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

by John W. Campbell

  “Are you ready, Wolverton?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Nozaki waited until the blue gel stopped cascading and the rocks were trapped in the web. As the web sagged and gathered force, she watched the rocks soar past her and then turned out the head lamp.

  “Let’s go!”

  She flung herself head first out into the void, somersaulting and descending so slowly she felt as if she were floating. Exhilarated, she went down and down. At last she hit the web and felt it give way beneath her weight. It sagged a few meters, and then shot her upward with terrific force.

  She flew up toward the starry sky.

  “Goodbye, Nozaki,” she heard Wolverton say over her radio.

  “Jump, Woverton!”

  “No, I’m staying here, just like I told you.”

  Nozaki sailed over the crater’s rim into space, alone. She tumbled head over heels, seeing the stars blacked out by LGC-1 again and again. A crimson corona surrounded the tiny world, and she was afraid that she had been thrown too far, that she would go all the way around LGC-1 and end up facing the sun’s fatal hydrogen shell.

  She felt another force drawing her. Her body stopped tumbling and she was pulled headfirst toward something. She looked up to see nothing but darkness.

  She had expected a glittering, strobing machine like the one that pulled her down under the asteroid’s surface, but that thing must have been designed to illuminate the surface on the dark side so that the lariats could pick out ore samples. This was a snare set at a point in space and needed no lighting.

  The last thing she saw before darkness enveloped her was the last load of rocks that had been tossed up just before she jumped. They were being sucked into something she couldn’t see.

  Then she was inside the snare. She prayed that whatever was inside it would show the same deference to organic life that the spiders did. Otherwise, she might very well be crushed along with the ore samples. It occurred to her that it would be best to move her limbs, so that whatever was there could more easily detect her as an animate lifeform.

  She waved her arms and legs as much as she could. Something grasped her around the waist and turned her over. She got one last glimpse of LGC-1, and then the darkness irised shut.

  She was towed through utter blackness into a compartment similar to the ore collector’s. This was more spacious, and its other end opened almost immediately to let her out into a lit space.

  She could tell that this place was built by the same people who had made the ore-collector and hollowed out much of LGC-1. The same economy of interior space, lighting, and storage globes were here, the latter in comfortingly large portions. She went to the nearest orange globe and stuck her head inside it, shutting off her tank and removing her helmet to suck in the intoxicating, pure oxygen.

  She laughed, the sound echoing in her ears, but then she thought of Wolverton. She should have made him go first and pushed him out the tunnel. She could do nothing for him now. He was stuck there for the rest of his life.

  “Of course, I might be stuck here for the rest of my life, too,” she said, stepping out of the globe with a balloon clinging to her head. She did not intend to waste time. She was going to find out everything she could about this place to see if there was anything here that could help her get back to base camp.

  She leaped through the space station, floating and tumbling toward a red glow. Soon she found that there was an opening in one wall that admitted Gamma Crucis’s light. It was covered by something transparent that filtered the red glare. She walked up and touched it. There was a bit of give and then the clear covering sprang back. She looked out at the sun, LGC-1, and a funnel that spat out ore chunks.

  It was easy to see the funnel against the red giant’s hydrogen shell. The rocks shot out to a certain point and then they were gone.

  “The bubble!”

  It had to be. Either the bubble extended from the asteroid’s surface out into space, or it moved around some point in space. She favored the latter hypothesis, because the miners would not have built this station if they could have done the same thing on the surface. But why were they shooting ore through a temporal bubble? Were the miners using it to build something in another bubble? If so, what were they building? This asteroid was rich in metals, and that was likely the reason the miners had chosen it. But what were they using it for?

  She would have to go through the bubble and find out for herself. Otherwise, she might just as well jump back down to the surface and spend the rest of her life in Wolverton’s world.

  She had no idea how to get out to the bubble, unless she allowed herself to be shot out with the ore chunks, in which case she was quite likely to be smashed to a pulp. She was very tired, and she wanted to eat and bathe before she slept. Then she would think about how to get back.

  She went to sleep inside an oxygen balloon with her helmet off, drifting off quickly after what she had been through in the past few hours.

  A visitor woke her.

  At first she didn’t notice it. She had opened her eyes and was thinking about having some more food. She would have to figure out how to do that, she realized, because she had not been there when Wolverton had produced the food in the cavern, although he said there was nothing to it. From what he had said, she gathered that it would pretty much take care of itself once it had analyzed her metabolism. She wasn’t sure how that worked, exactly, but she would deal with it. Ah, for a tasteless meal with the consistency of toothpaste.

  She was about to shut her eyes and go back to sleep again, when a shadow flitted past the orange transparency.

  “Wolverton?” she said.

  There was no reply. She was wide awake in a heartbeat. She leaped out of the balloon, holding enough of it around her head to continue breathing.

  It wasn’t Wolverton.

  “Hello,” Nozaki said to it. It was hard to tell exactly what part of it to look at while she addressed it.

  It made a sound. At least she knew it could hear her, because it was responsive. Its five limbs seemed to flow into one another, but it made no threatening move.

  “I’m sorry to have come here uninvited,” she said, “but it was the only way I could get off the asteroid.”

  The alien made a cooing sound, followed by a gurgle. She felt silly talking to it, but even if it didn’t understand what she was saying, it seemed to realize that she was being communicative.

  It made more cooing and gurgling noises, and she let it go on talking while she took a good look at it.

  Its skin was blue shot with pink blood vessels, and its five eyes were about where a human’s mouth would be, set in a semi-circle, as if it were smiling through the eyes. Its head emerged on a slender neck from the belly, and its fluid limbs parted to show its mouth at crotch level. It was naked.

  At last it stopped speaking, and its eyes regarded Nozaki.

  “There’s someone else trapped down there,” she said, pointing her finger straight at the floor. “Inside the asteroid.”

  An arm extended from between its swaybacked shoulders. It mimicked her gesture, and she saw that its fingers were either multi-jointed or tentacular. They moved about like worms, but one of them pointed at the floor.

  “You’re smart, at least,” she said. And then she realized how silly that sounded. This being was from one of the races that had built this space station, the ore processer, and the spiders-sling; they had hollowed out an asteroid and extracted valuable metals with remarkable efficiency, and they didn’t even have to be present to be sure it all worked. Smart? They were very advanced.…

  Even if this guy did resemble a cartoon character.

  “You probably think I look pretty funny, too,” she said, smiling.

  The expression the alien made with its mouth was unsettling, but she assumed that it was an imitation of her smile. There was something about the the thing’s manner that told her it was trying to be friendly. The mine and the space station appeared to have been designed to accommod
ate quite a few races, so perhaps it was more used to her shape than she was to its.

  It wasn’t naked, after all, she saw, but completely enveloped in a clear balloon from shoulders to its starfish feet. It could not breathe the gases in this environment any more than she could. Perhaps this was a neutral environment, and yet it was comfortable enough. The temperature was moderate to human sensibilities, and everything she needed was readily available. She was in her balloon and the alien was in its balloon. She wondered what it smelled like.

  “Maybe you’re a stranger here, too,” she said.

  Its serpentine fingers coiled and uncoiled, and its head swung to one side. It turned and lumbered away from her. After a few paces it hesitated and looked back at her, waving as if to tell her to come along.

  “What have I got to lose?”

  Nozaki followed the alien through the station, until they came to a corridor leading into the darkness.

  “Is this the way out?” she asked.

  The alien belched something at her in its language and waved her on into the tunnel. She was concerned that the oxygen in the balloon over her head might wear out, so she clutched her helmet tightly, ready to put it on and access her air tank at the first hint of darkening orange.

  She needn’t have worried. When they emerged from the tunnel, the first thing she saw was a reassuring cluster of orange globes. These were squeezed into a corner of a very compact chamber, in which everything seemed to have a special place. She recognized this as a prerequisite of a spacecraft’s interior.

  “We’re in your ship, aren’t we?”

  The mouth in the alien’s crotch smiled at her.

  “Proud of it, huh?” She looked around. “I don’t blame you. It’s very sophisticated…and very tidy.”

  Some of the ship’s features were identifiable as correlatives of human design, and some she could only guess at. The rest were so strange that she hadn’t a clue about their functions.

  “So, where are we going?”

  The alien gurgled and coughed a reply. It gesticulated toward a big balloon in front of a console.

  “Cockpit, I bet.” Nozaki settled into the balloon.

  The alien used a coil to connect the balloon to an oxygen globe. Soon Nozaki felt free to luxuriate inside it while her host made preparations to depart the station.

  “This should be interesting.”

  And it was.

  The cockpit darkened and a starry panorama expanded all around them. The alien manipulated some peculiarly lumpy-looking controls, and the ship freed itself from the tethering tunnel. Nozaki looked to her left to see the station, a clamshell limned in red from Gamma Crucis’s light. The tether curled up like one of the alien’s fingers and fitted itself neatly into the clamshell’s underbelly.

  Below them was LGC-1, a cratered sphere, much different from the little world she had been living and working on for the past six months.

  Behind them was the sun, its vast hydrogen shell a crimson orb that enveloped what had once been a solar system. Now only asteroids and the outer planets remained, the system having been slowly eaten up as GC expanded. It was a chilling thought that the same thing would happen to Sol in a few billion years, and Earth would be burned away.

  When she finally turned to face forward, she understood where they were going, and why the alien had been able to suddenly appear at the station while she was asleep. The ship was headed for the bubble. Nozaki could see the last of an ore shipment vanishing into it.

  “Well, join the service and see the multiverse,” she said.

  The alien burbled something in reply and goosed the ship’s engines.

  They flew straight into the bubble.

  “Whoa!” Nozaki shouted as they sailed through it.

  A moment later everything was different. The positions of the stars had changed; the light from the sun was white and much dimmer. The alien banked its ship and they came around until Nozaki saw that Gamma Crucis had been replaced by a protostar.

  They were in a universe billions of years before her time, and the ore that spewed out of the bubble was spinning in a vast accretion disc. The aliens were manufacturing a planetesimal.

  They weren’t just mining asteroids. They were going into the past and creating worlds!

  Was this sun Gamma Crucis in an early stage, or some other sun?

  It made sense, in a way. Planets, moons, and asteroids about to be consumed by red giants would make the perfect fodder for new planets. By firing enough rocks at specific points in space while the protostar was developing, the miners could build as many worlds as they liked.

  “But why?”

  The alien gurgled, but she had no idea what it was saying. Was its species part of a confederacy dedicated to making new solar systems? For what purpose? As a future home for themselves or other species whose home planets had been destroyed by Red Giants? Unless she learned how to talk to this guy, she would never know.

  “Maybe we’ll have a long time to get to knew one another,” she said.

  But the alien said nothing. It was intent on piloting the ship, and it looked to Nozaki as if they were headed right back into the bubble. The alien skimmed its craft past a hail of rocks that spewed out of the darkness.

  When they came out the other side the red giant was back. Or rather, they were back.

  Just below was LGC-1, looking just the way Nozaki remembered it the first time she had seen it from space. No craters, no mines, just a metallic ball baking under a crimson sun.

  The ship banked again, and the alien took them down toward the asteroid’s dark side. The drastically curving landscape was partly lit by the sun’s red albedo, but soon they flew over a dark expanse.

  The ship slowed, and Nozaki saw the lights of base camp as they approached.

  “You brought me back!” she cried in amazement, tears coming to her eyes. “How did you know where to bring me?”

  But the alien was silent as it landed the ship on the hard surface of LGC-1. They drifted to the ground and settled like a butterfly. The engines were still hissing as it turned to her and gestured with its snaky fingers around its head.

  “Huh?” Nozaki said. “Oh, you want me to put my helmet on?”

  She did so, and turned on her air supply.

  A round hatch funneled open next to her. It was well lit, and she could see the ground below. The funnel took an elbow turn. She assumed she was supposed to jump out.

  “Thank you, my friend,” she said.

  The alien cooed a response, but then gesticulated again, as if telling her to hurry.

  “Okay,” she said, standing at the edge of the hatch. She took one last look at the ungainly creature, thinking for the first time that it was beautiful. “Thanks.”

  She dropped down and slid through the funnel. Landing lightly on her feet, she moved quickly away from the ship, wary of its engines. She bounded two steps and came down, knees bent, twenty or so meters away.

  The ship went straight up until it had gained an altitude of a kilometer or so. She waved at its occupant just it shot forward and rode the curve of the horizon back toward the bubble.

  “If I’m dreaming all this,” she said, “I don’t want to wake up.”

  She leaped joyously over the metallic surface toward base camp. The low buildings came into sight under floodlights, and there was one of her colleagues manipulating a wieldo, putting together another structure.

  “Hey!” she called.

  The wieldos stopped moving and the pressure-suited figure turned toward her. She saw that it was Labutunu, a friendly sort who had been on LCG-1 longer than she. He was one of the construction crew, in fact.

  “Hi, Nozaki,” he said. “Back so soon?”

  “Soon? You won’t believe all I’ve been through.”

  “Oh, yeah? Was that the flyby that just went over?”

  “No.”

  She moved closer, and saw the puzzlement in his eyes. And then she realized that the building he was putting up had
been there for weeks.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?” Labutunu asked.

  “There are more bubbles around here than I ever dreamed of,” she said.

  “Bubbles?”

  “I wonder if I’m going to show up soon,” she said, “on the double…”

  “What are you talking about, Nozaki?” Labutunu asked.

  “I’ll tell you everything, but right now I just want to get inside.”

  “Yeah, the sun will be up soon.” He turned off the wieldo’s power and withdrew his arms from the mechanism.

  Nozaki stumbled, and he caught her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, just a little tired.”

  “Well, you’ll be able to rest soon,” Labutunu said.

  “Rest,” she said. “Poor Wolverton…”

  “Poor who?”

  “Wolverton. He’s the new geo-areologist.”

  “Oh, yeah. I think he’ll be here in a couple days,” Labutunu said as they bounded toward base camp. “Have you met him before?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “I didn’t think anybody here knew him.”

  They were about to go inside. The airlock opened to admit them, and as she stepped through the door, Nozaki was so grateful to be back that she couldn’t control herself. She broke down and wept as she took off her helmet.

  Labutunu seemed confused and embarrassed.

  “That was the trouble,” she said, wiping tears off on the back of a glove. “Nobody knew him.”

  “Well, up here we’ll all get acquainted.”

  “I hope so,” Nozaki said.

  This time, she intended to be Wolverton’s friend from the moment he arrived.

  THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY, THE LIGHTNESS OF THE FUTURE, by Jay Lake

  Year 1143 post-Mistake

  High orbit around Themiscyra; in the Antiope Sector

  The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard the starship Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  The orbital habitat spun around its center of mass, but eccentrically with the great, sweeping wheels that formed its structure. Tiny moonlets of debris accompanied the station in its eternal fall around the roiling planet of Themiscrya. Late Polity space architecture, to be sure—no one from the Imperium Humana had built anything new in this sector since the Mistake, after all.