Adventures in Time and Space

by Raymond J Healy

  And still he stood there, shuddering with the awful pain, holding the unfastened metal plate with hard-clenched tentacles. His massive head pointed as in dread fascination at that bitterly hard wall.

  He heard one of the engineroom doors crash inward. Men shouted; disintegrators rolled forward, their raging power unchecked. Coeurl heard the floor of the engine room hiss in protest, as those beams of atomic energy tore everything in their path to bits. The machines rolled closer; cautious footsteps sounded behind them. In a minute they would be at the flimsy doors separating the engine room from the machine shop.

  Suddenly, Coeurl was satisfied. With a snarl of hate, a vindictive glow of feral eyes, he ducked into his little craft, and pulled the metal plate down into place as if it was a hatchway.

  His ear tendrils hummed, as he softened the edges of the surrounding metal. In an instant, the plate was more than welded‌—‌it was part of his ship, a seamless, rivetless part of a whole that was solid opaque metal except for two transparent areas, one in the front, one in the rear.

  His tentacle embraced the power drive with almost sensuous tenderness. There was a forward surge of his, fragile machine, straight at the great outer wall of the machine shops. The nose of the forty-foot craft touched‌—‌and the wall dissolved in a glittering shower of dust.

  Coeurl felt the barest retarding movement; and then he kicked the nose of the machine out into the cold of space, twisted it about, and headed back in the direction from which the big ship had been coming all these hours.

  Men in space armor stood in the jagged hole that yawned in the lower reaches of the gigantic globe. The men and the great ship grew smaller. Then the men were gone; and there was only the ship with its blaze of a thousand blurring portholes. The ball shrank incredibly, too small now for individual portholes to be visible.

  Almost straight ahead, Coeurl saw a tiny, dim, ‘reddish ball‌—‌his own sun, he realized. He headed toward it at full speed. There were caves where he could hide and with other coeurls build secretly a spaceship in which they could reach other planets safely‌—‌now that he knew how.

  His body ached from the agony of acceleration, yet he dared not let up for a single instant. He glanced back, half in terror. The globe was still there, a tiny dot of light in the immense blackness of space. Suddenly it twinkled and was gone.

  For a brief moment, he had the empty, frightened impression that just before it disappeared, it moved. But he could see nothing. He could not, escape the belief that they had shut off all their lights, and were sneaking up on him in the darkness. Worried and uncertain, he looked through the forward transparent plate.

  A tremor of dismay shot through him. The dim red sun toward which he was heading was not growing larger. It was becoming smaller by the instant, and it grew visibly tinier during the next five minutes, became a palered dot in the sky‌—‌and vanished like the ship.

  Fear came then, a blinding surge of it, that swept through his being and left him chilled with the sense of the unknown. For minutes, he stared frantically into the space ahead, searching for some landmark. But only the remote stars glimmered there, unwinking points against a velvet background of unfathomable distance.

  Wait! One of the points was growing larger. With every muscle and nerve tensed, Coeurl watched the point becoming a dot, a round ball of light‌—‌red light. Bigger, bigger, it grew. Suddenly, the red light shimmered and turned white‌—‌and there, before him, was the great globe of the spaceship, lights glaring from every porthole, the very ship which a few minutes before he had watched vanish behind him.

  Something happened to Coeurl in that moment. His brain was spinning like a flywheel, faster, faster, more incoherently. Suddenly, the wheel flew apart into a million aching fragments. His eyes almost started from their sockets as, like a maddened animal, he raged in his small quarters.

  His tentacles clutched at precious instruments and flung them insensately; his paws smashed in fury at the very walls of his ship. Finally, in a brief flash of sanity, he knew that he couldn’t face the inevitable fire of atomic disintegrators.

  It was a simple thing to create the violent disorganization that freed every drop of id from his vital organs.

  They found him lying dead in a little pool of phosphorus.

  “Poor pussy,” said Morton. “I wonder what he thought when he saw us appear ahead of him, after his own sun disappeared. Knowing nothing of anti-accelerators, he couldn’t know that we could stop short in space, whereas it would take him more than three hours to decelerate; and in the meantime he’d be drawing farther and farther away from where he wanted to go. He couldn’t know that by stopping, we flashed past him at millions of miles a second. Of course, he, didn’t have a chance once he left our ship. The whole world must have seemed topsy-turvy.”

  “Never mind the sympathy,” he heard Kent say behind him. “We’ve got a job‌—‌to kill every cat in that miserable world.”

  Korita murmured softly: “That should be simple. They are but primitives; and we have merely to sit down, and they will come to us, cunningly expecting to delude us.”

  Smith snapped: “You fellows make me sick! Pussy was the toughest nut we ever had to crack. He had everything he needed to defeat us‌—‌”

  Morton smiled as Korita interrupted blandly: “Exactly, my dear Smith, except that he reacted according to the biological impulses of his type. His defeat was already foreshadowed when we unerringly analyzed him as a criminal from a certain era of his civilization.

  “It was history, honorable Mr. Smith, our knowledge of history that defeated him,” said the Japanese archeologist, reverting to the ancient politeness of his race.

  SYMBIOTICA

  Eric Frank Russell

  Assuming that our own universe is as well-traveled as the Atlantic sea lanes, Mr. Russell sends the good ship Marathon out to the cluster of planets circling Rigel. This is a story of fascinating detail. The relationship of the various members of a crew made up of Terrestrials, Martians and a giant thinking robot; the utterly alien pattern of life on a planet whose inhabitants have followed the vegetable, rather than the animal path of evolution‌—‌all these are written with such care and logic that it seems like the log of an actual voyage rather than a purely speculative piece of fiction.

  * * *

  They had commissioned the Marathon to look over a likely planet floating near Rigel and what some of us would have liked to learn was how our Terrestrial astronomers could select worthwhile subjects at such an enormous distance.

  Last trip they’d found us a juicy job when they’d sent us to that mechanical world and its watery neighbour near Bootes. The Marathon, a newly designed Flettner boat, was something super and had no counterpart in our neck of the cosmos. So our solution of the mystery was that the astronomers had got hold of some instrument equally revolutionary.

  Anyway, we had covered the outward trip as per instructions and had come near enough to see that once again the astronomers had justified their claim to expertness when they’d said that here was a planet likely to hold life.

  Over to starboard, Rigel blazed like a distant furnace about thirty degrees above the plane which was horizontal at that moment. By that I mean the horizontal plane always is the ship’s horizontal plane to which the entire cosmos had to relate itself whether it likes it or not. But this planet’s primary wasn’t the far-off Rigel: its own sun -much nearer-looked a fraction smaller and rather yellower than Old Sol.

  Two more planets lay farther out and we’d seen another one swinging round the opposite side of the sun. That made four in all, but three were as sterile as a Venusian guppy’s mind and only this, the innermost one, seemed interesting.

  We swooped upon it bow first. The way that world swelled in the observation-ports did things to my insides.

  One trip on the casually meandering Upsydaisy had given me my space-legs and made me accustomed to living in suspense over umpteen million miles of nothingness, but I reckoned it was going
to take me another century or two to become hardened to the mad bull takeoffs and landings of these Flettner craft.

  Young Wilson in his harness followed his pious custom of praying for the safely of his photographic plates. From his expression of spiritual agony you’d have thought he was married to the darned things. We landed, kerumph! The boat did a hectic belly-slide.

  “I wouldn’t grieve,” I told Wilson. “Those emulsified window-panes never fry you a chicken or shove a strawberry shortcake under your drooling mouth.”

  “No,” he admitted. “They don’t.” Struggling out of his harness, he gave me the sour eye and growled, “How’d you like me to spit in the needlers?” “I’d break your neck,” I promised. “See?” he said, pointedly, and forthwith beat it to find out whether his stuff had survived intact.

  Sticking my face to the nearest port, I had a look through its thick disc and studied what I could see of the new world. It was green. You’d never have believed any place could be so thoroughly and absolutely green. The sun, which had appeared a primrose colour out in space, now looked an extremely pale green. It poured down a flood of yellow-green light.

  The Marathon lay in a glade that cut through a mighty forest. The area immediately around us was lush with green grasses, herbs, shrubs, and bugs. And the forest itself was a near-solid mass of tremendous growths that ranged in colour from a very light silver-green to a dark, glossy green that verged upon black.

  Brennand came and stood beside me. His face promptly became a spotty and bilious green as the eerie light hit it. He looked like one of the undead.

  “Well, here we are again.” Turning away from the port, he grinned at me, swiftly wiped the grin off his face and replaced it with a look of alarm. “Hey, don’t you be sick over me!”

  “It’s the light,” I pointed out. “Take a look at yourself.

  You resemble a portion of undigested haggis floating in the scuppers of a Moon-tripper.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  For a while we remained there looking out the port and waiting for the general summons to the conference which usually preceded the first venture out of the ship. I was counting on maintaining my lucky streak by being picked from the hat. Brennand likewise itched to stamp his feet on real soil. But the summons did not come.

  In the end, Brennand griped, “The skipper is slow-what’s holding him?”

  “No idea.”

  I had another look at his leprous face. It was awful. Judging by his expression he wasn’t fanatically in love with my features either.

  I said, “You know how cautious McNulty is. Guess that spree on Mechanistria has persuaded him to count a hundred before issuing an order.”

  “Yes,” agreed Brennand. “I’ll go forward and find out what’s cooking.”

  He mooched along the passage. I couldn’t go with him because at this stage it was my duty to be ready at the armoury. You never could tell when they’d come for the stuff therein, and they had a habit of coming on the run.

  Brennand had only just disappeared around the end corner when sure enough the exploring party barged in shouting for equipment. Six of them. Molders, an engineer; Jepson, a navigating officer; Sam Hignett, our Negro surgeon; young Wilson, and two Martians, Kli Dreen and Kli Morg.

  “Hah, lucky again?” I growled at Sam, tossing him his needle ray and sundry oddments.

  “Yes, sergeant.” His very white teeth glistened in his dark face as he smiled with satisfaction. “The skipper says nobody is to go out afoot until first we’ve scouted around in number four lifeboat.”

  Kli Morg got his needler in a long, snaky tentacle, waved the dangerous thing around with bland disregard for everyone’s safety, and chirruped, “Give Dreen and me our helmets.”

  “Helmets?” I glanced from him to the Terrestrials. “You guys want spacesuits, too?”

  “No,” replied Jepson. “The stuff outside is up to fifteen pounds and so rich in oxygen you whizz around thinking you’re merely ambling.”

  “Mud!” snapped Kli Morg. “Just like mud! Give us our helmets.”

  He got them. These Martians were so conditioned by the three pounds pressure of their native planet that anything thicker and heavier irritated their livers, assuming that they had livers. That’s why they had the use of the starboard airlock in which pressure was kept down to suit their taste. They could endure weightier atmosphere for a limited time, but sooner or later they’d wax unsociable and behave as though burdened with the world’s woes.

  We Terrestrials helped them clamp down their head-and-shoulder pieces and exhaust the air to what they considered comfortable. If I’d lent a hand with this job once I’d done it fifty times and still it seemed as crazy as ever. It isn’t right that people should feel happier for breathing in short whiffs.

  Jay Score lumbered lithely into the armoury just as I’d got all the clients decorated like Christmas trees. He leaned his more than three hundred pounds on the tubular barrier which promptly groaned. He got off it quickly. His eyes shone brightly in a face as impassive as ever.

  Shaking the barrier to see if it was wrecked, I said, “The trouble with you is that you don’t know your own strength.”

  He ignored that, turned his attention to the others and told them, “The skipper orders you to be extra careful. We don’t want any repetition of what happened to Haines and his crew. Don’t fly below one thousand feet, don’t risk a landing elsewhere. Keep the autocamera running, keep your eyes skinned and beat it back here the moment you discover anything worth reporting.”

  “All right, Jay.” Molders swung a couple of spare ammo belts over an arm. “We’ll watch our steps.”

  They traipsed out. Soon afterwards the lifeboat broke free with a squeaky parody of the Marathon’s deep-throated, sonorous drumming. It curved sharply through the green light, soared over huge trees and diminished to a dot. Brennand returned, stood by the port and watched the boat vanish.

  “McNulty is leery,” he remarked.

  “He has plenty of reasons. And he has all the explaining to do when we arrive home.”

  A smirk passed over his seasick complexion. “I took a walk to the noisy end and found that a couple of those stern-gang bums have beaten everyone to the mark. They didn’t wait for orders. They’re outside right now, playing duck-on-the-rock.”

  “Playing what?” I yelped.

  “Duck-on-the-rock,” he repeated, deriving malicious satisfaction from it.

  I went to the tail-end, Brennand following with a wide grin. Sure enough, two of those dirty mechanics who service the tubes had pulled a fast one. They must have crawled out through the main driver, not yet cool. Standing ankle-deep in green growths, the pair were ribbing each other and slinging pebbles at a small rock poised on top of a boulder. To look at them you’d have thought this was a Sunday school picnic.

  “Does the skipper know about this?”

  “Don’t be silly,” advised Brennand. “Do you think he’d pick that pair of unshaven tramps for first out?”

  One of the couple turned, noticed us staring at him through the port. He smiled toothily, shouted something impossible to hear through the thick walls, leaped nine feet into the air and smacked his chest with a grimy hand. He made it plain that the gravity was low, the oxygen-content high and he was feeling mutinously topnotch. Brennand’s face suggested that he was sorely tempted to crawl through the tube and join the fun.

  “McNulty will skin those hoodlums,” I said, dutifully concealing my envy.

  “Can’t blame them. Our artificial gravity is still switched on, the ship is full of fog and we’ve come a long, long way. It’ll be great to go outside. I could do some sand-castling myself if I had a bucket and spade.”

  “There isn’t any sand.”

  Becoming tired of the rock, the escapees picked themselves a supply of round pebbles from among the growths, moved toward a big bush growing fifty yards from the Marathon’s stern. The farther away they went, the gr
eater the likelihood of them being spotted from the skipper’s lair, but they didn’t care a hoot. They knew McNulty couldn’t do much more than lecture them and enter it in the log disguised as a severe reprimand.

  This bush stood between twelve and fifteen feet high, had a very thick mass of bright green foliage at the top of a thin, willowy trunk. One of the pair approached it a couple of yards ahead of the other, flung a pebble at the bush, struck it fair and square in the middle of the foliage. What happened next was so swift that we had difficulty in following it.

  The pebble crashed amid the leaves. The entire bush whipped over backwards as if its trunk were a steel spring. A trio of tiny creatures fell out at the limit of the arc, dropped from sight into herbage below. The bush whipped forward in a return swipe and then stood precisely as before, undisturbed except for a minute quivering in its topmost branches.

  But the one who’d flung the stone now lay flat on his face. His companion, three or four paces behind, had stopped and was gaping like one petrified by the utterly unexpected.

  “Hey?” squawked Brennand. “What happened there?”

  Outside, the man who had fallen suddenly stirred, rolled over, sat up and started picking at himself. His companion got to him, helped him pick. Not a sound came into the ship, so we couldn’t hear what they were talking about or the oaths they were certainly using.

  The picking process finished, the smitten one came unsteadily erect. His balance was lousy and his fellow had to support him as they started back to the ship. Behind them the bush stood as innocent-looking as ever, its vague quivers having died away.

  Halfway back to the Marathon the pebble-thrower teetered and went white, then licked his lips and keeled over. The other glanced anxiously toward the bush as if he wouldn’t have been surprised to find it charging down upon them. Bending, he got the body in a shoulder-hitch, struggled with it toward the midway airlock. Jay Score met him before he’d heaved his load twenty steps. Striding powerfully and confidently through the carpet of green, Jay took the limp form from the other and carried it with ease. We raced toward the bow to find out what had happened.