasses and waited at their radios, ready to rain a shower of shells on the Martian vessel at the least suspicion. But nothing happened.

  Finally, they were under the very lee of the metal hulk. It towered above them like a skyscraper, and extended in both directions like a mountain range. Still nothing happened.

  "All out!" the General ordered, as the tanks stopped.

  Their feet crunching in the sand, their hands full of grenades, they made their way slowly alongside the ship. One hundred yards. Two hundred yards, three hundred yards, they walked along, and still there appeared no way of getting inside. The holes that "Swoop" Martin had made were on the upper surface, and there was no way to climb.

  "Try a grenade," the General ordered.

  They all backed off. There was a crash of flying fragments, but no damage to the wall.

  "A four-inch shell, then!"

  The only communication with the gunners was now by flags. The General's order was rapidly wig-wagged to them. The General and his men hurried to shelter behind a sand hummock, now genuinely expecting complete annihilation. The gun crew placed the first shot too short and merely threw up sand. The second was a little high, tearing open the metal plates of the hull about twenty feet above the ground. The third shot ripped open a hole that they could easily walk into.

  For a moment the General contemplated with interest the twisted and blackened edges of the shiny, white metal that was unknown to him. Then he recollected that they were in danger, he and his little group of men, peering into the depths of the dark opening. There was some huge machinery visible, a long corridor with a bright, flat surface at the end of it. Nothing had as yet happened to them. They were still alive.

  The General pushed back one of the men who was edging into the opening. He claimed the privilege of being the first to walk into danger. The men with grenades and hand-machine guns crowded behind him. The General found himself walking down a small corridor, and the men filed behind him. The corridor soon became a bridge out in a vast void, black and filled with machinery of enormous proportions. Then again it became a corridor, and the bright surface was a wall turning at right angles.

  It seemed that they spent hours walking about with pounding hearts and thumping heads, expecting every moment to be attacked in some unknown way from dark ambush. There was endless machinery, large and small, everywhere.

  Finally, at the end of a climb up a long stairway, they came to an open space, at what they guessed
to be about the middle of the ship. It looked as though they had found the "living quarters" at last. They were in a vestibule. In front of them was a metal door with a glass window, through which they could look into a vast, ovoid, rotunda-like room or hall.

  All efforts to open the door failed. There seemed to be no lock against which to direct operations. The metal of the door was firm as a mountain against all their blows. So, they all stepped back, and a well-aimed grenade tore the door open wide enough for them to go through, their ears singing from the roar of the explosion. They went through cautiously, two experienced enlisted-men first, with their rifles at ready, then the officers with their pistols in their hands.

  The lighting seemed to them rather dim, though it had the quality of daylight. Probably it corresponded to the lower intensity of illumination as found on the surface of Mars, "Crash!" went the rifle of a soldier at something that moved slightly on a couch across the room, a hundred yards away. Whatever it was that had moved, jerked as though it had been kicked, shuddered a moment, and lay still.

  The group stood huddled together near the door, looked around and waited. Not a sound, not a stir in the vast room. It had all the proportions of some huge Coliseum, though none of the ponderous evidences of constructional difficulties. They had time to examine the place. About two hundred cots or couches stood around its walls. It appeared that originally they had been arranged in precise order, but now there was confusion. All of them were occupied by little, shriveled, flat-looking bodies, that looked astonishingly human. They were small and frail-looking. On closer inspection they looked especially human because the faces were so very old and sad. The skin was blue, leathery, and wrinkled.

  In the middle of the place was a cluster of some kind of apparatus: a foundation-pillar, a platform, elongated, casing-like structures of metal pointing in all directions like telescopes or projectors, wheels, knobs, and levers for control. It may possibly have been the control station for running the ship. Near one end of the space into which they were looking, three or four of the mechanical contrivances in which these creatures traveled around when they were on earth, lay propped up in a heap, and a motionless body was still strapped in one of them.

  "All beds occupied but one, sir!" the veteran Sergeant said; "and that must belong to him," pointing to the one in the machine. "Not one of them is stirring."

  "Just the same," the wary old General said, "the four of you go around and prod everyone of them to see if there is any life left. This is no time to get shot from behind."

  A keen-looking officer with a lieutenant-colonel's leaves on his shoulders, was also looking the bodies over. They were indeed all dead. He walked up to one and another, and even thumped and prodded several with professional skill and interest. The General watched him in mute inquiry.

  "Well, doctor," he finally asked, "what killed them?"

  "Radiation!" the medical officer replied. "As I see it, they had developed no natural protection against radiation because they live underground, and because there is so little radiation of any kind on Mars, both because of its distance from the sun and because of the scarcity of its radioactive minerals. Apparently there was no warning in their mathematics, of the terrific power of radium against their own flesh, even through the lead walls of its containers. See the deep destruction of skin and tissue on some of the older cases."

  The General stood a moment, lost in thought. Then he sent two men back to the main force with orders that proper guards be brought up for the Martian ship.

  "Now we'll look for the radium," he said. "It can't be far from here."

  The men stuck close together as they moved here and there. It was a jittery place. The vastness and dimness of it, the two-hundred odd dead Martians, the jungles of incredibly huge machinery filling the great spaces all around them, between them and honest daylight, with God only knew what lurking in the depths, were conditions to which they were unaccustomed. They would have preferred a concrete human enemy in front of them no matter how well armed. They went to one of the doors that were let into the wall at intervals, then to another, then to several in succession.

  The doors were of the same character as the first one they had encountered. There seemed no way to open them except by explosives, and this for the present they hesitated to do. The light from the rotunda penetrated the glass windows of the doors only a short distance, and was lost among the huge bulks and dizzy reaches of machinery.

  Suddenly a harsh cackle sounded behind them.

  They wheeled around and stood petrified, the enlisted men with their rifles automatically aimed in the direction from which the laugh had come.

  "Ha! ha! ha! ha!" rasped a harsh, dry laugh. "Go ahead and have a shot at me, boys, and see how much harm it does!"

  They saw Dragstedt standing there his eyes gleaming.

  There was a moment's pause. The General whispered:

  "He's insane."

  "Who wouldn't be?" the medical officer said.

  The madman's dry cackle rose again to the lofty ceiling:

  "Ha! ha! So you think you can get the best of me, eh? Look what I can do to you!"

  He whirled a little wheel, which slowly swung one of the long casings so that it pointed at a dead Martian on a couch. He moved his hand to something else, and an intense red ray shot across the intervening space. The Martian and his bed simply flew into pieces, and the fragments also disappeared, leaving behind them faint clouds of smoky vapor. A dull thud shook the room.

  "Look! and look! and look!" the madman shouted excitedly, aiming at one after another of the Martians, blowing them into smoke with red streaks and dull thuds.

  Crash! went a soldier's rifle as the ray began to swing too close to them.

  The soldier dropped his rifle in one hand, and held the other to his head as though to nurse a headache.

  "Swipe me! I could hit a pinhead at that distance!" he moaned.

  "Fire at him again!" the General ordered. They all watched closely.

  Crash! went the rifle. At the same time a small puff of smoke appeared in the thin air about a foot from Professor Dragstedt, and in line with his heart. The bullet had been caught and disintegrated by some field of force.

  Again the long, cackling laugh:

  "You see, I've got you!"

  "Yes," said the General. "What do you want?"

  "I'm sailing this ship to Mars," the Professor said. "I'm going to sell them the radium there. I'm going to be rich. I'm going to get power! I'm going to rule. I'll be the biggest—"

  "But what about us?" the General interrupted.

  The madman's face became crafty.

  "You will come with me, and be my royal Guard," he orated. "Or—" he waited thoughtfully a moment as though a new and more interesting idea had struck him—"—or, I'll blast you into smoke. What would you rather do? Go to Mars, or get flashed into nothing?"

  Someone in the group whispered:

  "But the ship's got holes in it. If he goes out into space, we're all goners in a few seconds."

  Another voice whispered:

  "Does he really believe he can handle this ship? And get it to Mars? Looks complicated to me, and I'm—"

  The old General's head probably worked faster than anyone else's.

  "You go to hell!" he thundered to the mad professor. "We'll get you yet, and court-martial you and shoot you."

  Professor Dragstedt gave a shrill yell.

  "Whoopee! All aboard for Mars! Here we go!"

  He adjusted a number of little wheels, lumbered all the casings into different positions, and took hold of a large, heavy lever.

  The men looked at each other blankly. In a few seconds the cold of space would penetrate into their bone marrow, and all the air out of their bodies would be lost as an infinitesimal whiff in the limitless void. Irresistibly they turned to Dragstedt again.

  With a wild grin on his face, he leaned back, and gave a long, hard pull at the heavy lever in front of him.

  Suddenly they were pres
sed to the floor with an immense weight. The sensation was over in a second. During that second the spectacle in front of them took place. A fountain of a dozen streams of red beams played for an instant at steep angles, crisscrossing each other and forming a hyperboloid. When they subsided, the tower in the middle of the room was a molten mass, and the only trace of Professor Dragstedt was a whiff of smoky vapor, slowly dissipating itself in faint swirls.

  * * *

  Contents

  ALL THAT GOES UP

  By Kirby Brooks

  At fifty, a man should be too old to go around flying off the handle, or wandering around on the ceiling. But what could a man do when he had a son who insisted on being a genius?

  For a man my age, the middle 50's, life has a number of compensations. There're children--we have two; there's a good wife, and I'm certainly blessed in that respect with Mary; and there's the joy of coming home, slipping on my slippers, having a good dinner, then relaxing with coffee and a pipe. There's no compensation for being plastered to the ceiling. But, more of that later.

  The after dinner coffee with a dash of rum in it, tasted very good, and so did the pipe. The meal was satisfying too. Thank goodness for that meal, because it was the last decent one I've had for quite some time. Oh, I've eaten all right, but you'd have to stretch your imagination to call any of it a meal. Can you picture eating food that keeps trying to move away from your face? That is, if you can keep the plate from moving away too?

  As I say, Mary and I had just finished dinner, when Jim, our 22-year-old gangly son, who's home on summer vacation from MIT, called me.

  "Can you come here a minute, Dad?"

  "Sure," I said, heading down the hall to his combination laboratory, dark room, aviary, and just plain bedroom. Fortunately it was a big room so there was space for a bed in addition to all the stuff a boy can collect who becomes enamored of science while in High School, and who consummates the wedding with studying electronics in college.