Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  After a couple of weeks of this kind of life I began to wonder about the stories I had read, and what happened to all the glamour and adventure the space service was steeped in. I even went so far as to ask Hume about it. He thought it was very funny.

  “That whiffed out with the power beams,” he told me. “There wouldn’t be anyone aboard these ships if it weren’t for the fact that someone has to keep the chrome clean and the books up to date. Then, of course, there are emergencies.”

  “What?” I asked hopefully.

  “Oh—I dunno. I never heard of any. But just in case some of the machinery turned out not to be fool-proof, which has never happened so far, or in case something happened to the ship—”

  “But what could happen?”

  “Well—aw, why worry about it ? Nothing ever has. If it did, it would happen so quickly we’d never know about it, or the ship would take care of itself so fast that by the time we realized there was an emergency, it would be past history.” He sat down on the mess-room table and put his feet on the bench. “Look, kid, I might as well wise you up. This is no kind of a life for a human being. If any of us were worth a damn in any trade at all, we wouldn’t be here. If the Board members weren’t as worthless as we are, they’d build ships without crew’s quarters. If you have any gumption, you’ll get off as soon as we get back to Terra, and go back to raising castor beans or whatever else it was you were doing before you shipped aboard this mud hen. If you have no gumption, you’ll stay here with the rest of us bums and pray that the world in general and the Space Commerce Board in particular doesn’t get hep to what soft, soft cushions a space tradition has shoved under our fat—”

  Crash!

  It wasn’t a loud noise, and it wasn’t much of a lurch, but both were so utterly unexpected that we found ourselves thrown very hard and very flat.

  Hume looked at me blankly. The lights went out, flashed on again as an automatic emergency circuit snapped in. He said in a weak voice, “Well, there’s your emergency!” and fainted away.

  A voice I had never heard before said sharply, through the speakers, “Emergency! Stand by!” I rightly assumed that this, too, was an automatic alarm. I shook Hume until he sat up.

  “What do we do now?” I snapped at him. I rather think I was a little panicky.

  “I only work here,” he said with a sickly attempt at levity. There were voices in the alleyway outside. We drifted out there. It was the captain and two of the spacemen.

  “How should I know? Who do you think I am—Plotnick?”

  “Who’s Plotnick?” asked one of the stooges. The fact that Plotnick had invented the power beam that Martin had adapted to interstellar commerce was just another of those things that those guys never got around to learning.

  “Plotnick’s dead,” said the other stooge brightly.

  “The captain ain’t dead,” said the first stooge even more brightly.

  “Oh, go on back to bed,” said the captain pettishly. “Something happened. I don’t know what it was. It’ll be fixed when we get to Titan. Pass the word.”

  There was no necessity for that since the whole crew was there by that time. Those not on watch went back to bed. Yeah—back to bed, in the most desperate emergency any of them were ever destined to live through.

  ~ * ~

  I went on watch two hours later. I hadn’t slept very well. Breathing was hard, and my heart was racing violently. I dozed fitfully, not realizing what the trouble was until the sting of sweat got into my eyes and I came awake. Just then Fuzzy came in to call me.

  “One bell, lug,” he said. His usual shirt and dungarees had given way to a pair of underwear shorts, and he, too, was sweating profusely. What jolted me more than anything else was his voice. It had been a deep gas-on-the-stomach bass. Now it was a quavering tenor-baritone.

  “Comin’ up,” I said, and rolled out. We stared at each other curiously. My voice had positively pip-squeaked. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and went out. I noticed he was panting.

  There was a red light blinking over the door. I’d never noticed it before. Somewhere an alarm siren began wailing. I didn’t know what that meant, either. I rolled out and headed for the mess room. They were all there. Everyone looked worried except the captain. He just looked unhappy. They were all asking him what had happened, what was happening. I gathered that everyone was having trouble breathing, and I know everyone’s voice sounded like a recording speeded up three hundred per cent.

  It was hot as hell.

  Came that throat-clearing sound from the annunciators. Everyone shut up. Here at last was the blessed voice of authority. “Air pressure falling,” it said. “All hands into spacesuits. Look for leaks.”

  We looked at one another stupidly. No one had the slightest idea where a spacesuit might be found.

  There was a whir and click from the alleyway. Someone looked out and reported, “An impenetron shield’s blocked us off from the rest of the crew’s quarters, Cap.”

  “My word,” said the captain.

  “My cigarettes,” said Fuzzy.

  The captain started forward. We followed because there was nothing else for us to do. When we got to the control room another shield dropped quietly behind us.

  “No more mess room,” said Fuzzy sadly.

  “Yeah. No more eats,” said one of the stooges.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny about this,” I said. I was scared. I was more scared than I ever even heard of anyone being. I was wishing I was working in the mines instead of this. I was wishing I was home in bed.

  “There isn’t anything funny about this,” said the captain worriedly. He began fumbling a door open. We trailed in.

  Thank heavens the captain knew something about the ship. The room was lined with case upon case of supplies—food, weapons, coils of wire, masses of spare apparatus that none of us knew anything about. But we knew cases of food when we saw them. There was even a roomy refrigerator there for storage. Also—eight spacesuits. Spares.

  The captain checked our rush for them. “The air’s all right here,” he said. “Those automatic gates must have cut off the sections where the leaks were. We’ll just have to make ourselves comfortable here.”

  “Yeah,” said one of the stooges. “No beds. Where am I gonna sleep?”

  There was a babel over that childish question. I drew Hume aside. He was no gem, but he seemed a little more intelligent than the rest of them. “What’s this all about?”

  He scratched his ear. “I dunno.”

  That seemed to be a reflex with these boys—”I dunno.” “I guess we hit something—or something hit us.”

  “That would account for the loss of pressure,” I said, “but what about the heat?” He began to speak; I stopped him. “Don’t say, ‘I dunno.’ Think, for a change!”

  It was a new idea for Hume. He turned it over for a minute and then came out with, “Why should I worry about it? The ship can take care of us till we get to Titan, and then the repair crews can worry about it.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, sore. “Go on, worm, spin yourself a cocoon. Me, I’ll do my worrying now. That heat isn’t coming from just nothing. Seems to me if we were just punctured it’d be getting cold here, not hot. But—you ain’t worried. So go ahead. Be happy.” I walked away.

  He stared after me for a second and then shrugged and started looking for a place to bunk. Twice, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him stop and stare at me. He seemed to be going through pangs of some sort. I had a hunch what it was. The birth of thought. The stirring of an awakening intellect. It isn’t surprising. Brains atrophy when they’re not used, same as arms or legs. Boy, he was a case.

  It got hotter.

  I went to the captain about it. He actually seemed to be listening to everything I had to say. He nodded sagely every time I paused for breath. I was a little more than annoyed when I realized that he was nodding because he didn’t understand a word of what I was saying. In some kind of desperation I asked him if
there was, by any chance, a manual aboard, describing the ship and its equipment. When I had finished he went right on nodding his head, realized I had asked him a direct question, and stopped, not knowing what to do with his little head. Not use it to think with, certainly. He was another. The things that happen in the name of civilization! Some people would call this kind of ship progress. I was calling it poison.

  “Yes,” he said uncertainly, “there ought to be some such thing around.” He began fumbling through the stores. I had to keep on his tail or he’d have forgotten what it was he was looking for. “Don’t know what you want it for. Can’t imagine. Terribly dull reading,” he kept muttering. Suddenly he came across a box of books. He pulled one out, looked at it—the son of a gun could read, apparently—and exclaimed, “Now here is something!” He handed it to me. It was a trilogy of romantic novels.

  “What the hell’s this for?”

  “One of the finest books I ever read,” he said in a let-me-be-a-sister-to-you tone.

  I threw it at his head, tipped the books out. The manual was there, all right. It was a thick volume, very efficient-looking. It was. It was streamlined. It consisted of column after column, page after page, of figures and letters and dozens of symbols I’d never heard of. I couldn’t understand a letter of it. In the foreward it said something about a key. Apparently there was a twenty- or thirty-volume key somewhere which gave the definitions of all that spaghetti. There was, the captain informed me—in the after magazine.

  The after magazine was closed off by those precious automatic gates.

  I groaned and took myself and my manual off into a corner. Somewhere in that book must be what I was looking for—instructions on how to proceed when your ship seems to be burning up. I raised my head. Burning up ? If something was burning—

  But what could be burning? The ship was all steel and impenetron. The cargo—magnesium. Sodium!

  I almost let out a shout, but I hadn’t the heart to disturb all those happy, stupid, unworried drifters. What good would it do them to know what the trouble was? They wouldn’t know what to do about it if I did tell them.

  No one got in my way as I circulated around the control chambers, staring at the maze of dials and indicators banked around the walls. The ship’s designers had had a shot of the interior decorator’s virus mixed in with their blood, it seemed to me. There were more damn concealed closets and sliding panels than a dope addict could dream up. It was mostly by accident that I found what I was looking for—a panel studded with tiny centigrade dials, with a monel plate at the top bearing the inscription “Cargo Temperatures.”

  Now the Maggie Northern had seventy-six holds of various sizes. Our cargo was about one-sixth sodium, the rest mag. According to the dials—and there was no reason why they should lie about it—fourteen of the mag holds were at temperatures ranging from nine to eleven hundred-odd degrees. Fourteen of them, all on the starboard bilge. That was all I wanted to know. I called the captain over. He peered owlishly at the dials,

  “There’s your trouble,” I said with the air of a man completing a very complicated card trick. He nodded and looked at me as if he expected me to say something else.

  “Well, what’s the matter with you?” I roared. “The mag’s afire! We hit something—sideswiped it! The frictional heat raised the mag to its kindling temperature; there was a residue of air in the holds; the mag started to burn, softened the bulkheads, and the air pressure from alleyways and living quarters and other holds caved them in and fed more air to the burning mag!”

  The captain shook his head in wonderment. “You certainly seem to have doped it out,” he said admiringly.

  I stared at him, unable to believe my own eyes and ears. “What’s the matter with you?” I screamed. By this time the rest of them were gathered around us, looking like a flock of sheep just over the hill from blasting operations. “Radio in to Titan! Find out what to do about it!”

  The captain looked about him blankly. “What’s the use? The ship’s duplicate indicator board has already told the Titans all about it. I can’t imagine why they haven’t already let us hear from them.”

  “Try it,” I gritted.

  “Why?” he said.

  I plowed into him. I only got a couple of good ones in before Hume and Fuzzy piled on me and held me down. The captain ran into the storeroom and shut the door.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said Hume amazedly.

  I said something like “Ugh!” and shrugged loose.

  Fuzzy’s ape face was disgustingly slack. Those guys didn’t have the guts God gave a goose.

  I went over to what looked to me more like a visiscreen than anything else in the place. There was a switch beside it. I threw it. Nothing happened. “Where’s the receiver and transmitter?” I growled.

  One of the spacemen piped up. “That’s my station,” he said. “Starboard side, down below.”

  I had another look at the hold-temperature indicators. “Fused solid by this time,” I grunted. “You know anything about radio?”

  He shook his chowder head. So did everyone else. I felt like crying.

  Somebody had to do something. I couldn’t—I didn’t know anything. If only I had—aw, what’s the use! And then it was I had my bright idea. I turned to Hume.

  “Listen—didn’t you say you were chem controller aboard this ship?”

  He nodded.

  “Well—come on then—give. We got a fire aboard. Put it out!”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Oh.” He counted on his fingers in slow motion, which, I gathered, was his substitute for thought. Finally he came out with, “I don’t know how.”

  “You don’t know how.” I was going to get started on a long diatribe about how he ever got to be a chemical controller when he didn’t even know how to put a little fire out—a fire that would have us all well-done and tender a week before what was left of the ship reached Titan. I decided to try to be patient.

  “Look,” I said gently. “Unless something is done by somebody, and soon, you and you and you are going to be roasted alive in this pig. See? I don’t suppose you’ve noticed it, but it’s getting warm in here too, already. Look— Four more holds have gone. Okay. Sit around and tell each other some bedtime stories. Go on. Die. See if anyone cares. Wait until the air gets so hot in here you can’t breathe it. Watch your lazy ignorant flesh slough off when it starts to cook. It won’t be quick, you know. You’ll stay alive a long time. You have plenty to eat, plenty to drink. It’ll hurt some, but what do you care? You’re too damned comfortable to do anything about it.”

  The boys looked definitely sober. After a while Fuzzy spoke up. “Come on, Hume—can’t you think of something?”

  Hume had suddenly become very important to all of them. And I think the guy was really trying to come through. “We could put water on it,” he said finally.

  “This ain’t a house fire, you know,” I said.

  “So what?”

  “So—nothing,” I said in my ignorance. “Try it, anyway; try something.”

  We coaxed the captain out and explained what went on. It was all right with him. Anything was all right with him. He showed us the tank valves and the controls to the hold pipelines. Luckily they were very plainly labeled. Hume went to work on No. 14 hold. It wasn’t as hot as the others, according to the temperature readings. The hottest any of them got was around eleven hundred, for some reason. Fourteen was about eight hundred. That was the mean temperature for the hold; I gathered from that that it was part afire. After a lot of fumbling Hume got the vents into the tank open and the water turned on. We could spare the water—all those ships stored themselves with a safety factor of five. Council law.

  The hold had gotten fifty degrees hotter before Hume got the water in there. As soon as he turned his valve the needle bounced up to about two thousand and quivered there.

  “Turn it off!” I squawked. “That mag likes water. It likes it very much. Look at that!” I
pointed at the board. The next hold was getting hot.

  “Now what?” said Hume worriedly.

  Me, I didn’t know what to say. Fuzzy saved me the trouble.

  “Get out of the way,” he spat, suddenly very much alive. “You call yourself a chem super! I wasn’t far off when I got the idea I could push you out of that job! Let a man in there.” He slammed Hume aside, began to be very busy with the valves. “The setup’s perfect,” he said. “What’s in a fire extinguisher? Water? No, dope—carbon dioxide. We have a fire in an enclosed space—all we have to do to blank it is fill the hold with CO2! Cap—give me a hand.”