Harry Turtledove

by The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

  “We’re alive now,” he said, getting it set in his mind, consolidating assurance with reasonable words, “and there’s only one way we can stay alive.”

  He looked at them, decision reached. “We have to stay here,” he said.

  They just looked at him. He wished that one of them, at least, would agree with him, show some sign of definition in their minds.

  “But . . . what about our orders?” Mason said vaguely.

  “Our orders don’t tell us to kill ourselves!” Ross said. “No, it’s the only answer. If we never go up again, we never crash. We . . . we avoid it, we prevent it!”

  His head jarred once in a curt nod. To Ross, the thing was settled.

  Mason shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t . . . “

  “I do,” Ross stated. “Now let’s get out of here. This ship is getting on our nerves.”

  Mason stood up as the captain gestured toward the door. Mickey started to move, then hesitated. He looked down at the bodies.

  “Shouldn’t we . . . ?” he started to inquire.

  “What, what?” Ross asked, impatient to leave.

  Mickey stared at the bodies. He felt caught up in a great, bewildering insanity.

  “Shouldn’t we . . . bury ourselves?” he said.

  Ross swallowed. He would hear no more. He herded them out of the cabin. Then, as they started down through the wreckage, he looked in at the door. He looked at the tarpaulin with the jumbled mound of bodies beneath it. He pressed his lips together until they were white.

  “I’m alive,” he muttered angrily.

  Then he turned out the cabin light with tight, vengeful fingers and left.

  ———

  They all sat in the cabin of their own ship. Ross had ordered food brought out from the lockers, but he was the only one eating. He ate with a belligerent rotation of his jaw as though he would grind away all mystery with his teeth.

  Mickey stared at the food.

  “How long do we have to stay?” he asked, as if he didn’t clearly realize that they were to remain permanently.

  Mason took it up. He leaned forward in his seat and looked at Ross.

  “How long will our food last?” he said.

  “There’s edible food outside, I’ve no doubt,” Ross said, chewing.

  “How will we know which is edible and which is poisonous?”

  “We’ll watch the animals,” Ross persisted.

  “They’re a different type of life,” Mason said. “What they can eat might be poisonous to us. Besides, we don’t even know if there are any animals here.”

  The words made his lips raise in a brief, bitter smile. And he’d actually been hoping to contact another people. It was practically humorous.

  Ross bristled. “We’ll . . . cross each river as we come to it,” he blurted out as if he hoped to smother all complaint with this ancient homily.

  Mason shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Ross stood up.

  “Listen,” he said. “It’s easy to ask questions. We’ve all made a decision to stay here. Now let’s do some concrete thinking about it. Don’t tell me what we can’t do. I know that as well as you. Tell me what we can do.”

  Then he turned on his heel and stalked over to the control board. He stood there glaring at blank-faced gauges and dials. He sat down and began scribbling rapidly in his log as if something of great note had just occurred to him. Later Mason looked at what Ross had written and saw that it was a long paragraph which explained in faulty but unyielding logic why they were all alive.

  Mickey got up and sat down on his bunk. He pressed his large hands against his temples. He looked very much like a little boy who had eaten too many green apples against his mother’s injunction and who feared retribution on both counts. Mason knew what Mickey was thinking. Of that still body with the skull forced in. The image of himself brutally killed in collision. He, Mason, was thinking of the same thing. And, behavior to the contrary, Ross probably was too.

  Mason stood by the port looking out at the silent hulk across the meadow. Darkness was falling. The last rays of the planet’s sun glinted off the skin of the crashed rocket ship. Mason turned away. He looked at the outside temperature gauge. Already it was seven degrees and it was still light. Mason moved the thermostat needle with his right forefinger.

  Heat being used up, he thought. The energy of our grounded ship being used up faster and faster. The ship drinking its own blood with no possibility of transfusion. Only operation would recharge the ship’s energy system. And they were without motion, trapped and stationary.

  “How long can we last?” he asked Ross again, refusing to keep silence in the face of the question. “We can’t live in this ship indefinitely. The food will run out in a couple of months. And a long time before that the charging system will go. The heat will stop. We’ll freeze to death.”

  “How do we know the outside temperature will freeze us?” Ross asked, falsely patient.

  “It’s only sundown,” Mason said, “and already it’s . . . minus thirteen degrees.”

  Ross looked at him sullenly. Then he pushed up from his chair and began pacing.

  “If we go up,” he said, “we risk . . . duplicating that ship over there.”

  “But would we?” Mason wondered. “We can only die once. It seems we already have. In this galaxy. Maybe a person can die once in every galaxy. Maybe that’s afterlife. Maybe . . . “

  “Are you through?” asked Ross coldly.

  Mickey looked up.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I don’t want to hang around here.”

  He looked at Ross.

  Ross said, “Let’s not stick out our necks before we know what we’re doing. Let’s think this out.”

  “I have a wife!” Mickey said angrily. “Just because you’re not married—”

  “Shut up!” Ross thundered.

  Mickey threw himself on the bunk and turned to face the cold bulkhead. Breath shuddered through his heavy frame. He didn’t say anything. His fingers opened and closed on the blanket, twisting it, pulling it out from under his body.

  Ross paced the deck, abstractedly punching at his palm with a hard fist. His teeth clicked together, his head shook as one argument after another fell before his bullheaded determination. He stopped, looked at Mason, then started pacing again. Once he turned on the outside spotlight and looked to make sure it was not imagination.

  The light illumined the broken ship. It glowed strangely, like a huge, broken tombstone. Ross snapped off the spotlight with a soundless snarl. He turned to face them. His broad chest rose and fell heavily as he breathed.

  “All right,” he said. “It’s your lives too. I can’t decide for all of us. We’ll hand vote on it. That thing out there may be something entirely different from what we think. If you two think it’s worth the risk of our lives to go up, we’ll . . . go up.”

  He shrugged. “Vote,” he said. “I say we stay here.”

  “I say we go,” Mason said.

  They looked at Mickey.

  “Carter,” said Ross, “what’s your vote?”

  Mickey looked over his shoulder with bleak eyes.

  “Vote,” Ross said.

  “Up,” Mickey said. “Take us up. I’d rather die than stay here.”

  Ross’s throat moved. Then he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “We’ll go up.”

  “God have mercy on us,” Mickey muttered as Ross went quickly to the control board.

  The captain hesitated a moment. Then he threw switches. The great ship began shuddering as gases ignited and began to pour like channeled lightning from the rear vents. The sound was almost soothing to Mason. He didn’t care any more; he was willing, like Mickey, to take a chance. It had only been a few hours. It had seemed like a year. Minutes had dragged, each one weighted with oppressive recollections. Of the bodies they’d seen, of the shattered rocket�
�even more of the Earth they would never see, of parents and wives and sweethearts and children. Lost to their sight forever. No, it was far better to try to get back. Sitting and waiting was always the hardest thing for a man to do. He was no longer conditioned for it.

  Mason sat down at his board. He waited tensely. He heard Mickey jump up and move over to the engine control board.

  “I’m going to take us up easy,” Ross said to them. “There’s no reason why we should . . . have any trouble.”

  He paused. They snapped their heads over and looked at him with muscle-tight impatience.

  “Are you both ready?” Ross asked.

  “Take us up,” Mickey said.

  Ross jammed his lips together and shoved over the switch that read: Vertical Rise.

  They felt the ship tremble, hesitate. Then it moved off the ground, headed up with increasing velocity. Mason flicked on the rear viewer. He watched the dark earth recede, tried not to look at the white patch in the corner of the screen, the patch that shone metallically under the moonlight.

  “Five hundred,” he read. “Seven-fifty . . . one thousand . . . fifteen hundred. . . .”

  He kept waiting. For explosion. For an engine to give out. For their rise to stop.

  They kept moving up.

  “Three thousand,” Mason said, his voice beginning to betray the rising sense of elation he felt. The planet was getting farther and farther away. The other ship was only a memory now. He looked across at Mickey. Mickey was staring, open-mouthed, as if he were about ready to shout out “Hurry!” but was afraid to tempt the fates.

  “Six thousand . . . seven thousand!” Mason’s voice was jubilant. “We’re out of it!”

  Mickey’s face broke into a great, relieved grin. He ran a hand over his brow and flicked great drops of sweat on the deck.

  “God,” he said, gasping, “my God.”

  Mason moved over to Ross’s seat. He clapped the captain on the shoulder.

  “We made it,” he said. “Nice flying.”

  Ross looked irritated.

  “We shouldn’t have left,” he said. “It was nothing all the time. Now we have to start looking for another planet.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t a good idea to leave,” he said.

  Mason stared at him. He turned away shaking his head, thinking . . . you can’t win.

  “If I ever see another glitter,” he thought aloud, “I’ll keep my big mouth shut. To hell with alien races anyway.”

  Silence. He went back to his seat and picked up his graph chart. He let out a long shaking breath. Let Ross complain, he thought, I can take anything now. Things are normal again. He began to figure casually what might have occurred down there on that planet.

  Then he happened to glance at Ross.

  Ross was thinking. His lips pressed together. He said something to himself. Mason found the captain looking at him.

  “Mason,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Alien race, you said.”

  Mason felt a chill flood through his body. He saw the big head nod once in decision. Unknown decision. His hands started to shake. A crazy idea came. No, Ross wouldn’t do that, not just to assuage vanity. Would he?

  “I don’t . . .” he started. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mickey watching the captain too.

  “Listen,” Ross said. “I’ll tell you what happened down there. I’ll show you what happened!”

  They stared at him in paralyzing horror as he threw the ship around and headed back.

  “What are you doing!” Mickey cried.

  “Listen,” Ross said. “Didn’t you understand me? Don’t you see how we’ve been tricked?”

  They looked at him without comprehension. Mickey took a step toward him.

  “Alien race,” Ross said. “That’s the short of it. That time-space idea is all wet. But I’ll tell you what idea isn’t all wet. So we leave the place. What’s our first instinct as far as reporting it? Saying it’s uninhabitable? We’d do more than that. We wouldn’t report it at all.”

  “Ross, you’re not taking us back!” Mason said, standing up suddenly as the full terror of returning struck him.

  “You bet I am!” Ross said, fiercely elated.

  “You’re crazy!” Mickey shouted at him, his body twitching, his hands clenched at his sides menacingly.

  “Listen to me!” Ross roared at them. “Who would be benefited by us not reporting the existence of that planet?”

  They didn’t answer. Mickey moved closer.

  “Fools!” he said. “Isn’t it obvious? There is life down there. But life that isn’t strong enough to kill us or chase us away with force. So what can they do? They don’t want us there. So what can they do?”

  He asked them like a teacher who cannot get the right answers from the dolts in his class.

  Mickey looked suspicious. But he was curious now, too, and a little timorous as he had always been with his captain, except in moments of greatest physical danger. Ross had always led them, and it was hard to rebel against it even when it seemed he was trying to kill them all. His eyes moved to the viewer screen where the planet began to loom beneath them like a huge dark ball.

  “We’re alive,” Ross said, “and I say there never was a ship down there. We saw it, sure. We touched it. But you can see anything if you believe it’s there! All your senses can tell you there’s something when there’s nothing. All you have to do is believe it!”

  “What are you getting at?” Mason asked hurriedly, too frightened to realize. His eyes fled to the altitude gauge. Seventeen thousand . . . sixteen thousand . . . fifteen . . .

  “Telepathy,” Ross said, triumphantly decisive. “I say those men, or whatever they are, saw us coming. And they didn’t want us there. So they read our minds and saw the death fear, and they decided that the best way to scare us away was to show us our ship crashed and ourselves dead in it. And it worked . . . until now.”

  “So it worked!” Mason exploded. “Are you going to take a chance on killing us just to prove your damn theory?”

  “It’s more than a theory!” Ross stormed, as the ship fell, then Ross added with the distorted argument of injured vanity, “My orders say to pick up specimens from every planet. I’ve always followed orders before and, by God, I still will!”

  “You saw how cold it was!” Mason said. “No one can live there anyway! Use your head, Ross!”

  “Damn it, I’m captain of this ship!” Ross yelled, “and I give the orders!”

  “Not when our lives are in your hands!” Mickey started for the captain.

  “Get back!” Ross ordered.

  That was when one of the ship’s engines stopped and the ship yawed wildly.

  “You fool!” Mickey exploded, thrown off balance. “You did it, you did it!”

  Outside the black night hurtled past.

  The ship wobbled violently. Prediction true was the only phrase Mason could think of. His own vision of the screaming, the numbing horror, the exhortations to a deaf heaven—all coming true. That hulk would be this ship in a matter of minutes. Those three bodies would be . . .

  “Oh . . . damn!” He screamed it at the top of his lungs, furious at the enraging stubbornness of Ross in taking them back, of causing the future to be as they saw—all because of insane pride.

  “No, they’re not going to fool us!” Ross shouted, still holding fast to his last idea like a dying bulldog holding its enemy fast in its teeth.

  He threw switches and tried to turn the ship. But it wouldn’t turn. It kept plunging down like a fluttering leaf. The gyroscope couldn’t keep up with the abrupt variations in cabin equilibrium and the three of them found themselves being thrown off balance on the tilting deck.

  “Auxiliary engines!” Ross yelled.

  “It’s no use!” Mickey cried.

  “Damn it!” Ross clawed his way up the angled deck, then crashed heavily against the engine board as the cabin inclined the other way. He threw switches over with shaking fingers.

/>   Suddenly Mason saw an even spout of flame through the rear viewer again. The ship stopped shuddering and headed straight down. The cabin righted itself.

  Ross threw himself into his chair and shot out furious hands to turn the ship about. From the floor Mickey looked at him with a blank, white face. Mason looked at him, too, afraid to speak.

  “Now shut up!” Ross said disgustedly, not even looking at them, talking like a disgruntled father to his sons. “When we get down there you’re going to see that it’s true. That ship’ll be gone. And we’re going to go looking for those bastards who put the idea in our minds!”

  They both stared at their captain humbly as the ship headed down backwards. They watched Ross’s hands move efficiently over the controls. Mason felt a sense of confidence in his captain. He stood on the deck quietly, waiting for the landing without fear. Mickey got up from the floor and stood beside him, waiting.

  The ship hit the ground. It stopped. They had landed again. They were still the same. And . . .

  “Turn on the spotlight,” Ross told them.

  Mason threw the switch. They all crowded to the port. Mason wondered for a second how Ross could possibly have landed in the same spot. He hadn’t even appeared to be following the calculations made on the last landing.

  They looked out.

  Mickey stopped breathing. And Ross’s mouth fell open.

  The wreckage was still there.

  They had landed in the same place and they had found the wrecked ship still there. Mason turned away from the port and stumbled over the deck. He felt lost, a victim of some terrible universal prank, a man accursed.

  “You said . . .” Mickey said to the captain.

  Ross just looked out of the port with unbelieving eyes.

  “Now we’ll go up again,” Mickey said, grinding his teeth. “And we’ll really crash this time. And we’ll be killed. Just like those . . . those . . . “

  Ross didn’t speak. He stared out of the port at the refutation of his last clinging hope. He felt hollow, void of all faith in belief in sensible things.

  Then Mason spoke.

  “We’re not going to crash—” he said somberly—“ever.”

  “What?”

  Mickey was looking at him. Ross turned and looked too.