The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  “What is it?”

  “Durgan! Look! What the hell—”

  And then he screamed.

  It was a harsh cry of an animal in both fear and pain. Durgan spun from the controls, the hairs prickling at the base of his neck, nerves tense for unexpected dangers.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Pendris didn’t answer. He stood beside the pile of slugs reclaimed from the wrecked vessel, the compact bulk of shedeena crystals, staring with bulging eyes. Over the heaped pile, glowing in the cabin lights, a green vapor clung like a thin liquid, coiling, pulsing with a strange energy, rising in tenuous streams. More of the green vapor clung to his hands, puffy balls of brilliant emerald, clotted and writhing as it crawled up his arms.

  “It burned,” he whispered. “It stung like acid. I touched the slugs and it felt like fire. Durgan! Help me!”

  “Step back! Away from the cargo! Stand back against the far bulkhead! Move, damn you! Move!”

  Durgan reached back, his right hand diving beneath the instrument console, reappearing with the weight of a gun firmly clutched in his fingers.

  “Insurance,” he said. “I’m not such a fool as to trust others. I planted it when I examined the ship. If you or Creech had any bright ideas about cutting me out I intended to be ready.” The muzzle of the weapon rose as Pendris made to step forward. “Stay where you are.”

  “You think I’m joking?” Pendris lifted his arms, balls of green fluffing like balls of emerald cotton, expanding as they climbed higher up his arms. “I tell you, this stuff felt like acid.”

  “Try wiping the stuff off. Use one hand against the other.” Durgan frowned as Pendris obeyed. “Jerk your arms. If it’s a gas, it should blow free.”

  It wasn’t a gas, or if it was, it was like none he had ever seen before. No matter how Pendris thrashed his arms, the vapor clung, clots of it catching his legs, his body. From the heap of slugs, more gas rose to join that attached to the man. Within moments, Pendris was covered in a green film that seemed to close around him, thickening, pulsing as with inner life.

  “Durgan!” He stepped forward, stumbling, hands extended. “Durgan, help me!”

  “Keep back!” Sweat beaded Durgan’s face as he lifted his pistol. “Right back. Quick or I’ll burn you apart!”

  “You’d kill me?”

  “If I have to, yes.”

  “You—”

  “Save it,” said Durgan sharply. “This is a tough life, Pendris, you’ve no cause to whine. How do you feel now?”

  “I don’t know. Just numb and weak.” Pendris lifted his hands and pawed at his face. His voice was thin, cracked. “It’s hard to breathe. For God’s sake, do something!”

  He lowered his hands and stood, swaying, tendrils of green vapor clinging tight to his body.

  And, as Durgan watched, he aged.

  He shriveled like a long-inflated balloon suddenly relieved of pressure. His face collapsed, prominent bone thrusting against skin that had grown sere and withered. His body stooped, his hands shrank to bony claws, a naked skull shone through thinning hair. His eyes glared from deep within shadowed sockets, lips parting to show toothless gums. He stumbled forward, one step, then crumpled to the deck to lie like a heap of discarded clothing.

  “Durgan!” His voice was a piping whisper. “Help me, Durgan! Help me!”

  The hair vanished, the skin, the flesh beneath. Naked bone hung from the ends of the sleeves, the neck of the blouse. In the open sockets of the eyes, green vapor rose in delicate plumes.

  Durgan fired, jamming his finger hard against the trigger, sending blasts of incinerating flame lancing across the cabin to where the skeleton lay. It flared, smoldered, burst into flame and smoke.

  Durgan lowered the weapon. Behind him, the control panel flashed with signal lights as automatie fans whined into life, clearing the smoke.

  Over the assembled stacks of reclaimed slugs, the emerald vapor rose until it reached the roof, recoiled, then rose again, clinging, surging over the metal as if it were a leech.

  From the radio came the insistent voice. “Brad, come in please. Sheila to Brad. Brad, please answer.”

  Durgan ignored it, watching the advance of the alien gas, remembering where he had seen it before.

  On Jupiter, the strange cloud which had streamed from the opened cargo container and which had settled beside the ship, remaining despite the wind which would have blown away any normal accumulation of gas. Nanset had touched it, reaching into it with both arms as he tried to recover the dropped slug, and Nanset had died. Pendris had touched it—and now Pendris was dead.

  Life, thought Durgan. Alien. Spawned in the chemical brew that was the atmosphere of Jupiter. Or perhaps the cargo itself had provided the stimulus, the concentrated life-force which the shedeena crystals provided. Or perhaps the strange thing had merely been attracted to the source of so much life-giving energy. It didn’t matter.

  It must have come aboard as they entered the cabin, unnoticed, drawn perhaps by the lure of the collected slugs. The release of pressure could have stimulated it, the flood of oxygen speeding its metabolism. It was a life-feeder and hungry. It would always be hungry. It would destroy every living thing it touched, sucking the life-force as if it were a sponge, compressing a lifetime of normal living into moments. It had to be destroyed.

  He fired again, spraying the cabin with searing flame, blasting the gas, the pile of slugs, the roof and deck and bulkhead. Metal glowed with red heat and the air grew stifling. But, when the gun was empty, the gas remained.

  Thicker, the cloud; larger, the green more intense. It lapped against the walls and billowed towards the control panel, the couches, to the place where Durgan stood. More avid now that it had fed, eager for fresh life, new life-force, added fuel so that it could grow and expand to—

  To cover a world if it were released on a planet. To hang waiting in space if he released it into the void. Hanging and drifting to, perhaps, be caught in a gravity well and be drawn down to Callisto or Ganymede, to maybe even reach Earth in time. A sea of emerald vapor to replace the blue seas, the white clouds, the rich brown of fertile soil.

  “Brad!” Sheila’s voice was ragged with strain. “For God’s sake come in, Brad! Come in!”

  Come in to warmth and safety, to luxury and the comforting softness of a woman’s arms. And then he saw her, tall and lovely, her hair a golden curtain to her rounded shoulders, a green vapor touching, clinging, sucking away her youth, her beauty, her very life.

  He looked down at his hand. On the back a spot of green swelled as he watched, spreading with a touch of fire, the pain instantly dying as the nerves were killed, the skin numbed and rendered senseless. A parasite, insidious, beautiful in a way but still a parasite. A freak of life which, with luck, would never be repeated.

  The ship drummed as he sat before the controls and adjusted the power. In the screens the swollen ball of Jupiter rose as he dived towards it, the tenuous masses of upper-cloud ripped and torn by the savage winds. They closed around the vessel, whipping, streaming, the sound of their passing a droning thunder against the hull.

  He would not hear them for long. Nor would he feel the sudden implosion which would send the ship and what it contained down to where it belonged.

  The Red Spot made a wonderful target.

  KILLER ADVICE, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Sixteen minutes. Sixteen minutes was simply not enough time to prepare for an onslot. One would think with the recent breakthroughs in interstellar communication that a simple heads-up would be in order. Yet no one thought to contact Hunsaker.

  Of course, the communications problem wasn’t with the Presidio, who barely got off a single we need help; we’re docking soon communiqué before their entire communications array went down. No, the problem was with Repair and Maintenance. Some idiot there forgot to inform Hunsaker that his resort would soon be full.

  Not that the Vaadum Resort and Casino was much of a resort. It was more o
f a Hail Mary Pass. If you were passing through the Commons System (which was what most people did in the Commons System—pass through) and for some reason you needed to exit your luxurious spaceship for some downtime and you couldn’t wait the extra day to go to Commons Starship Resorts—which were real resorts, by the way, on full size space stations—then you ended up at Vaadum Resort and Casino.

  Hunsaker liked to think of Vaadum as a bit of a surprise. Vaadum was on the Vaadum Outpost, which predated the Commons Space Station by nearly two hundred years and looked it. Small, cramped quarters, a docking ring that couldn’t accommodate most modern ships, a repair shop that was catch as catch can, a resupply warehouse that sometimes needed resupplying itself, and of course, the Resort.

  Which, when Hunsaker bought it, was a seedy little rundown motel, operated by the repair crew, who learned (accidentally or so the histories said) that ships in distress often couldn’t house their passengers. Better to place those passengers in a paying room than having them bunk on top of tables in the cafeteria.

  Hunsaker was manning the front desk because sixteen minutes didn’t make up for the six months during which he had neglected to upgrade the automatic checkin system. He hadn’t cleaned the rooms in six months either—or at least, not all of them, nor had he checked the environmental systems.

  He sent his entire staff—all two of them—off to dust, change linens, and ensure that each room had both oxygen and some sort of livable temperature while he scoured the entry, trying to make it somewhat presentable.

  The Repair and Maintenance crew told him that the Presidio had twelve passengers and four crew members, so he would need a minimum of eight rooms, but it would be better to have sixteen.

  It would be better to have all thirty rooms cleaned and livable, but really, where was the percentage in that? He had three functioning rooms at all times, and two of those were rarely full. The regulars that came through—and there were regulars, although not always the best of regulars—came for the casino, which had the only living breathing human dealer in the Commons System.

  She was fifty percent fake. He didn’t test the fifty percent theory or which part about her parts was rumor—although he did know that her breasts literally sparkled because she often dealt topless (hence the repeat audience).

  She was bit too vulgar for him. Vaadum Resort and Casinos was a bit vulgar for him, and quite low scale, and if someone asked him, he would have admitted that the entire enterprise had irritated him when he arrived, but didn’t bother him so much now.

  His standards had lowered, not because of the place, but because he didn’t really deserve better.

  He was just coming to terms with that.

  The entry was the largest room in the Resort, not counting the restaurant or the casino. The entry had bench seats, no-die, regrow plants that he’d bought early in his tenure here and regretted ever since, and a large faux marble floor that, when he bothered to faux polish it, shined like a million bright stars.

  He managed to clean the dust off the benches, prune the regrow plants so that their branches no longer took up most of the stairwell, and set up a makeshift computer system to handle the new guests, all in fifteen of his sixteen minutes. But he hadn’t tried to clean the floor and he was grateful for that as the passengers of the Presidio pushed and shoved their way through the double doors.

  All human (thank God for small blessings) and all sizes, the twelve passengers from the Presidio smelled—not so faintly—of burnt plastic. A few had smoke lines across their faces, and another few wore tattered clothing.

  They also stank of sweat and fear and had that wild-eyed look of people Who Had Been Through It All And Weren’t Yet Sure They had Lived To Tell About It.

  He had seen so many people like that over the years, and they were always distraught, always needy, and always demanding. He loathed demanding customers, even though his high-end education had prepared him for them. Once upon a time, he was the best at dealing with the most difficult of guests, back when he actually worked in a real resort that catered to the very wealthy, who, at least, were predictable in their very disagreeability.

  He peered at the sea of humanity before him—well, all twelve of them anyway, which felt like a veritable sea to him, considering he probably hadn’t seen twelve people all in one place since the last ship disaster nearly a year before. These people, with their untended hair and their air of complete panic, stared back at him as if he were their only savior.

  He smiled unctuously—and he hadn’t managed that expression in nearly a decade—and nodded his head to the first person in line.

  She was a stout elderly woman, wearing a black business suit (now decorated with several rips to the right side) and matching sensible shoes. She even had a little hat perched on top of her graying curls. That hat looked like it was an afterthought—one of those things she had grabbed automatically as she fled the ship just to make herself presentable.

  “Agatha Kantswinkle,” she said with one of those operatic voices (complete with vibrato) that certain older persons cultivated. “I should like a single room.”

  She did not say please, nor did he expect her to. In fact, she raised her chin after she spoke to him.

  She, at least, was a type he could handle.

  “We only have a few rooms, madam,” he said in his best toady voice. “You’d be more comfortable if you shared a double.”

  “I would not,” she said. “I shall not ever room with any of these despicable people.”

  She leaned forward and whispered—as best an operatic voice could whisper, which was to say not at all—and confided, “There are murderers among them.”

  A middle-aged man in the middle, face covered with soot, rolled his eyes. A younger woman toward the back raised her gaze heavenward—if there were a heaven in space, which there was not. Still, Hunsaker didn’t miss the gesture. Or the grimaces of dislike on the faces of the other passengers.

  “Surely, it wasn’t as bad as all that, madam,” he said as he opened the file on the old-fashioned built-in screen on his desk. The comment was somewhat reflexive. He hated histrionics. But it was also geared toward the other passengers upon whom, he was becoming certain, he would have to rely to keep Agatha Kantswinkle under some kind of control.

  “Not as bad as all that?” she repeated, slapping a palm on the desk, making his computer screen hiccup and nearly blip out. “Are you mad, man? When we left the Dyo System, we had fifteen. Do you think they stepped off the ship midflight? I think not.”

  Hunsaker raised his eyebrows and looked over her shoulder at the other passengers. The man with the soot-covered face shook his head slightly. The young woman had closed her eyes. A few others were looking away as if Agatha Kantswinkle’s behavior embarrassed them.

  He decided to ignore the woman, which meant getting her away from his desk as quickly as possible. “We have a single room, madam,” he said, “but it’s tiny. The entertainment system needs upgrading and the bed—”

  “I’ll take it,” she said, handing him a card with her information coded into it, a method as old-fashioned as she was.

  He charged her twice the room’s usual rate and felt not a qualm about it. First (he reasoned to himself), the Presidio’s parent company would probably pay for the extra stop. Secondly, the woman had already shown herself to be an annoyance, and he’d been a hotelier long enough (even at a disreputable place like this one) to know that customers often showed their true colors from the moment they walked in the door.

  He was simply adding a surcharge for the difficulties ahead.

  He finished adding her information to his file, resisted the urge to wipe his hands on the constantly sanitized towel he kept beneath the desk, and gave her his best fake smile.

  “Your room, madam,” he said with a nod, “is up those stairs to the left. It is the only room off the first landing.”

  Because it used to be a maid’s room, back when the resort had actual dreams of grandeur, in the days just aft
er its first construction, long before he was born.

  She did not thank him and mercifully did not ask him how she would unlock the door. He handed her the door’s code, but it was a mere formality. The lock had broken long ago.

  As she made her way toward the stairs, he processed four other passengers—real, sane, sensible people. They had all of their information coded into their fingertips like proper human beings, and they were solvent, which was good, since he debited their accounts immediately, although he didn’t overcharge them (too badly) like he had Agatha Kantswinkle. People who were in a hurry to get to their rooms, relax and try to forget whatever it was that brought them to this godforsaken place.

  Hunsaker was beginning to think that the rest of the checkins would go well, when the soot-faced man approached the desk. He was taller than Hunsaker, but bent slightly, as if embarrassed by his height—which Hunsaker could well understand, since so many distance ships were not built for the egregiously tall.

  “Sorry for the old lady,” the man said as he extended his index finger, the only clean one on his hand. “We’re really not that bad a bunch.”

  The finger, touching the screen, identified him as William F. Bunting, Bill for short, who began his journey in the Dyo system just like Agatha Kantswinkle. His occupation listed varied, which usually meant unemployed and searching for work, but he had nearly two dozen stellar (no pun intended) recommendations, so perhaps his occupation truly was varied and he had traveled from job to job as he traveled farther and farther from home.

  “Sounds like you’ve had a difficult trip,” Hunsaker said, offering the platitude the way another man would grunt with disinterest.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Bunting said. “If you had any other ship docked here, I’d request a transfer.”

  “Perhaps one will arrive while yours is being repaired,” Hunsaker said, debiting Bunting’s account, which looked full enough—especially for a man who had listed “varied” as his occupation.

  “Please God,” Bunting said, and sounded serious, which caught Hunsaker’s attention.