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

by John W. Campbell

  “I think I have a few pennies in my pocketbook,” suggested Dorothy.

  “Get ’em,” he directed briefly, and while she was gone he searched Margaret, without result save for the cartridges in her pistol, as she had no jewelry remaining after her imprisonment. Dorothy returned and handed him everything she had found.

  “I would like to keep this ring,” she said slowly, pointing to a slender circlet of gold set with a solitaire diamond, “if you think there is any chance of us getting clear.”

  “Everything goes that has any copper in it,” he said coldly, “and I am glad to see that Seaton is too good a chemist to buy any platinum jewelry. You may keep the diamond, though,” as he wrenched the jewel out of its setting and returned it to her.

  He threw all the metal into the central chamber and the vessel gave a tremendous lurch as the power was again applied. It was soon spent, however, and after the final observation, the others waiting in breathless suspense for him to finish his calculations, he made his curt announcement.

  “Not enough.”

  Perkins, his mind weakened by the strain of the last few days, went completely insane at the words. With a wild howl he threw himself at the unmoved scientist, who struck him with the butt of his pistol as he leaped, the mighty force of DuQuesne’s blow crushing his skull like an eggshell and throwing him backward to the opposite side of the vessel. Margaret lay in her seat in a dead faint. Dorothy and DuQuesne looked at each other in the feeble light of the torch. To the girl’s amazement, the man was as calm as though he were safe in his own house, and she made a determined effort to hold herself together.

  “What next, Doctor DuQuesne?”

  “I don’t know. We have a couple of days yet, at least. I’ll have to study awhile.”

  “In that time Dick will find us, I know.”

  “Even if they do find us in time, which I doubt, what good will it do? It simply means that they will go with us instead of saving us, for of course they can’t pull away, since we couldn’t. I hope they don’t find us, but locate this star in time to keep away from it.”

  “Why?” she gasped. “You have been planning to kill both of them! I should think you would be delighted to take them with us?”

  “Far from it. Please try to be logical. I intended to remove them because they stood in the way of my developing this new metal. If I am to be out of the way—and frankly, I see very little chance of getting out of this—I hope that Seaton goes ahead with it. It is the greatest discovery the world has ever known, and if both Seaton and I, the only two men in the world who know how to handle it, drop out, it will be lost for perhaps hundreds of years.”

  “If Dick’s finding us means that he must go, too, of course I hope that he won’t find us, but I don’t believe that. I simply know that he could get us away from here.”

  She continued more slowly, almost speaking to herself, her heart sinking with her voice:

  “He is following us, and he won’t stop even if he does see this dead star and knows that he can’t get away. We will die together.”

  “There’s no denying the fact that our situation is critical, but you know a man isn’t dead until after his heart stops beating. We have two whole days yet, and in that time, I can probably dope out some way of getting away from here.”

  “I hope so,” she replied, keeping her voice from breaking only by a great effort. “But go ahead with your doping. I’m worn out.” She drew herself down upon one of the seats and stared at the ceiling, fighting to restrain an almost overpowering impulse to scream.

  Thus the hours wore by—Perkins dead; Margaret still unconscious; Dorothy lying in her seat, her thoughts a formless prayer, buoyed up only by her faith in God and in her lover; DuQuesne self-possessed, smoking innumerable cigarettes, his keen mind grappling with its most desperate problem, grimly fighting until the very last instant of life—while the powerless space-car fell with an appalling velocity, faster and faster; falling toward that cold and desolate monster of the heaven.

  CHAPTER X

  The Rescue

  Seaton and Crane drove the Skylark in the direction indicated by the unwavering object-compass with the greatest acceleration they could stand, each man taking a twelve-hour watch at the instrument board.

  Now, indeed, did the Skylark justify the faith of her builders, and the two inventors, with an exultant certainty of their success, flew out beyond man’s wildest imaginings. Had it not been for the haunting fear for Dorothy’s safety, the journey would have been one of pure triumph, and even that anxiety did not prevent a profound joy in the enterprise.

  “If that misguided mutt thinks he can pull off a stunt like that and get away with it, he’s got another think coming,” asserted Seaton, after making a reading on the other car after several days of the flight. “He went off half-cocked this time, for sure, and we’ve got him foul. We’d better put on some negative pretty soon hadn’t we, Mart? Only a little over a hundred light-years now.”

  Crane nodded agreement and Seaton continued:

  “It’ll take as long to stop, of course, as it has taken to get out here, and if we ram them—GOOD NIGHT! Let’s figure it out as nearly as we can.”

  They calculated their own speed, and that of the other vessel, as shown by the various readings taken, and applied just enough negative acceleration to slow the Skylark down to the speed of the other space-car when they should come up with it. They smiled at each other in recognition of the perfect working of the mechanism when the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed. Each knew that they were actually traveling in a direction that to them seemed “down,” but with a constantly diminishing velocity, even though they seemed to be still going “up” with an increasing speed.

  Until nearly the end of the calculated time the two took turns as before, but as the time of meeting drew near both men were on the alert, taking readings on the object-compass every few minutes. Finally Crane announced:

  “We are almost on them, Dick. They are so close that it is almost impossible to time the needle—less than ten thousand miles.”

  Seaton gradually increased the retarding force until the needle showed that they were very close to the other vessel and maintaining a constant distance from it. He then shut off the power, and both men hurried to the bottom window to search for the fleeing ship with their powerful night-glasses. They looked at each other in amazement as they felt themselves falling almost directly downward, with an astounding acceleration.

  “What do you make of it, Dick?” asked Crane calmly, as he brought his glasses to his eyes and stared out into the black heavens, studded with multitudes of brilliant and unfamiliar stars.

  “I don’t make it at all, Mart. By the feel, I should say we were falling toward something that would make our earth look like a pin-head. I remember now that I noticed that the bus was getting a little out of plumb with the bar all this last watch. I didn’t pay much attention to it, as I couldn’t see anything out of the way. Nothing but a sun could be big enough to raise all this disturbance, and I can’t see any close enough to be afraid of, can you?”

  “No, and I cannot see the Steel space-car, either. Look sharp.”

  “Of course,” Seaton continued to argue as he peered out into the night, “it is theoretically possible that a heavenly body can exist large enough so that it could exert even this much force and still appear no larger than an ordinary star, but I don’t believe it is probable. Give me three or four minutes of visual angle and I’ll believe anything, but none of these stars are big enough to have any visual angle at all. Furthermore.…”

  “There is at least half a degree of visual angle!” broke in his friend intensely. “Just to the left of that constellation that looks so much like a question mark. It is not bright, but dark, like a very dark moon—barely perceptible.”

  Seaton pointed his glass eagerly in the direction indicated.

  “Great Cat!” he ejaculated. �
�I’ll say that’s some moon! Wouldn’t that rattle your slats? And there’s DuQuesne’s bus, too, on the right edge. Get it?”

  As they stood up, Seaton’s mood turned to one of deadly earnestness, and a grave look came over Crane’s face as the seriousness of their situation dawned upon them. Trained mathematicians both, they knew instantly that that unknown world was of inconceivable mass, and that their chance of escape was none too good, even should they abandon the other craft to its fate. Seaton stared at Crane, his fists clenched and drops of perspiration standing on his forehead. Suddenly, with agony in his eyes and in his voice, he spoke.

  “Mighty slim chance of getting away if we go through with it, old man.… Hate like the devil.… Have no right to ask you to throw yourself away, too.”

  “Enough of that, Dick. You had nothing to do with my coming: you could not have kept me away. We will see it through.”

  Their hands met in a fierce clasp, broken by Seaton, as he jumped to the levers with an intense:

  “Well, let’s get busy!”

  In a few minutes they had reduced the distance until they could plainly see the other vessel, a small black circle against the faintly luminous disk. As it leaped into clear relief in the beam of his powerful searchlight, Seaton focused the great attractor upon the fugitive car and threw in the lever which released the full force of that mighty magnet, while Crane attracted the attention of the vessel’s occupants by means of a momentary burst of solid machine-gun bullets, which he knew would glance harmlessly off the steel hull.

  After an interminable silence, DuQuesne drew himself out of his seat. He took a long inhalation, deposited the butt of his cigarette carefully in his ash tray, and made his way to his room. He returned with three heavy fur suits provided with air helmets, two of which he handed to the girls, who were huddled in a seat with their arms around each other. These suits were the armor designed by Crane for use in exploring the vacuum and the intense cold of dead worlds. Airtight, braced with fine steel netting, and supplied with air at normal pressure from small tanks by automatic valves, they made their wearers independent of surrounding conditions of pressure and temperature.

  “The next thing to do,” DuQuesne stated calmly, “is to get the copper off the outside of the ship. That is the last resort, as it robs us of our only safeguard against meteorites, but this is the time for last-resort measures. I’m going after that copper. Put these suits on, as our air will leave as soon as I open the door, and practically an absolute vacuum and equally absolute zero will come in.”

  As he spoke, the ship was enveloped in a blinding glare and they were thrown flat as the vessel slowed down in its terrific fall. The thought flashed across DuQuesne’s mind that they had already entered the atmosphere of that monster globe and were being slowed down and set afire by its friction, but he dismissed it as quickly as it had come—the light in that case would be the green of copper, not this bluish-white. His next thought was that there had been a collision of meteors in the neighborhood, and that their retardation was due to the outer coating. While these thoughts were flickering through his mind, they heard an insistent metallic tapping, which DuQuesne recognized instantly.

  “A machine-gun!” he blurted in amazement. “How in.…”

  “It’s Dick!” screamed Dorothy, with flashing eyes. “He’s found us, just as I knew he would. You couldn’t beat Dick and Martin in a thousand years!”

  The tension under which they had been laboring so long suddenly released, the two girls locked their arms around each other in a half-hysterical outburst of relief. Margaret’s meaningless words and Dorothy’s incoherent praises of her lover and Crane mingled with their racking sobs as each fought to recover self-possession.

  DuQuesne had instantly mounted to the upper window. Throwing back the cover, he flashed his torch rapidly. The glare of the searchlight was snuffed out and he saw a flashing light spell out in dots and dashes:

  “Can you read Morse?”

  “Yes,” he signalled back. “Power gone, drifting into.…”

  “We know it. Will you resist?”

  “No.”

  “Have you fur pressure-suits?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put them on. Shut off your outer coating. Will touch so your upper door against our lower. Open, transfer quick.”

  “O. K.”

  Hastily returning to the main compartment, he briefly informed the girls as to what had happened. All three donned the suits and stationed themselves at the upper opening. Rapidly, but with unerring precision, the two ships were brought into place and held together by the attractor. As the doors were opened, there was a screaming hiss as the air of the vessels escaped through the narrow crack between them. The passengers saw the moisture in the air turn into snow, and saw the air itself first liquefy and then freeze into a solid coating upon the metal around the orifices at the touch of the frightful cold outside—the absolute zero of interstellar space, about four hundred sixty degrees below zero in the every-day scale of temperature. The moisture of their breath condensed upon the inside of the double glasses of their helmets, rendering sight useless.

  DuQuesne seized her and tossed her lightly through the doorway in such a manner that she would not touch the metal, which would have frozen instantly anything coming into contact with it.

  Dorothy pushed the other girl ahead of her. DuQuesne seized her and tossed her lightly through the doorway in such a manner that she would not touch the metal, which would have frozen instantly anything coming into contact with it. Seaton was waiting. Feeling a woman’s slender form in his arms, he crushed her to him in a mighty embrace, and was astonished to feel movements of resistance, and to hear a strange, girlish voice cry out:

  “Don’t! It’s me! Dorothy’s next!”

  Releasing her abruptly, he passed her on to Martin and turned just in time to catch his sweetheart, who, knowing that he would be there and recognizing his powerful arms at the first touch, returned his embrace with a fierce intensity which even he had never suspected that she could exert. They stood motionless, locked in each other’s arms, while DuQuesne dove through the opening and snapped the door shut behind him.

  The air-pressure and temperature back to normal, the cumbersome suits were hastily removed, and Seaton’s lips met Dorothy’s in a long, clinging caress. DuQuesne’s cold, incisive voice broke the silence.

  “Every second counts. I would suggest that we go somewhere.”

  “Just a minute!” snapped Crane. “Dick, what shall we do with this murderer?”

  Seaton had forgotten DuQuesne utterly in the joy of holding his sweetheart in his arms, but at his friend’s words, he faced about and his face grew stern.

  “By rights, we ought to chuck him back into his own tub and let him go to the devil,” he said savagely, doubling his fists and turning swiftly.

  “No, no, Dick,” remonstrated Dorothy, seizing his arm. “He treated us very well, and saved my life once. Anyway, you mustn’t kill him.”

  “No, I suppose not,” grudgingly assented her lover, “and I won’t, either, unless he gives me at least half an excuse.”

  “We might iron him to a post?” suggested Crane, doubtfully.

  “I think there’s a better way,” replied Seaton. “He may be able to work his way. His brain hits on all twelve, and he’s strong as a bull. Our chance of getting back isn’t a certainty, as you know.” He turned to DuQuesne.

  “I’ve heard that your word is good.”

  “It has never been broken.”

  “Will you give your word to act as one of the party, for the good of us all, if we don’t iron you?”

  “Yes—until we get back to the earth. Provided, of course, that I reserve the right to escape at any time between now and then if I wish to and can do so without injuring the vessel or any member of the party in any way.”

  “Agreed. Let’s get busy—we’re altogether too close to that dud there to suit me. Sit tight, everybody, we’re on our way!” he cried, as he turn
ed to the board, applied one notch of power, and shut off the attractor. The Skylark slowed down a trifle in its mad fall, the other vessel continued on its way—a helpless hulk, manned by a corpse, falling to destruction upon the bleak wastes of a desert world.

  “Hold on!” said DuQuesne sharply. “Your power is the same as mine was, in proportion to your mass, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then our goose is cooked. I couldn’t pull away from it with everything I had, couldn’t even swing out enough to make an orbit, either hyperbolic or elliptical around it. With a reserve bar you will be able to make an orbit, but you can’t get away from it.”

  “Thanks for the dope. That saves our wasting some effort. Our power-plant can be doubled up in emergencies, thanks to Martin’s cautious old bean. We’ll simply double her up and go away from here.”

  “There is one thing we didn’t consider quite enough,” said Crane, thoughtfully. “I started to faint back there before the full power of even one motor was in use. With the motor doubled, each of us will be held down by a force of many tons—we would all be helpless.”

  “Yes,” added Dorothy, with foreboding in her eyes, “we were all unconscious on the way out, except Dr. DuQuesne.”

  “Well, then, Blackie and I, as the huskiest members of the party, will give her the juice until only one of us is left with his eyes open. If that isn’t enough to pull us clear, we’ll have to give her the whole works and let her ramble by herself after we all go out. How about it, Blackie?” unconsciously falling into the old Bureau nickname. “Do you think we can make it stop at unconsciousness with double power on?”

  DuQuesne studied the two girls carefully.

  “With oxygen in the helmets instead of air, we all may be able to stand it. These special cushions keep the body from flattening out, as it normally would under such a pressure. The unconsciousness is simply a suffocation caused by the lateral muscles being unable to lift the ribs—in other words, the air-pumps aren’t strong enough for the added work put upon them. At least we stand a chance this way. We may live through the pressure while we are pulling away, and we certainly shall die if we don’t pull away.”