Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  I just watched. It sounded all right to me. Hume looked ashamed of himself. The rest of the boys clustered around the temperature gauges.

  “Try hold number twenty,” I said.

  Fuzzy threw over a lever and turned a valve quickly. There was a new confidence in the way he worked that was like a breath of cool air in the control room. Only there wasn’t any cool air in the control room. It was getting hotter. Seven pairs of eyes watched the needle, narrowed as it flickered, widened as it slid over the dial to two thousand plus.

  “Cut!” I cried.

  There was a dead silence. Someone said unnecessarily, “It likes carbon dioxide, too.”

  “I don’t understand it,” said the captain. “I’ve been loading mag on this run for eight years now.” He mopped his head. “I know all about it—specific gravity 1.75, boiling point 1100, melting point 632.7. But I guess no one ever thought I’d have to know how to put it out if it started to burn.”

  “And you never thought to look it up,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  I’d noticed that Hume had been sulking a little too silently in a corner after Fuzzy had shoved him there. He suddenly let out a yip and dove for the valves.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “That would-be over there,” Hume said, nodding toward Fuzzy, “barked up the wrong stump. I’ve got it! We’re safe! Look—when mag burns—when anything burns—it hooks up with oxygen—right? It burned the oxygen in the air. It burned the oxygen in water. It burned the oxygen in the CO2. But there ain’t no oxygen in nitrogen!”

  I turned it over gleefully and slapped him on the back. He and the captain got busy hooking up the nitrogen tanks to the hold pipelines. I called for No. 22. It took a little longer this time, due to Hume’s accidentally turning the water valve on instead of off when he had finished turning a whole set of wrong valves, so that the nitrogen, under pressure, backed up into the water tanks. But we got that straightened out and proceeded.

  Nothing happened. One of the stooges got hysterical and had to be locked in the storeroom. The needle wavered a little, went down twenty degrees, stayed there. In a few minutes it went up.

  “It used up all the nitrogen!” wailed the captain.

  Hume said, “Must have combined with it. Damn. That mag sure is hungry.” He looked at me as if I were a policeman and he were a little lost boy.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” I said. I glanced at the dials. More than half the mag cargo was either burning or ready to. I had a bright idea. “Dump the cargo!”

  The captain spread his hands. “Can’t. If the hatches are opened, the automatic relays will break the power beam. The ship can’t take off, operate, or anything else with the hatches open.”

  “Oh,” I started walking up and down. I took off my shirt. Everyone else already had. Some had gone further than that. These automatic controls might have some good points, but—boy, oh, boy! when they started working against you!

  I whirled on the captain. “What about the lifeboats?”

  He looked up hopefully and then shook his head. “There’s one forward and one aft. But they’re both aft of here; we’re right up in the nose now. The impenetron shields have locked us in. There’s an escape hatch here, but—no, the lifeboat locks can only be opened from the inside. We couldn’t get to the boats if we went out in spacesuits.”

  Hume got excited then. “How about those spacesuits?” he rapped out. “When it gets too hot in here, couldn’t we cling to the hull in suits until the ship docks?”

  We streamed into the storeroom. On each of the space helmets was a tag describing the air, water, and food rations for each suit. Enough for eight days. We wouldn’t be in for another two weeks. We went back to the control room and sat down. The stooge who had been locked in came out with us, much chastened. It got hotter.

  ~ * ~

  Four days later we were a sorry-looking lot. No one had spoken for twelve hours. We’d thrown away all our clothing with metal fasteners, all rings, wrist chronometers, and radios, because the metal was too hot to bear. The refrigerator in the storeroom had afforded some relief until it broke down. We were in a bad way. And one by one the crew started to crack. Hume began to giggle quietly to himself, on and on and on. Fuzzy lay still like some great hairy animal, panting silently. The captain sat unmoving, with an insanely complacent smirk on his excuse for a face. No one dared move or speak because of the agonizing impact of the hot air on their bare flesh when they did so. There was no relief, no help for it. By now the sodium cargo was molten, the mag burning wherever it could find air—and it found air every time it got a bulkhead hot enough to work on it. The bulkheads weren’t built for that sort of thing. They could take any kind of hammering when they were fairly cool, but that damn alloy couldn’t take it when it got much over a thousand degrees. The hull resisted nicely enough, more’s the pity. We’d have been happy to see the mag burn its way through into space.

  No one noticed the faint rumbling sound any more, once we had doped it out as merely the opening up of new bulkheads, feeding more air and more mag to the voracious fire. But all of us started weakly at the tremendous shuddering crash that echoed suddenly through the ship. The captain began to laugh crazily. We looked at him numbly.

  “She’s still working,” he whispered hoarsely. “And that finishes us. The ship was getting off balance. The automatic equalizing chutes just opened. All the mag on the port side’s open to the fire now.” He waved weakly at the temperature board. Every needle on it had begun to climb.

  Hume said something that made my flesh creep. “I wish I had the guts to kill myself.”

  ~ * ~

  Another two days. The crew sprawled around, asleep or unconscious or dead. I came to for a little while, I remember, because I started coughing weakly. Hume, in a last effort to accomplish something, had opened a water valve he’d discovered in the storeroom, thinking it would cool us off. It puffed into steam where it touched metal, and the air was full of it. Somehow someone else—Fuzzy, I think—managed to turn it off.

  Then there was a time when someone began shaking me and shaking me. I didn’t see how I could be alive, but I must have been because I felt the heat again. It was Hume. He had lost about thirty pounds. He had a red beard. Red eyes.

  “ Whassamarrer ?”

  “The gauges! They’re . . . they’re going down!”

  I lay there for a long time, not able to react. He crouched over me, a thin line of moisture creeping out of the corner of his mouth.

  “The holds are cooling down!” he said again, and began shaking me.

  I sat up, blinked at the board. It took quite a while for me to focus my eyes, but when I saw he was right I somehow found the energy to get my feet under me, climb upright.

  It was unbelievable, it was past all hope, but it was true! Hume started giggling again, and this time it didn’t annoy me because I giggled too.

  “The mag,” he said. “You see? Why’n hell didn’t we think of that before? Mag’s a good conductor. When the ship equalized herself, the rest of the mag smashed down on what was burning, soaked up heat, distributed it so much that it lowered the temperature below kindling point!”

  “Throw another log on the fire,” I crooned, “an’ the fire goes out!” And then the rest of it occurred to me.

  “Th’ sodium!” I said. “See what happened? It dumped onto the hot mag, vaporized. The vapor conducted the heat to the ship’s hull. She’s radiating it off! If it wasn’t for that, the temperature would just get to a certain point and stay there, and we’d have gotten roasted anyway, fire or no fire!”

  We hugged each other gleefully and then started working on the rest of the crew.

  ~ * ~

  “Well, that’s all there is to it. We rode in to Titan on the super-efficient wreck. We were all of us more dead than alive, but what the hell —as long as there was life enough left to bring back.” The second officer of the new passenger liner stood up and stretched himself.
<
br />   “So they restored the office of chem super?”

  “Yep. But now those boys really know their stuff. Man—you ought to see the examinations they have to pass to get that kind of money for doing nothing! I’d sooner work for pay all along the line than work for nothing trying to learn that much about a job I might flunk out of anyway.”

  “Just a second,” I said. “A couple of things I’d like to know. What happened to Hume and Fuzzy?”

  “Both got the jobs they wanted. You’d be surprised how hard they studied their chemistry!”

  “Not under those circumstances I wouldn’t,” I said. “Er . . . one thing I don’t understand. You said that the ship was thrown off balance when one half of the mag cargo was ignited. How come? Where’d the weight come from?”

  The second officer fastened his collar. “Very shrewd of you, my lad. Can you keep something to yourself?”

  “I can try.”

  He sat down again and put his head close. “The Maggie Northern didn’t put her own fire out. I did.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. Now wait a minute—don’t go giving me credit for it. I turned plumb yellow. I got hysterical. I couldn’t stand to see those boys gasping out their lives for days on end. Most of all, I guess, I couldn’t stand the idea of dying that way myself. That ‘log on the fire’ business was my idea. If half the cargo would burn and kill us slowly, I assumed that if the whole cargo burned we’d die fast. I dumped the rest of the cargo on the fire. Maybe some of them saw me, but no one noticed. Well, it turned the trick, and it wasn’t the kind of thing I’d bring out at the inquest if nobody else did.”

  “Completely automatic,” I murmured. “I’ve sure changed my opinion about these useless jobs. You guys can get along swell without brains!”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Nelson S. Bond

  THE DAY WE CELEBRATE

  Uranus, nine and a half times as far from the Sun as Earth, is a planet with gravity nearly the same as Earth’s—eight per cent less— even though its diameter is roughly four times as great. This means that its density is very much less than Earth’s. However, in view of its estimated surface temperature (-300°F), most of its gases will certainly be frozen solid enough to form a crust upon which man could exist—always provided that our insulating materials and methods are by then much more perfect than anything now available.

  This story imagines a native life form which is definitely humanoid, though obviously unlike ourselves in many respects. What the humans on Uranus, with their atomic energy, their fire power, and their arrogance, do to these natives makes for a wryly satirical study of colonial administration under unprecedented conditions.

  ~ * ~

  IT HAD snowed yesterday and the day before. It was snowing now. It would snow again tomorrow and the next day.

  “—and the day after that,” said Baldy Harrigan, warden of Penal Colony No. 1, Uranus, “and the day after that, and the day after that! And so on. Ad infinooty.”

  He turned disgustedly from the quartzite view pane. There was nothing to see outside there but rolling dunes of frozen carbon dioxide, rime-crusted hills of raw metal, and a tempest of white granules sifting endlessly out of a dull and sullen sky.

  Beside him, his companion, Rusty Peters—once an inmate of P. C. 1, then a trusty, now, by choice, Baldy’s chief assistant—crammed another fistful of scrap into an already bulging jowl.

  “Odd which?”

  “Infinooty,” repeated Harrigan. “That’s Latin for, ‘till it gives you the screaming meemies.’ Don’t it never do nothing but snow on this here lousy planet?”

  “Sometimes,” consoled Rusty, “it sleets. Gee, what the hell, Baldy! We ain’t got no squawk. It’s safe an’ warm here in the dome, anyway. S’posin’ we lived in caverns, like the natives? They’ve really got it tough.”

  Baldy Harrigan’s space-faded eyes crackled.

  “The tougher,” he snarled, “the better! Them green scuts give me a headache in the sitting-down place. We could be hearing music and seeing pictures from New Oslo except for them. Something to pass the time away.

  “But, no! They pick a season like this to smash up our outside aerials. Which means that all we get in the line of entertainment is coded weather reports and flight transfer orders.

  “Just wait! The first clear spell comes along, I’m going to take out an expedition and give them dead pans what-for! Somebody ought to ‘a* done it long ago, anyhow—”

  “Don’t look now,” said Rusty, “but it’s been tried. Not once or twice, but about six million times. The Patrol’s been warrin’ on the Uranians ever since the first flight ship dropped gravs here. So what? So they still ain’t managed to squelch ‘em. The natives is still makin’ periodic attacks on the Earth colonies.

  “For which,” he added pensively, “I don’t know as I blame ‘em much. After all, Uranus was their planet. Till we come along. An’ the Patrol ain’t exactly what you might call no debatin’ team. Its missionary method is bang-bang! with a rotor gun, an’ you’re civilized. R.I.P.”

  “The Solar Space Patrol—” began Harrigan stiffly.

  “Yeah, I know. It brang order out o’ chaos. Or so the buttons on the unyform say. Nuts, Baldy! The Rocketeers ain’t no diff’rent from any other bunch of conquerors. They do just what England done in India, Holland done in the Pacific, an’ the States done in the Philippines. ‘Underneath the starry flag, civilize ‘em with a Krag’—an’ so on!”

  Rusty grunted, scanned the metal-walled antechamber hopefully with his eyes, and dropped a quivering arc of brown liquid dead center into a distant gobboon.

  “Nevertheless—” said Baldy.

  “The Uranians are pests,” admitted Rusty. “They git in our hair. They raid our outposts an’ bust up our vallybul equipment an’ when they can git gunpowder—which ain’t often—they even attack domed cities like New Oslo.

  “But why do we hafta be so rough with ‘em? Why not call a big conference an’ parley our diff’rences? That would be better’n formin’ parties to blast ‘em out of existence.”

  “Nevertheless,” repeated Baldy, “and howsomever—”

  “Hey!” said Rusty. “What’s up?”

  The intercommunicating visiplate on the far wall of the chamber had brightened. The face of Tommy Henderson, the Penal Colony’s radioman, was imaged on the gleaming platter.

  “Warden Harrigan?”

  “Yes.”

  “An important message from Patrol H.Q.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s a G. O. signed by Colonel Cochrane, commanding Interplanetary Division 134. It says, ‘The governing council of the Planetary Union, in congress assembled, has decided to finally achieve a solution of the Uranian problem—’”

  “Hold it!” snapped Baldy. He stared at his copper-thatched associate. “I and you must be psychic! Just what we was talking about. We’ll be right there, Sparks!”

  This last was over his shoulder to the visiplate as he tugged at Baldy’s elbow, his walk breaking into a waddling run. The radioman’s puzzled face faded from the plate as the two men hurried through the dome to the communications room.

  There, a few moments later, they saw the message in its entirety. It was, as Sparks had said, from the commander of the New Oslo garrison.

  “ ‘The governing council of the Planetary Union,’ it ran, ‘in congress assembled, has decided to finally achieve a solution of the Uranian problem.

  “ ‘This is to be done immediately, in order that the date of accomplishment may coincide with the date of tomorrow—a holiday observed and respected by all Earthmen.

  ‘“The present order supersedes all former orders or combat plans. Upon receiving this message, the commanders of all outposts will rendezvous instantly to this base for more, and definite, instructions—’

  “And so on, and so on,” concluded Baldy. He looked at Peters with something like awe in his eyes. “Commanders!” he said. “Commanders of all o
utposts! Hey . . . that’s me!”

  But even more dazed was his companion. Rusty’s jaw had dropped perilously agape.

  “Ain’t that a whipper!” whispered Rusty. “ ‘Achieve a solution o’ the ‘Ranie problem.’ Kickin’ overboard all the old combat plans. An’ all because of a date. What date?”

  Baldy said curtly, “Don’t look at me. I lost track of time something like nine years ago. Who gives a damn what Earth date it is on a planet which takes eighty-four years to swing around the Sun? The main thing is, there’s going to be something done. At last. And me, I’m in on it. I’ve got to get to— Hey, Sparks!”

  “Yessir?”

  “Get Hogan in the lock room. Tell him to get me out a bulger, check and fuel a motosled, and call a driver. I’ve got to get to New Oslo, and fast!”