The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

For once, neither Mitchell nor Chambers rose to the challenge. Indeed, they maintained a somewhat frigid silence. That’s torn it, thought Saunders. I should have kept my big mouth shut; now I’ve hurt their feelings. I should have remembered that advice I read somewhere: “The British have two religions: cricket and the Royal Family. Never attempt to criticize either.”

  The awkward pause was broken by the radio from the spaceport controller.

  “Control to Centaurus. Your flight lane clear. OK to lift.”

  “Takeoff program starting . . . now!” replied Saunders, throwing the master switch. Then he leaned back, his eyes taking in the entire control panel, his hands clear of the board but ready for instant action.

  He was tense but completely confident. Better brains than his—brains of metal and crystal and flashing electron streams —were in charge of the Centaurus now. If necessary, he could take command, but he had never yet lifted a ship manually and never expected to do so. If the automatics failed, he would cancel the takeoff and sit here on Earth until the fault had been cleared.

  The main field went on, and weight ebbed from the Centaurus. There were protesting groans from the ship’s hull and structure as the strains redistributed themselves. The curved arms of the landing cradle were carrying no load now; the slightest breath of wind would carry the freighter away into the sky.

  Control called from the tower: “Your weight now zero: check calibration.”

  Saunders looked at his meters. The upthrust of the field should now exactly equal the weight of the ship, and the meter readings should agree with the totals on the loading schedules. In at least one instance this check had revealed the presence of a stowaway on board a spaceship—the gauges were as sensitive as that.

  “One million, five hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and twenty kilograms,” Saunders read off from the thrust indicators. “Pretty good—it checks to within fifteen kilos. The first time I’ve been underweight, though. You could have taken on some more candy for that plump girl friend of yours in Port Lowell, Mitch.”

  The assistant pilot gave a rather sickly grin. He had never quite lived down a blind date on Mars which had given him a completely unwarranted reputation for preferring statuesque blondes.

  There was no sense of motion, but the Centaurus was now climbing up into the summer sky as her weight was not only neutralized but reversed. To the watchers below, she would be a swiftly mounting star, a silver globule, falling through and beyond the clouds. Around her, the blue of the atmosphere was deepening into the eternal darkness of space. Like a bead moving along an invisible wire, the freighter was following the pattern of radio waves that would lead her from world to world.

  This, thought Captain Saunders, was his twenty-sixth takeoff from Earth. But the wonder would never die, nor would he ever outgrow the feeling of power it gave him to sit here at the control panel, the master of forces beyond even the dreams of Mankind’s ancient gods. No two departures were ever the same: some were into the dawn, some towards the sunset, some above a cloud-veiled Earth, some through clear and sparkling skies. Space itself might be unchanging, but on Earth the same pattern never recurred, and no man ever looked twice at the same landscape of the same sky. Down there the Atlantic waves were marching eternally towards Europe, and high above them—but so far below the Centaurus!—the glittering bands of cloud were advancing before the same winds. England began to merge into the continent, and the European coastline became foreshortened and misty as it sank hull-down beyond the curve of the world. At the frontier of the west, a fugitive stain on the horizon, was the first hint of America. With a single glance, Captain Saunders could span all the leagues across which Columbus had labored half a thousand years ago.

  With the silence of limitless power, the ship shook itself free from the last bonds of Earth. To an outside observer, the only sign of the energies it was expending would have been the dull red glow from the radiation fins around the vessel’s equator, as the heat loss from the mass-converters was dissipated into space.

  “14:03:45,” wrote Captain Saunders neatly in the log. “Escape velocity attained. Course deviation negligible.”

  There was little point in making the entry. The modest twenty-five thousand miles an hour which had been the almost unattainable goal of the first astronauts had no practical significance now, since the Centaurus was still accelerating and would continue to gain speed for hours. But it had a profound psychological meaning. Until this moment, if power had failed, they would have fallen back to Earth. But now gravity could never recapture them: they had achieved the freedom of space, and could take their pick of the planets. In practice, of course, there would be several kinds of hell to pay if they did not pick on Mars and deliver their cargo according to plan. But Captain Saunders, like all spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this he would sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn, or the somber Neptunian wastes, lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun.

  One hour after takeoff, according to the hallowed ritual, Chambers left the course computer to its own devices and produced the three glasses that lived beneath the chart table. As he drank the traditional toast to Newton, Oberth and Einstein, Saunders wondered how this little ceremony had originated. Space crews had certainly been doing it for at least sixty years: perhaps it could be traced back to the legendary rocket engineer who made the remark: “I’ve burnt more alcohol in sixty seconds than you’ve ever sold across this lousy bar.”

  Two hours later the last course-correction that the tracking stations on Earth could give them had been fed into the computer. From now on, until Mars came sweeping up ahead, they were on their own. It was a lonely thought, yet a curiously exhilarating one. Saunders savored it in his mind. There were just the three of them here—and no one else within a million miles.

  In the circumstances, the detonation of an atomic bomb could hardly have been more shattering than the modest knock on the cabin door.

  ~ * ~

  Captain Saunders had never been so startled in his life. With a yelp that had already left him before he had a chance to suppress it, he shot out of his seat and rose a full yard before the ship’s residual gravity field dragged him back. Chambers and Mitchell, on the other hand, behaved with traditional British phlegm. They swiveled in their bucket seats, stared at the door, and then waited for their Captain to take action.

  It took Saunders several seconds to recover. Had he been confronted with what might be called a normal emergency, he would already have been halfway into a spacesuit. But a diffident knock on the door of the control cabin, when everyone in the ship was sitting inside, was not a fair test.

  A stowaway was simply impossible. The danger had been so obvious, right from the beginning of commercial spaceflight, that the most stringent precautions had been taken against it. One of his officers, Saunders knew, would always have been on duty during loading; no one could possibly have crept in unobserved. Then there had been the detailed preflight inspection, carried out by both Mitchell and Chambers. Finally, there was the weight check at the moment before takeoff; that was conclusive. No, a stowaway was totally . . .

  The knock on the door sounded again. Captain Saunders clenched his fists and squared his jaw. In a few minutes, he thought, some romantic idiot was going to be very, very sorry.

  “Open the door, Mr. Mitchell,” Saunders growled. In a single long stride, the assistant pilot crossed the cabin and jerked open the hatch.

  For an age, it seemed, no one spoke. Then the stowaway, wavering slightly in the low gravity, came into the cabin. He was completely self-possessed, and looked very pleased with himself.

  “Good afternoon, Captain Saunders,” he said. “I must apologize for this intrusion.”

  Saunders swallowed hard. Then, as the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, he looked first at Mitchell, then at Chambers. Both of his officers stared guilelessly back at him with expressions of ineffable innocence. “So that’s it,” he said bitterly. There was no nee
d for any explanations: everything was perfectly clear. It was easy to picture the complicated negotiations, the midnight meetings, the falsification of records, the offloading of non-essential cargoes that his trusted colleagues had been conducting behind his back. He was sure it was a most interesting story, but he didn’t want to hear about it now. He was too busy wondering what the Manual of Space Law would have to say about a situation like this, though he was already gloomily certain that it would be of no use to him at all.

  It was too late to turn back, of course: the conspirators wouldn’t have made an elementary miscalculation like that. He would just have to make the best of what looked like being the trickiest voyage in his career.

  He was still trying to think of something to say when the PRIORITY signal started flashing on the radio board. The stow-away looked at his watch.

  “I was expecting that,” he said. “It’s probably the Prime Minister. I think I’d better speak to the poor man.”

  Saunders thought so too.

  “Very well, Your Royal Highness,” he said sulkily.

  It was the Prime Minister all right, and he sounded very upset. Several times he used the phrase “your duty to your people” and once there was a distinct catch in his throat as he said something about “devotion of your subjects to the Crown.”

  While this emotional harangue was in progress, Mitchell leaned over to Saunders and whispered in his ear:

  “The old boy’s on a sticky wicket, and he knows it. The people will be behind the Prince when they hear what’s happened. Everybody knows he’s been trying to get into space for years.”

  “Shush!” said Chambers. The Prince was speaking, his words winging back across the abyss that now sundered him from the island he would one day rule.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, “if I’ve caused you any alarm. I will return as soon as it is convenient. Someone has to do everything for the first time, and I felt the moment had come for a member of my family to leave Earth. My great-grandfathers were sailors before they became kings of a maritime nation. This will be a valuable part of my education, and will make me more fitted to carry out my duty. Good-by.”

  He dropped the microphone and walked over to the observation window—the only spaceward-looking port on the entire ship. Saunders watched him standing there, proud and lonely—but contented now.

  No one spoke for a long time. Then Prince Henry tore his gaze away from the blinding splendor beyond the port, looked at Captain Saunders, and smiled.

  “Where’s the galley, Captain?” he asked. “I may be out of practice, but when I used to go scouting I was the best cook in my patrol.”

  Saunders slowly relaxed, then smiled back. The tension seemed to lift from the control room. Mars was still a long way off, but he knew now that this wasn’t going to be such a bad trip after all.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  MILDRED CLINGERMAN

  The most attractive thing about Mildred Clingerman— as a writer, I hasten to add, to avoid misinterpretation (“or,” as Elmer Davis once said, “interpretation either, for that matter”)—is that no two of her stories are alike in theme or in tone; there is, thank God, no Clingerman formula. For her first entry in this volume, the Toast of Tucson presents the deft and charming tale of a marriage, a hangover, a tomcat and an Alien Observer.

  BIRDS CAN’T COUNT

  EVERYBODY HAS HIS OWN WAY OF WEATHERING A HANGOVER. Maggie's husband's way was to ignore the whole matter, stoutly denying, if pressed, that he suffered at all. Maggie never denied Mark the right to this brave pretense, but she had long ago noted that on such days the family car needed a great deal of tinkering with, which necessitated Mark's lying down under it or in it for several hours. Maggie refused any such face-saving measures. Right after break-fast on the day after the party she took to her bed, fortified with massive doses of B1, a dull book and, for quiet companionship, Gomez, the cat.

  The window cooler hummed invitingly in the darkened bedroom; the curtains belled out in the breeze, and Maggie, shedding everything but her slip, climbed gratefully into bed. The book was called Hunting Our Feathered Friends with a Camera, and Maggie, who knew nothing of photography or birds, began to read it in the hope of being bored into sudden sleep.

  Sleep had been very elusive lately. It was silly of her to become so disturbed over shadows… or, more often, the lack of shadows. But how to explain her uneasiness to Mark, or to anybody? Once, last night at the party, she'd come very close to asking her friends for help or, maybe, just sympathy—the talk had turned to ghosts and hauntings;—but luckily she'd called back the words before they'd formed. The whole thing was too nebulous to talk about. From the first, Mark had labeled it paranoiac, laughing at her wide-eyed account of something that looked at her in the bathroom, trundled after her to the bedroom, then watched her in the kitchen while she pared potatoes. When Mark had asked where for Pete's sake was there room in that small kitchen for a secret watcher, Maggie had shut up. Not for worlds would she leave herself open to Mark's delighted shouts (she could just hear him) by answering that question.

  "If I'd said: 'on top of the refrigerator,' " Maggie thought drowsily, "I'd never have heard the last of it."

  … The hunting urge is deeply ingrained in man. It is no longer necessary to hunt for food; take a camera in your hands and stalk your prey. The prime hunter, anyway, from the days of the caveman, has been the artist, tracking down and recording beauty… Allow your children and yourself the thrill of the chase; satisfy this primitive urge with a safe weapon, the camera. Patience… do not harm the nests… natural setting… build yourself a blind… patience… catch them feeding… mating … battling … patience… quick exposure … patience…

  Maggie slept.

  Minutes later she woke to find Gomez, the cat, sitting on her stomach. She and Gomez, good friends, regarded each other gravely. Gomez, aware that he had her full attention, tossed his head skittishly.

  "You woke me," Maggie accused.

  "Mmm-ow-rannkk?" He was giving her the three-syllable, get-up-and-feed-me treatment. Maggie was supposed to find this coaxing irresistible.

  "Blast and damn," Maggie said gently, not moving. Gomez trod heavily towards her chin.

  "All right," Maggie muttered.

  "But stop flouncing. Whoever heard of a flouncing tomcat—"

  Both Maggie and Gomez froze, staring at something close to the ceiling.

  "Do you see it, too?" Maggie rolled her eyes at Gomez, which so terrified him he immediately began evasive action—bounding off the bed, stumbling over her shoes, caroming off her desk, falling into the lid of her portable typewriter, his favorite sleeping spot. Gomez cowered deep in the lid, one scalloped ear doing radar duty for whatever danger hovered.

  "That's my brave, contained cat." Maggie crooned through her teeth. She raised herself up on her elbows to stare at one corner of the ceiling; her eyes moved slowly with the slow movement there. But was it movement? Strictly speaking, it was not. Only some subtle shifting of the light in the room, she thought. That was all. The ceiling was blank and bare. Gradually the tumult of her heart subsided. Maggie caught sight of her face in the dressing table mirror. She was interestingly pale.

  "It's all done with mirrors, Gomez, and who's afraid of a mirror? Neither you nor I… a car went by, or a cloud. Take one cloud, a mirror, and a hangover; divide by… Wait a minute. I just thought of something."

  Gomez waited, relaxing somewhat in his tight-fitting box. Maggie sat cross-legged in the middle of the double bed silently pursuing an elusive memory.

  White face… tents… carnival… yes, the spider lady! It was one of the first dates I had with Mark, and how much I impressed him, because I saw through the illusion at once. There in the tent, behind a roped-off section, sat a huge, hairy spider with the head of a woman. The bead turned and talked and laughed with the crowd, but glared at me when I began to point out to Mark the arrangement of the mirrors. It was all simple enough an
d fairly obvious, but not to Mark. Not to most people. Later, over coffee and doughnuts, I explained rather proudly to him that magic shows, pickpocket shows, that kind of thing, were always dull for me, because I could see so clearly what was really happening—that the way to look, to watch, was not straight on, but in a funny kind of oblique way, head tilted. Mark squeezed my hand then and made one remark about a crazy female who goes through life with her head on one side, seeing too deeply into things…

  It is nice to remember young love, Maggie thought, but I'm losing the track of that thought. Oh yes… and then during the war there was the general at Mark's training camp—he definitely lacked my peculiar ability—who came to check on the trainees' camouflaged foxholes. Mark wrote me about it. The old boy cursed them all for inept idiots who couldn't decently camouflage a flea, and then, right in front of the whole company and still cursing the obviousness of their efforts, stepped straight into one of the concealed holes and broke his leg. So…?

  Maggie lay back on her bed, her usual abstracted look considerably deepened. Her mind wheeled around to the party last night. Something said or done then nagged at her now. What was it? It had been a good party. Nobody mad or sad or very bad. The summer bachelor had flitted about like an overweight hummingbird stealing sips of kisses… and almost drowned in the blonde, bless her. A mercurial young man had explained to Maggie what a bitch his first wife was, while staring rather gloomily at his second… The talk had ranged from ghosts to sex, from religion to sex, from flying saucers to sex, and everybody had come out strongly on the side of the angels and sex. The rocket engineer believed passionately in the flying saucers, but—that was it!