Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Halfway there, the globes met them again. The things were not singing; from their many eyes poured a fierce, angry blue light. They rolled with a determination that frightened him. Yet he strode on, until they were barely a foot away.

  "Jump, Digger!"

  The spheres stopped short, reversed their direction toward the little group at a furious rate, flinging out long, whip-like tentacles. One wrapped itself around Nat's ankle, drew him down. He shifted the limp form over to his shoulder, slipped out his heat-rod. Quickly the tentacle was severed. But now others took their place; he continued firing at them, making each bolt tell, but the numbers were too great.

  Digger sprang into action, rending the globes with those claws that were capable of tearing the hulls of spaceships. But tentacles lashed around him from the rear, snaked about him so that he was helpless.

  The girl was slipping off Nat's shoulder. He could not raise the stump of an arm to balance her; it was stiff and useless. He stopped firing long enough to make the shift, even as the spheres attacked again. The bolts had put out the lights in fully half of the marauders but the others came on unafraid.

  Nat straddled Digger's writhing body, held the spacehound motionless between his legs. At short range, he seared off the imprisoning tentacles, knowing that it would take far more than a heat-bolt to damage the well-nigh impregnable creature. He swooped the dog up under his good arm and fled from the madly-pursuing spheres, thanking nameless deities that the gravity here permitted such herculean feats. The spheres rolled faster, he soon found, than he could jump; so long as he was above them, all was well, but by the time the weak gravity permitted him to land, they were waiting for him. He tried zig-zagging. Good! It worked. He eluded them up to the mouth of the cave, then jumped for the door of his ship's outer airlock.

  Nat placed the girl in his bunk, removed the cumbersome spacesuit. Her eyes blinked faintly, then sprang open. But they did not see him; they were staring straight ahead. Her mouth opened and shut weakly as though she were speaking, but no sound issued from it. He brought her water, but when he returned she had fallen asleep. He returned to the kitchen to prepare some food.

  "You're still running around in that pillow case," he remarked to Digger as he extracted the spacehound from it. "Attend me, now. We know why and how those people disappeared. It would take the Space Patrol ship at least a month to arrive here; I don't intend to perch on the back of this devil as long as that. And if we leave, old thing, it'll just lure other chivalrous fools to very unpleasant ends.

  "And we've got to get this kid back to civilization. She needs a doctor's care, preferably a doctor with two arms."

  Digger's vibrations were one of general approval.

  "We could poison it," he went on. "Only I'm not a chemist; even if I knew the compounds contained in that reeking stomach I wouldn't know what would destroy them. Might blow it up, but we haven't enough explosive.

  "No, we'll have to get down into the thing's insides again. In fact—" He paused suddenly, mouth open. "Congratulate me, Digger! I have it!"

  The smell of burning vegetables cut short his soliloquy. He fed the starved, half-blind girl, then left her sleeping exhaustedly as he squirmed into his suit.

  No sooner had he entered the mouth of the cave than a half-dozen of the singing sensory organs rolled quickly, yet not angrily, toward him. The beast was apparently optimistic, for the globes sang in their most soothing, seductive tones. They tried to herd him into the first cave on the right, but he had remembered the squeaker; they could not distract him.

  Effortlessly he leaped over them toward the mouth of the cave on the left. That was where the spaceships lay, pointing in all directions like a carelessly-dropped handful of rice.

  All the ships were in running order. Good; had there been one vessel he could not move, then all was lost. The fuel in several ran low, but after a few moments of punching levers and pulling chokes, the under rockets thundered in the big room.

  Taking care not to injure the motor compartments of the other ships, using only the most minute explosion-quantities, he jockeyed each ship around until all their noses pointed in one direction. The exhausts pointed out through the wide doorway. It was well that the beast had formed curved corners in the room, otherwise the scheme would not have worked. The exhausts which did not point toward the door, directly, were toward the curved walls which would deflect the forceful gasses expelled doorward.

  When he emerged from the ship, the spheres attacked. He seared off their tentacles throughout what seemed to be eternities. His body was becoming a mass of bruises from the lash of their tentacles. He burned his way through the swarm on to ship after ship.

  As he stepped from the last vessel there was a rumbling beneath his feet. Did the monster understand his intent? Was it stirring in its shell? Most of the globes had disappeared; now a nauseatingly sweet odor penetrated the screen in his headpiece, which permitted him to smell without allowing the oxygen to escape. He hurried around to the rear of the ship, an apprehensive, sickening feeling at the pit of his stomach. A thick jelly-like wave of liquid was rolling over the floor—the reeking, deadly juices from the beast's stomach. If the liquid touched him, it would eat through the heavy fabric, exploding the air pressure from around his body. How was he to escape from the cave?

  The answer came to him suddenly. Quickly he darted back toward the nearest vessel. Two of the screaming spheres blocked his way; he sent bolt after searing bolt into them, more of a charge than he had given any of the others. The lights in the globes went out; their voices ceased. And they burst into slowly mounting incandescence. Yet, they were not consumed by their fire, only glowed an intense white light like that of a lighthouse.

  "Lighthouse!" The word flashed through his mind clearly, strongly. They glowed like the "zirconia lights" of a lighthouse. Why hadn't he recognized the greasy, quartz-like material before? It was zirconia, a compound of zirconium, of course. A silicate base creature could easily have formed a shell of it about itself.

  Zirconia—one of the compounds he'd intended prospecting for on the moons of Saturn. Worth over a hundred dollars per pound. Because of its resistance to heat, it was used to line the tubes of rockets; Terra's supply had long been used up. Here was a fortune all around him; but that fortune was about to be destroyed, he along with it, if he did not hurry.

  If he could only reach the timing mechanism to yank from it the wires connecting it to the other ships. It was at the other end of the line. He started in that direction, but a surge of fatal, thick acid rolled before him, reaching for him with hungry, questing tongues.

  When it was almost touching his toes, he leaped. As he floated toward the floor, he placed a chair beneath him so that his feet landed on the seat. The legs of the chair sank slowly into the liquid.

  Again he leaped, his moment retarded by the fluid which now reached halfway up the chair legs, sucked and clung there. The sweetly-evil smelling stuff was rising rapidly. But the next leap carried him into the main cave. Abandoning the chair, he leaped once more, out through the cave's mouth, pursued by the waving tentacles of the sensory spheres.

  He had lost precious minutes eluding that deadly acid. It would take at least five minutes to get his ship away from the asteroid; he must hurry before all those rocket motors were thrown into action, or it would be too late.

  Leap and leap again. It seemed ages, but he reached the ship, bolted the door shut. Thumps against the door as the pursuing globes ran up against it. A thought came to him; swiftly he opened the door, permitted a few of them to enter, then slammed it shut. With the heat gun he sheared off their tentacles; he could sell the zirconia in the entities. Then he turned to the controls and the ship zoomed up and out.

  Nat had barely raised his ship from the Asteroid Moira when he saw the small planetoid lurch suddenly, bounding off its orbit at almost a right angle. The sudden combined driving force of all the rockets within the cave had sent it hurtling away like a rocket itself.

 
The asteroid housing the monster was heading into the Flora group of Asteroids. There the fifty-seven odd solid bodies of that group would grind, crack, and rend that dangerous beast into harmless, dead fragments.

  "A good job," said a weak, but softly friendly voice behind him. He whirled. The girl stood in the doorway of the pilot room, supporting herself against the door frame. Digger rubbed thoughtfully against her legs.

  "We'll just follow that asteroid, Miss," he said, "and see if we can't pick up some odd fragment of zirconia when it's smashed in the grindstone there. Then we'll light out for Terra."

  She smiled. Earth, to him, seemed like a very good place to go as soon as possible.

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  Contents

  PIONEER

  By William Hardy

  If you could travel through time to a few years hence you'd find a stone monument in honor and memory of a brave deed you may shy away from!

  I didn't much like the way Max--that's the guy who trained me--fastened the broad leather straps over my body. There was a smell of nervous excitement in the air and Max's hand trembled as he fumbled with the buckles. Thinking back on it, the whole morning had been like that. Nervous and excited.

  Right after breakfast, Max had given me a good bath and loaded me in the car. I always like to ride in the car and this time Max even allowed me to stick my head out the window. He doesn't usually let me do that, but I was too engrossed in the exhilarating rush of air to pay any attention to the change of routine. When we drew up in front of a large brick building a multitude of strange and peculiar odors assailed my nose, tantalizingly anonymous. Max's big hand caught me before I got halfway through the window. That disgusted me, because I wanted to investigate the funny smells, and I pouted all the way into the building. As the events of the next hour progressed I got madder and madder.

  First there was the doctor, poking around in my mouth, stabbing my eyes with a blinding beam of light, and prodding and squeezing my body. It reminded me of the day I came to live with Max and I was tempted to take a hunk out of this doctor's hand like I did the other one. But Max was there and that stopped me. I didn't want to see the hurt look that would come to his eyes every time I did something wrong.

  After the doctor finished Max led me into a gleaming white room where I was surrounded by a gushing mob of women dressed in white uniforms. Their "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" and "Isn't he beautiful!"--I'm not beautiful and I detest the description--put the finishing touch to what had once been a wonderful day. I flopped to the floor, trying to ignore them. Then, indignities of indignities, one of the "girls" tried to pick up my eighty pounds of blue-gray masculinity. That was the last straw!

  I let out a deep-throated growl, and sprang clear of her encircling arms. Fangs bared, ears flat against my head, I must have presented a terrifying appearance to the women, because they fled to all corners of the room, squealing and bleating like a bunch of sheep.

  For the fun of it, I made a short dash at the one who had tried to pick me up. With a high-pitched scream she slumped to the floor in a dead faint. I could hardly keep from laughing as I turned to search for a new victim. About this time Max came barging through the door and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, putting an end to my fun. He wasn't mad, although he pretended to be, and I could detect the humor in his voice while he scolded me.

  Back in the car again, Max roared with laughter while patting me on the head and saying, "You old devil, you!" in that special way he has when amused at something I've done. When he finally got control of himself, he started the car and drove in the direction of the funny smells. As the smells got stronger, I began to get uneasy. Looking at Max, I sensed that he was uneasy too. "What was going on?" I wondered as the car dipped down a ramp and entered a dimly lit cave where the smells became overpowering.

  The cave was jammed with huge tank-trucks and that was where the strange smells were coming from. I don't know what was in the trucks, but Max said something about nitric acid and hydrozine fuel when he noticed my interest in them. Leaving the car, we walked down a short passage branching off the cave, climbed a couple flights of stairs and emerged in the bright sunlight. I nearly yipped in surprise as I caught sight of the over-grown thing beside me. It looked for all the world like a giant cigar that had been cut in half and stood on end. There were still three or four trucks around the base of the thing and a kind of fear spread through my mind. The magic of the strange smells was gone and here, at close quarters, the smell was raw and uninviting.

  * * * * *

  Max led me to a group of men and they talked for a few minutes. I didn't pay much attention to what they said until one of them, a big man with a lot of stars on his shoulder, reached down and patted my back. "Better get him loaded," said the Starman. "Only ten minutes till blast-off."

  Max led me to a kind of open-air elevator and started up the side of the gleaming monster. At the top Max put me into a padded cage inside the cigar, fastened the straps, and patted me. Then he was gone and a large door slid into place, leaving me in vile smelling, pitch darkness. I lay there quietly, but the uneasy feeling kept getting worse. A sudden hissing noise nearly scared me to death; then I remembered my training. The hissing was only air, the same as had been in the cage at home, and wouldn't hurt me. Even so, I struggled against the straps, trying to reach them with my teeth. Nothing doing and again I lay quiet--waiting.

  I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew my cage was trembling violently and a powerful roaring dinned in my ears. This lasted only a second, then something crushed my body flat in the cage. My legs grew heavy and a racking, tearing pain ripped at my muscles. A black film blotted out the lighter blackness of my cage.

  I don't know what happened in the interval, but when I came to the roar was gone and my body felt like it was floating in the air. My head felt swollen and I experienced some difficulty in swallowing. I couldn't hear a thing except the hiss of air and I was suddenly overcome by the feeling that I was a long way from home.

  Slowly I became aware that my body was regaining its weight. The cage was becoming quite warm now and I licked my nose, wishing for a cold drink of water. Suddenly I was jerked against the straps and I forgot all about my other troubles. The jerks didn't hurt me as much as they scared me. I had experienced somewhat the same thing when Max hit the car brakes hard, but he wasn't here to pat me reassuringly.

  The cage was getting real hot now and the jerks were coming with increasing frequency. The air had stopped too and I desperately wanted a drink. The last thing I remember before the crash was wishing that Max would open the door and let me out like he always had at home.

  Max's gentle voice sounded a long way off. "Good boy!" he kept repeating. "Good boy!" I couldn't find the strength to open my eyes so I just lay quietly and listened to the talk, thankful that the smell, that had penetrated the entire day, was gone now.

  "I was afraid that those parachutes wouldn't cut the speed enough to get him down alive," said the Starman who had patted my back earlier.

  "No sign of radiation," said a strange voice. "His blood count is normal and he isn't hurt physically unless there are internal injuries."

  "What about his weakness?" asked Max, patting me.

  "You'd be weak too, if you had been through the ordeal he has," said Strange-voice. "He'll get over that soon and live to father a good many space-puppies."

  Strange-voice was absolutely right in his forecast and it's with pardonable fatherly pride that I lead each new family to the great stone monument which reads: "In honor of Rex, a German Shepherd dog, who pioneered man's first flight into outer space."

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  Contents

  DREAMER'S WORLDS

  By Edmond Hamilton

  Surely the world of Thar—its strange cities and enormous mountains, its turquoise seas, twin moons and crimson sun—is nothing but a dream? And yet...

  Reining in his pony on the ridge, Khal Kan pointed down across the other sands of the drylands that stretched i
n the glare of the crimson, sinking sun.

  "There we are, my lads!" he announced heartily. "See yonder black blobs on the desert? They're the tents of the dry-landers."

  His tall young figure was straining in the saddle, and there was a keen anticipation on his hard, merry young face.

  But Brusul, the squat warrior in blue leather beside him, and little Zoor, the wizened third member of the trio, looked uneasily.

  "We've no business meddling with the drylanders!" accused brawny Brusul loudly. "Your father the king said we were to scout only as far west as the Dragal Mountains. We've done that f and haven't found any sign of the cursed Bunts in them. Our business is to ride back to Jotan now and report."

  "Why, what are you afraid of?" demanded Khal Kan scoffingly. "We're wearing nondescript leather and weapons—we can pass ourselves off to the drylanders as mercenaries from Kaubos."

  "Why should we go bothering the damned desert-folk at all?" Brusul demanded violently. "They've got nothing we want."

  Little Zoor broke into sniggering laughter. His wizened, frog-like face was creased by wrinkles of mirth.

  "Our prince has heard of that dryland princess—old Bladomir's daughter that they call Golden Wings," he chuckled.

  "I'll be damned!" exploded Brusul. "I might have known it was a woman! Well, if you think I'm going to let you endanger our lives and the success of our reconnaissance for a look at some desert wench, you——"

  "My sentiments exactly, Brusul!" cried Khal Kan merrily, and spurred forward. His pony galloped crazily down the crimson ridge, and his voice came back to them singing.

  "The Bunts came up to Jotan,

  Long ago!

  The Bunts fled back on the homeward track