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

by John W. Campbell

  The welding arc, intended to fuse refractive meteoric iron, would be no mean weapon, at close quarters. And the quarters would be close.

  If only he could find some way to make the thing visible!

  Paint, or something of the kind, would stick to its skin.… His eyes, searching the room, caught the jar of face powder on the dressing table. Dash that over it! It ought to stick enough to make the outline visible.

  So, at last, holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until a time when the pressure upon the door had just relaxed, and he knew the monster was waiting outside. Swiftly, he opened the door.…

  Thad had partially overcome the instinctive horror that the unseen being had first aroused in him. But it returned in a sickening wave when he heard the short, shrill, coughing cries, hideously eager, that greeted the opening of the door. And the quick rasping of naked claws upon the floor. Sounds from nothingness!

  He flung the powder at the sound.

  A form of weird horror materialized before him, still half invisible, half outlined with the white film of adhering powder: gigantic and hideous claws, that seemed to reach out of empty air, the side of a huge, scaly body, a yawning, dripping jaw. For a moment Thad could see great, hooked fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if an unseen tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it in fluids which made it invisible.

  That unearthly, half-seen shape leaped at him.

  He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the floor. Claws were rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit. His arm was seized crushingly in half-visible jaws.

  Desperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated electrode was driven toward his body. He fought to keep it away; he knew that it would burn through even the insulated fabric of his suit.

  A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound, as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and felt a thin pencil of pain drawn along his body, where a claw cut his skin.

  Suddenly the suit was full of the earthy fetor of the monster’s body, nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and thrust upward hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood trickling from the wound.

  A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was carried from his hand. Flung to the side of the room, it clattered to the floor; and then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing the breath from his lungs. The monster stood upon his body and clawed at him.

  Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet, encountering a great, hard body. Futilely he beat and thrust with his arms against the pillarlike limb.

  His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick fabric. He heard it tear again, along his right thigh. But he felt no pain, and thought the claws had not reached the skin.

  It was the yellow dog that gave him the chance to recover the weapon. The animal had been running back and forth in the opposite end of the room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now, with the mad courage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at the monster.

  A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled it back across the room. It lay still, broken, whimpering.

  For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from Thad’s body. And Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung himself across the room, snatched up the welding tool.

  In an instant the creature was upon him again. But he met it with the incandescent electrode. He was crouched in a corner, now, where it could come at him from only one direction. Its claws still slashed at him ferociously. But he was able to cling to the weapon, and meet each onslaught with hot metal.

  Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his blind, thrusting blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A terrible choking, strangling sound came from the air. And he heard the thrashing struggles of wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He prodded the thing again and again with the hot electrode, and it did not move. It was dead.

  The creature’s body was so heavy that Thad had to return to the bridge, and shut off the current in the gravity plates along the keel, before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which he had entered the flier, and consigned it to space.…

  Five days later Thad brought the Red Dragon into the atmosphere of Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in response to his signals, and docked the flier safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again, with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard to inspect the vessel.

  Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in the hold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at the treasure, he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of white crystal, and looked once more upon the still form of the girl within it.

  Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat.

  Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so lovely. How terrible her last days of life must have been, with doom shadowing the vessel, and the men vanishing mysteriously, one by one! Terrible—until she had sought the security of death.

  Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half the incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the award of salvage. If only the girl were still living.… He felt a poignantly keen desire to hear her voice.

  Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. A hasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among glittering gems.

  “This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty minims of zeronel.

  “She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.

  “I entreat the finders of this to have care given her, and to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other claims.

  “Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and the injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time that must elapse.

  “If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing upon the ship has destroyed me and all my men.

  “Please do not fail me.

  Levington Cross.”

  Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its Martian garden of saffron and purple, among the low ocher hills beside Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where the girl of his dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaulted chamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay, to look into her pallid face, and feel her cold wrist. He kept a nurse in attendance, and had a physician call daily.

  A long Martian year went by.

  Looking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting was aging him. And it might be a hundred years, he remembered, before Linda Cross came from beneath the drug’s influence.

  He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while Linda lay still young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep; if she might awake, after long years, and see in him only a feeble old man. And he knew that he would not be sorry he had waited, even if he should die before she revived.

  On the next day, the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay. He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue, glorious.

  A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful wonder, then with confidence, and dawning understanding. And at last she smiled.

  25 The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is “mined” by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode’s Law, should occupy this space.

  THE ULTIMATE WEAPON, by John W. Campbell, Jr.

  I

  Patrol Cruiser “IP-T 247” circling out toward Pluto on leisurely inspection tour to visit the outpost miners there, was in no hurry at all as she loafed along. Her six-man
crew was taking it very easy, and easy meant two-man watches, and low speed, to watch for the instrument panel and attend ship into the bargain.

  She was about thirty million miles off Pluto, just beginning to get in touch with some of the larger mining stations out there, when Buck Kendall’s turn at the controls came along. Buck Kendall was one of life’s little jokes. When Nature made him, she was absentminded. Buck stood six feet two in his stocking feet, with his usual slight stoop in operation. When he forgot, and stood up straight, he loomed about two inches higher. He had the body and muscles of a dock navvy, which Nature started out to make. Then she forgot and added something of the same stuff she put in Sir Francis Drake. Maybe that made Old Nature nervous, and she started adding different things. At any rate, Kendall, as finally turned out, had a brain that put him in the first rank of scientists—when he felt like it—the general constitution of an ostrich and a flair for gambling.

  The present position was due to such a gamble. An IP man, a friend of his, had made the mistake of betting him a thousand dollars he wouldn’t get beyond a Captain’s bars in the Patrol. Kendall had liked the idea anyway, and adding a bit of a bet to it made it irresistible. So, being a very particular kind of a fool, the glorious kind which old Nature turns out now and then, he left a five million dollar estate on Long Island, Terra, that same evening, and joined up in the Patrol. The Sir Francis Drake strain had immediately come forth—and Kendall was having the time of his life. In a six-man cruiser, his real work in the Interplanetary Patrol had started. He was still in it—but it was his command now, and a blue circle on his left sleeve gave his lieutenant’s rank.

  Buck Kendall had immediately proceeded to enlist in his command the IP man who had made the mistaken bet, and Rad Cole was on duty with him now. Cole was the technician of the T-247. His rank as Technical Engineer was practically equivalent to Kendall’s circle-rank, which made the two more comfortable together.

  Cole was listening carefully to the signals coming through from Pluto. “That,” he decided, “sounds like Tad Nichols’ fist. You can recognize that broken-down truck-horse trot of his on the key as far away as you can hear it.”

  “Is that what it is?” sighed Buck. “I thought it was static mushing him at first. What’s he like?”

  “Like all the other damn fools who come out two billion miles to scratch rock, as if there weren’t enough already on the inner planets. He’s got a rich platinum property. Sells ninety percent of his output to buy his power, and the other eleven percent for his clothes and food.”

  “He must be an efficient miner,” suggested Kendall, “to maintain 101% production like that.”

  “No, but his bank account is. He’s figured out that’s the most economic level of production. If he produces less, he won’t be able to pay for his heating power, and if he produces more, his operation power will burn up his bank account too fast.”

  “Hmmm—sensible way to figure. A man after my own heart. How does he plan to restock his bank account?”

  “By mining on Mercury. He does it regularly—sort of a commuter. Out here his power bills eat it up. On Mercury he goes in for potassium, and sells the power he collects in cooling his dome, of course. He’s a good miner, and the old fool can make money down there.” Like any really skilled operator, Cole had been sending Morse messages while he talked. Now he sat quiet waiting for the reply, glancing at the chronometer.

  “I take it he’s not after money—just after fun,” suggested Buck.

  “Oh, no. He’s after money,” replied Cole gravely. “You ask him—he’s going to make his eternal fortune yet by striking a real bed of jovium, and then he’ll retire.”

  “Oh, one of that kind.”

  “They all are,” Cole laughed. “Eternal hope, and the rest of it.” He listened a moment and went on. “But old Nichols is a first-grade engineer. He wouldn’t be able to remake that bankroll every time if he wasn’t. You’ll see his Dome out there on Pluto—it’s always the best on the planet. Tip-top shape. And he’s a bit of an experimenter too. Ah—he’s with us.”

  Nichols’ ragged signals were coming through—or pounding through. They were worse than usual, and at first Kendall and Cole couldn’t make them out. Then finally they got them in bursts. The man was excited, and his bad key-work made it worse. “—Randing stopped. They got him I think. He said—th—ship as big—a—nsport. Said it wa—eaded my—ay. Neutrons—on instruments—he’s coming over the horizon—it’s huge—war ship I think—register—instru—neutrons—.” Abruptly the signals were blanked out completely.

  Cole and Kendall sat frozen and stiff. Each looked at the other abruptly, then Kendall moved. From the receiver, he ripped out the recording coil, and instantly jammed it into the analyzer. He started it through once, then again, then again, at different tone settings, till he found a very shrill whine that seemed to clear up most of Nichols’ bad key-work. “T-247—T-247—Emergency. Emergency. Randing reports the—over his horizon. Huge—ip—reign manufacture. Almost spherical. Randing’s stopped. They got him I think. He said the ship was as big as a transport. Said it was headed my way. Neutrons—ont—gister—instruments. I think—is h—he’s coming over the horizon. It’s huge, and a war ship I think—register—instruments—neutrons.”

  Kendall’s finger stabbed out at a button. Instantly the noise of the other men, wakened abruptly by the mild shocks, came from behind. Kendall swung to the controls, and Cole raced back to the engine room. The hundred-foot ship shot suddenly forward under the thrust of her tail ion-rockets. A blue-red cloud formed slowly behind her and expanded. Talbot appeared, and silently took her over from Kendall. “Stations, men,” snapped Kendall. “Emergency call from a miner of Pluto reporting a large armed vessel which attacked them.” Kendall swung back, and eased himself against the thrusting acceleration of the overpowered little ship, toward the engine room. Cole was bending over his apparatus, making careful check-ups, closing weapon-circuits. No window gave view of space here; on the left was the tiny tender’s pocket, on the right, above and below the great water tanks that fed the ion-rockets, behind the rockets themselves. The tungsten metal walls were cold and gray under the ship lights; the hunched bulks of the apparatus crowded the tiny room. Gigantic racked accumulators huddled in the corners. Martin and Garnet swung into position in the fighting-tanks just ahead of the power rooms; Canning slid rapidly through the engine room, oozed through a tiny door, and took up his position in the stern-chamber, seated half-over the great ion-rocket sheath.

  “Ready in positions, Captain Kendall,” called the war-pilot as the little green lights appeared on his board.

  “Test discharges on maximum,” ordered Kendall. He turned to Cole. “You start the automatic key?”

  “Right, Captain.”

  “All shipshape?”

  “Right as can be. Accumulators at thirty-seven per cent, thanks to the loaf out here. They ought to pick up our signal back on Jupiter, he’s nearest now. The station on Europa will get it.”

  “Talbot—we are only to investigate if the ship is as reported. Have you seen any signs of her?”

  “No sir, and the signals are blank.”

  “I’ll work from here.” Kendall took his position at the commanding control. Cole made way for him, and moved to the power board. One by one he tested the automatic doors, the pressure bulkheads. Kendall watched the instruments as one after another of the weapons were tested on momentary full discharge—titanic flames of five million volt protons. Then the ship thudded to the chatter of the Garnell rifles.

  Tensely the men watched the planet ahead, white, yet barely visible in the weak sunlight so far out. It was swimming slowly nearer as the tiny ship gathered speed.

  Kendall cast a glance over his detector-instruments. The radio network was undisturbed, the magnetic and electric fields recognized only the slight disturbances occasioned by the planet itself. There was nothing, noth—

  Five hundred miles away, a gigantic ship came into instantane
ous being. Simultaneously, and instantaneously, the various detector systems howled their warnings. Kendall gasped as the thing appeared on his view screen, with the scale-lines below. The scale must be cockeyed. They said the ship was fifteen hundred feet in diameter, and two thousand long!

  “Retreat,” ordered Kendall, “at maximum acceleration.”

  Talbot was already acting. The gyroscopes hummed in their castings, and the motors creaked. The T-247 spun on her axis, and abruptly the acceleration built up as the ion-rockets began to shudder. A faint smell of “heat” began to creep out of the converter. Immense “weight” built up, and pressed the men into their specially designed seats—

  The gigantic ship across the way turned slowly, and seemed to stare at the T-247. Then it darted toward them at incredible speed till the poor little T-247 seemed to be standing still, as sailors say. The stranger was so gigantic now, the screens could not show all of him.

  “God, Buck—he’s going to take us!”

  Simultaneously, the T-247 rolled, and from her broke every possible stream of destruction. The ion-rocket flames swirled abruptly toward her, the proton-guns whined their song of death in their housings, and the heavy pounding shudder of the Garnell guns racked the ship.

  Strangely, Kendall suddenly noticed, there was a stillness in the ship. The guns and the rays were still going—but the little human sounds seemed abruptly gone.

  “Talbot—Garnet—” Only silence answered him. Cole looked across at him in sudden white-faced amazement.

  “They’re gone—” gasped Cole.

  Kendall stood paralyzed for thirty seconds. Then suddenly he seemed to come to life. “Neutrons! Neutrons—and water tanks! Old Nichols was right—” He turned to his friend. “Cole—the tender—quick.” He darted a glance at the screen. The giant ship still lay alongside. A wash of ions was curling around her, splitting, and passing on. The pinprick explosions of the Garnell shells dotted space around her—but never on her.