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

by John W. Campbell

  “No use, Grant,” Slade Jackson said calmly. “You can’t kill me. Life is going backwards—not forwards. You can’t avenge because the Fitzgerald Contraction won’t let you.”

  “You dirty swine!” Grant leapt forward and seized Jackson savagely by the throat, forcing him back into the control seat. “You killed my wife, stole all my technical information—didn’t you? Answer me!”

  “Yes, I did,” Jackson retorted, dragging himself free of the grip. “I didn’t mean to murder, though. It was an accident. The information I stole enabled me to become a first mate aboard a spaceship. I was down and out, Grant: I had to steal the answers to technical questions in order to pass the examination and get a job quickly. Then I met with an accident. It ruined my face and crushed my chest. But it was also a golden opportunity. I realised when the surgeons had finished with me that my voice was different due to what they’d done inside my chest, and my face too was entirely altered by plastic surgery, leaving also a deep scar down one cheek. I had only to dye my hair to become a different person entirely. For all the law knew Slade Jackson had died somewhere in space. I became Bob Anderson, first mate. And at last I was assigned to work beside you.”

  “You, a murderer, worked beside me! Why?” Grant demanded. “Since you killed my wife you could just as easily have killed me—many a time! Why didn’t you?”

  “I keep on telling you, I didn’t murder deliberately! I worked beside you for one purpose only. I was waiting for the day when those various scientific inventions of yours would see fruit. I planned to steal them when that happened. Since we’re in a spot right now I’ve no need to hold anything back.… Yes, I intended to steal them. I believed, and rightly I think, that I could one day become scientific master of the System—at your expense. That was why I stayed beside you.”

  Grant waited, his face drawn and hard.

  “When I knew we were going to make for Pluto at a speed nearly equal to that of light I became worried,” Jackson continued. “I knew it was quite possible that the speed of light might be exceeded, mainly because the hairline is so slight. If that happened, I decided, events exactly similar to those that have come about would happen. Devolution instead of evolution. I’m not entirely a mug in scientific matters, Grant.

  “I knew it was just possible that the years might fade from me like mist. That I had to prevent at all costs. I could not cry off from the trip because that would have stamped me as a quitter and I’d have lost my job—and you. The only course, it seemed, was to sabotage things so that you could never reach the speed of light. I did not want to cripple all means of power, mark you: that would have spelled disaster since, without power, we’d have gone on hurtling through space at a fixed velocity until some powerful gravity-field caught us and drew us to destruction. No; I had to partly cripple things…”

  Jackson paused and reflected, a cynical smile on his ever-younger face.

  “I fixed the electric switch so that Dawson got killed. On Brogan’s bunk I smeared insite poison. As you know brings first madness and then death. I knew that he would be sweating heavily from working in the rockethold and that the poison would be absorbed through his open pores. I also put the time-bomb in the rocket-tube. I believed these things would produce a mutiny. It nearly worked, only Baxter proved more level-headed than the rest and kept order. In spite of all my efforts the speed of light was exceeded…” I believed, too, that if the speed of light were exceeded there would still be a way back to our own Universe, and that that would take me back as a branded criminal. Now there’s no way back.”

  Grant said slowly: “And you planned all this, knowing there was canthite aboard? If our speed had slowed up as you intended the stuff would have exploded.”

  “There is no canthite aboard,” Jackson answered dryly. “I took it away the night before departure and substituted an identical parcel. It was that parcel which you saw on the morning of departure.”

  Grant sat down slowly. Before his sombre gaze Jackson was sweeping backwards down the scale of time. Grant too realized how far he himself had gone.

  At length Jackson spoke. “Somehow, it’s funny! You and me in an alien universe—bitter enemies—and neither of us can do a thing about it! You and me alone, with only the spirits of those who have died. Something else too, Grant. This ship is comparatively new. When it has retrogressed a certain distance it will fall in pieces—long before we have gone back to the moment of our births. Even if there is a way back we shan’t have the time to discover it. We couldn’t, either, because our minds are losing chunks of knowledge all the time. Knowledge accumulated through the years is just vanishing…”

  Grant gazed with steady, accusing eyes.

  “I murdered by accident in the first place,” Jackson went ob, but later it was by design. The men below, I mean. They were just criminal scum, the whole damned bunch of them. I had no qualms about blotting them out.… You’re not much better than I am, Grant. When you found out you tried to kill me.”

  “And was prevented,” Grant said quietly, “for which I thank heaven—” He looked up quickly as there was a curious sound from the direction of the rocketholds.

  “The ship’s beginning to break up!” Jackson whispered, moistening his lips. Suddenly he got to his feet and went to the airlock. “Do I open it and get it over with?”

  Grant shook his head slowly. “Give it a moment or two longer. Too much to face all at once.”

  He turned and looked pensively at the instruments, then that odd sound came again from the rockethold. The vessel lurched violently, seemed to spin in a dizzy half-circle to the sudden blast of rocket tubes.

  Jackson wheeled, dumbfounded, staring through the port on to a sky that had abruptly become powered with stars.

  “Grant, we’re free!” he shouted hoarsely. “Look, man! The stars are back!”

  He stopped dead. Grant, his face merciless, was holding a flame pistol steadily in his hand. For several moments he stood motionless, as also did Jackson. Both of them needed the respite to catch up on the adjustment to normal time and space dimensions again.… At last they had caught up on the years. Jackson’s face was again scarred; his voice had changed back; his hair was dark once more.

  “Grant, what’s happened?” he whispered. He looked again through the port, to behold Pluto dead ahead.

  At last Grant spoke. “For your information, Jackson, I have played tag with a cosmic law to expose a murderer! You thought the police believed you dead—but they didn’t. They worked it out that Robert Anderson could be Slade Jackson, but they could not prove it. What was required was cast-iron evidence in sound and vision. That has now been obtained. During the time we were beyond the deadline you broke down and told everything because Time itself had stripped you bare. In this control room, hidden from you are cameras and recorders. Everything was taken down!”

  “No use at all!” Jackson shouted. “They were photographing and recording in a negative Time—”

  “Which compensator instruments back on Earth will straighten out! Just as a chemical brings an otherwise invisible image into view on a photographic plate.” Then Grant continued calmly: “The moment you came under suspicion I ceased to refer to my progress with scientific inventions, so you could not learn anything. From then on I was determined to nail you. It may surprise you to know that I have exceeded the speed of light before now. I did it once with an old and very expert scientist who worked out the mathematics to get back to normal. After that—not possessing one tenth of his mathematical ability—I devised mechanical instruments to do it for me, on the lines of an electronic brain. These instruments were embodied in this ship. They accomplished automatically what a retrogressed brain could not even grapple with. They re-fired the rockets and catapulted us back into normal space-time. That was the noise we heard. It wasn’t a crack-up.”

  “Then—then every bit of this was planned?” Jackson demanded.

  “Every bit of it, yes, with the connivance of the Commanding Officer. He saw
to it that this ship had the special mechanisms embodied in it: he also worked alongside the law when they suggested this means of forcing you into the open as a long-wanted murdeer… I used a bit of psychology in guessing that you’d probably get nervy when you knew the speed we’d have to move at to reach Pluto in time. The contact I had with you had shown me that you have a good scientific knowledge. You would, I figured, probably be afraid of exceeding the speed of light. You did many of the things we thought you would, Jackson. You say you even took away the canthite? All you actually took was the parcel the C.O. had delivered to me.”

  “That was canthíte!” Jackson snapped. “You said so yourself! I removed it and buried it in waste ground.”

  Grant smiled crookedly. “You remember a bottle of fluid I brought on departure morning? That was the canthíte, my misguided friend! I realised you knew little about it. The C.O. gave it to me secretly on departure morning. Up to the last moment it was safely tucked away in an underground vault. I guessed you might switch parcels, and you did.… You see, I knew you had done so the moment I looked in the storage-hold.”

  “You damned well couldn’t have known!”

  “But I did. The C.O.’s parcel was wrapped in jitmus paper which is ordinarily yellow, but locked in the darkness it would have turned bright blue through chemical reaction by the time we were ready to depart, a colour only noticeable in darkness. Since all night passed and there was no bright blue colour when I looked at the parcel in the darkness—remember I did that?—it was perfectly obvious a switch had been made. The crew, though they had access to the ship itself during the night had not got a key to the stronghold. Only you had that.”

  “Then,” Jackson said slowly, “does this mean that canthite is not a genuine mutational substance?”

  “Most certainly it is, only the speed of change is not nearly so rapid as you were led to believe. As to the rest, the Pluto assignment was quite genuine. There is trouble on Pluto and that canthite is desperately needed.”

  “Normal speed would have sufficed?”

  “Yes.” Grant shrugged his broad shoulders. “You walked right into the trap, Jackson. Now you can give me a hand to land this ship—unless you’re anxious to die without trial!”

  Jackson obeyed, staring as he moved with hopeless eyes towards the fast approaching bulk of the ninth world.

  Behind his head the flame pistol pointed…inexorably.

  PLANETESIMAL DAWN, by Tim Sullivan

  It was the most dangerous place on the asteroid.

  “Why don’t we just go back?” Wolverton asked.

  “Because we can’t,” Nozaki said. “The sun’s coming up.”

  “Yeah, but we’ve got insulated suits.”

  “Not enough.”

  This wasn’t the best day to be base camp security chief, Nozaki thought. They stood next to the rover, watching the searing dawn advance across the curved horizon. The rover had died on them, and Nozaki had worked on it as long as she could. The dawn was too close. They had to get moving.

  “But we can’t go the other way,” Wolverton said. “It’s suicide.”

  “It’s the only chance we’ve got. We’ll die for sure if we go back on foot through that hell.”

  “What about the samples?” Wolverton asked, looking mournfully at the labeled rocks in the rover’s boot. He was a geo-areologist who’d just been assigned to base camp. He had been a loner since he got to LGC-1, and playing nursemaid to him on this field trip had made Nozaki understand why. “I spent all this time collecting them.”

  “They’re not going anywhere, but we are.”

  The red giant Gamma Crucis was burning up the landscape right in front of them. They’d been caught too far away from base camp at dawn, and now their only hope was to stay ahead of the sunlight.

  “We can’t walk the entire surface and get back to base before the next dawn,” Wolverton said, despair in his voice.

  “We’ve got to try,” Nozaki replied. “Maybe we better save our breath and walk.”

  They turned and started moving away from the dawn.

  Ahead of them was the asteroid’s dark, barren landscape. It curved abruptly into nowhere. Clustered stars seemed close enough to touch, but they provided no light on the surface. It was like stepping into the abyss.

  “Why can’t we talk to base?” Wolverton said, ignoring Nozaki’s broad hint that he should shut up.

  “The sun’s radiation is interfering, and we’re over the horizon,” Nozaki explained. “With the flyby down, there’s nothing to bounce the signal off.”

  “There’s no chance they can hear us?”

  “Maybe they’re picking us up intermittently, but we’re not getting anything from them, so I doubt it.”

  “If they do hear us, they’ll send the flyby, won’t they?”

  “I don’t think they can.” She was getting impatient with Wolverton. “I doubt they’ve got it fixed by now. The rover’s probably gone out for the same reason, an unusually large burst of radiation from GC’s hydrogen shell. We’re just going to have to hoof it.”

  “Oh, God,” Wolverton moaned.

  “Walk!” Nozaki said.

  Her stern tone seemed to sober the panicky Wolverton. He glanced at her through his visor, but he didn’t say anything.

  Nozaki quickened her pace so that Wolverton would do the same.

  They had a long way to go. But with the light gravity, it was the equivalent of only a few kilometers, and they could make it if they were determined enough. Each stride took them ten to twelve meters. At first it had been a disorientating sensation, almost like flying. It had been fun. Tonight it was a survival necessity.

  After half an hour or so, Nozaki ventured a look back at the encroaching sunrise. She saw that they were keeping ahead of it, maybe even gaining some ground. That was good, but they weren’t all that tired yet. They would have to run and leap for many more hours before they would reach base camp.

  A little over two hours passed before they came to the mound.

  “That’s not supposed to be here,” Wolverton said.

  This time Nozaki didn’t shush him, because he was right. What was this thing they’d landed on with their last jump?

  “It looks like gravel,” Nozaki said. She saw the mound’s shadow looming to cut off the star field.

  “But this asteroid’s supposed to be as round and smooth as a ball bearing.”

  “Yeah.” Nozaki took a breath and leaped forward, landing about halfway toward the top of the mound.

  A moment later, Wolverton came down a few feet from her, his knees bending under the light impact of his landing. He was only a vague shadow in the dark, but Nozaki was glad to know he was keeping up with her.

  It was shaped as if the ground had been dug up and banked.

  “This is all we need,” Nozaki said. “Hills to slow us down.”

  Wolverton didn’t comment. He jumped and landed on the mound’s rounded summit.

  Nozaki followed. She didn’t get quite as far as Wolverton, and when she took a few steps forward, she was very pleased that she hadn’t gone farther.

  “It’s not a mound,” she said.

  It was a crater, and they were standing on the rim.

  “It’s big,” said Wolverton. “Very big.”

  He was right. It was impossible to see just how big, but the concave slope descended into darkness so steeply that Nozaki suspected it might be several kilometers in diameter.

  “Now what?” Wolverton asked.

  Nozaki looked behind her. She could see the merciless sunrise coming.

  “Now we jump,” she said.

  “Can’t we go around it?”

  “There’s no time.”

  Wolverton turned to see for himself.

  “Well, I’m not going to lack for something to drink,” Wolverton said. “I just emptied my bladder.”

  “Good,” Nozaki said. She did the same, counting on the liquid processor to distill her urine and extract the water for drin
king later. If it failed, she would die of thirst. “You’re going to need it.”

  “No sense standing around here,” Wolverton said.

  He jumped into the crater. Nozaki was surprised that he’d had the nerve to go first. Wolverton was adapting pretty well after his initially fearful reaction.

  She followed him, leaping into the crater. For a few seconds she could see starlight, but then she fell into the rim’s shadow.

  There was no light at all. She seemed to be sailing in a void, and it felt as if she’d never come down. But at last she did, landing softly and rolling down the inside rim of the crater. She couldn’t see Wolverton but she could hear him grunting and panting.

  It seemed as if she would roll down that slope forever.

  But at last the incline graduated into a more level surface and she stopped. She lay on her side, trying to catch her breath for a moment. She wondered if she’d been hurt during the ascent, but she felt no pain.

  “Wolverton?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so. You?”

  “I’m fine.” She got to her knees and looked around. There was nothing but blackness. Only if she looked up could she see anything, and then only stars. She got to her feet.

  “We can’t be very far from each other,” she said. “I don’t want to waste the batteries, but I’m going to turn on the beacon lamp on my helmet so you can see me. Stay alert now. Ready?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  She pressed the tab on her wrist console and a beam of light stabbed out from over her head to illuminate the scree on the crater floor.

  “See the light?”

  “I can’t see anything else.”

  “Move in this direction then,” Nozaki said. “I’ll turn on the lamp every thirty seconds or so to make sure you don’t lose your way.”

  “Right.”

  She shut off the light and waited a little while before turning it on again. She couldn’t see Wolverton.

  “I’m turning it on again,” she said. She made a quick sweep to see if she could pick Wolverton out of the landscape. Not yet. “Can you see me?”