Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  Rusty hurried to the lock chamber. Johnson, Bridges, and Howe stumbled in from outside, stomping powdery snow from their thick-soled antigrav boots. Rusty, heedless of biting cold metal, impatiently helped Johnson off with his bulger.

  “You find ‘em?” he demanded.

  Johnson grunted.

  “If we didn’t, that’s the D.T.s chasing up across the valley. Like you said, they took out after us. They’ll be here before you can say ‘Andromeda.’ “

  “Nice work!” enthused Rusty. “All right, Hogan—you know what to do next.”

  Hogan looked grave. He looked doubtful, too.

  “Rusty, we’ve got a couple of rotor guns mounted on the topside turret. Don’t you think it’d be a good idea to give ‘em a couple of blasts, just to prove we won’t stand for no monkey business—”

  “That’ll do! I’m in command here. You do what I said. The ideer o’ this whole shindig is to solve the ‘Ranie problem for all time, ain’t it? Well, we ain’t gonna do that by bumpin’ off a handful of them an’ lettin’ the rest get away.

  “This is gonna be the end of our troubles. The end which was wanted by the Council when they decided on this day for a settlement—All right, boys! Everything out o’ the lock chamber. It’s gonna be cold in here when we let them gates open. Cold an’ smelly.”

  Johnson, who had not heard this much of the plan before, gulped his dismay.

  “You . . . you mean you’re gonna let them come right into the dome? Invade us?”

  “That’s the general ideer,” said Rusty jovially.

  “But they’ll massacree us!”

  “Mebbe. I think not. We’re prepared for them.” Rusty chuckled tautly. “Wait till you get a look at our fust line o’ defense. The auditorium. They got a big su’prise comin’ to them, boy. Okay, Hogan. Open the lock!”

  Hogan sighed. But his hand pressed a lever. The Earthmen fled from an exposed chamber as the gigantic airlock swung open invitingly.

  ~ * ~

  Baldy Harrigan tapped his driver on the shoulder.

  “Look, pal,” he pleaded, “can’t you get another hunk of speed out this crate?”

  The driver said, “Have to stay in formation, warden. Colonel’s orders.”

  Baldy relaxed. Physically, that is. He threw himself back against the cushions, forcing his body to sit still. But his mind was aflame with anxiety.

  Not too swiftly had the colonel accepted his opinion as to where the Uranians had gone. With the calm, unhurried precision of the trained Patrolman, he had insisted that the Scar Mountain refuge be searched thoroughly. Which resulted in nothing more than lost time— for the caverns were deserted.

  Thus, hours had passed since Baldy’s warning that the ‘Ranies had marched on P. C. 1. And now, belatedly, the companies were hurrying to the relief of what Baldy feared might be, by now, a desperately besieged post.

  There was only one good thing about it. P. C. 1 was not far away. A half-hour’s run—and the thirty minutes had now nearly slipped beneath the motosled’s gliders. Harrigan peered once more, and with feverish intensity, toward the dome which should soon loom through the white murk.

  “There it is!” he cried.

  The columns had spotted the prison; were swinging in a great arc to take positions before the ground lock. As his sled moved into its alloted post, Baldy squinted—and groaned.

  “The lock! It’s open!”

  Then suddenly the motosled was at rest and Harrigan was throwing himself from it, stumbling, slipping, racing awkwardly across the ground to the commander’s sled.

  “The ground lock’s open, Colonel! They’ve busted in!”

  “I see that.” Cochrane’s face was grim. He rapped swift commands to his aides. “But, at any rate, we have them trapped now, Harrigan. If they’ve harmed any of your men, we will avenge—”

  But Harrigan wasn’t thinking of vengeance. He was thinking of Rusty. And of the dozens of others whom he’d left, yesterday, at P. C. i. Friends of his, all of the men—even though they were exiles from Earth, even though they were convicts and he was their warden.

  It seemed incredible that marauding ‘Ranies should have been able to force entry into the dome—but the proof lay before his eyes: the outer lock gate gaping wide. There was still a chance, though, that the ‘Ranies had not penetrated the secondary defense positions. There was another lock beyond this. Then the entire dome was so barred that a handful of men could defend themselves for hours against many times their number.

  Baldy was in the van as the three Patrol companies marched in formation to the open lock. His dismay deepened as he saw the interior of that antechamber. There was something radically wrong here! He had half expected to find in the lock evidences of a battle. Charred bodies of the ‘Ranie invaders, perhaps even the mangled remains of some of his own men.

  There was—nothing! Only mute evidence that the Uranians had marched into the dome. For inside here, where the gales could not heap their huge drifts of frozen carbon dioxide, there were footprints in the thin hoarfrost.

  And beyond?

  ~ * ~

  The relief party halted at the second lock. Baldy sprang to an audio unit, pressed its button with trembling fingers. Through its speaker emanated an echo of the tumult within the dome proper. And the Rocketeers heard that which can be, at times, the grimmest of all sounds—the sound of riotous laughter!

  Baldy’s cheeks were wet with unashamed tears.

  “They’ve won! The damned, murdering scoundrels have taken the dome! They’re in there torturing my men, gloating over it—”

  And Colonel Cochrane’s eyes were like bits of flint, his voice the rasp of a file on stone, as he snapped his grim command: “Make entry!”

  Fourscore angry, vengeful men of the Space Patrol swung into action as one. The massive lock door shook before their efforts. A steel ram, wielded by strong arms, croonged hollowly against the barrier, swung back, forward again. The audio speaker suddenly went dead as the laughter from within ended abruptly in frightened, curious cries. The voices of Uranians bellowed above the shouts of a few Earthlings. And then—

  “What the hell,” demanded an irate voice, “is going on out there!”

  The lock wheezed asthmatically, swung back. Pumps sucked the foul Uranian air from the outer chamber, replaced it with fresh, pure, artificial Earth atmosphere. And Baldy started as, before him in the lock, appeared the figure of his friend and assistant, Rusty Peters!

  “That’s a hell of a way,” roared Rusty aggrievedly, “to crash a party!”

  ~ * ~

  Once, when Baldy was a young space swab, still wet behind the ears, he had made the mistake of trying to pet an ampie. The jolt of electricity that had knocked him sprawling on that occasion was a mild tingle compared to that which he now experienced as his eyes sought and found the auditorium behind Rusty.

  The Uranians had invaded P. C. 1—yes! But how they had invaded the station was another thing. If this was war—if this was murderous onslaught—

  There was a huge table set in the middle of the hall. It was groaning like a festive board with every delicacy known to the storage bins of the Colony. Food galore, and drinks! And more drinks! And still more drinks!

  And about this banquet table, shoulder to shoulder in riotous amity, were the men of P. C. 1 and their Uranian enemies. The laughter that had chilled Baldy’s blood was not the gloating of fiends and ghouls— it was the gay and not too sober laughter of men and ‘Ranies having one hell of a good time!

  Here a ‘Ranie, his green-lipped slit-shaped mouth preposterously wide in a grin, attempted to eat the breast of a fried chicken and at the same time sing his joy. There an Earthman, weeping with mirth, related in high, intoxicated falsetto a joke that could, to his audience of polygamous Uranians, have seemed only mildly funny at best. Off in one corner a group of Uranians, confused but game, were trying to point their toneless voices to the harmony of a tune pounded on the piano by burly Don Larkin. And in another corner, a
Uranian warrior was solemnly displaying his prowess with the blade by slicing, in midair, sugar lumps tossed at him by a circle of admiring cons.

  Baldy stammered, “Wh-what . . . Rusty, I don’t get it! What’s it all about?”

  But Colonel Cochrane was an opportunist. His keen mind sized the situation at a glance, and his order was curt.

  “Nice work, Peters! Devilishly clever! Don’t know how you did it, but you did! All right, men—grab the Uranians! Clap them in irons!”

  “Waaaait a minute!” It was Rusty Peters’s turn to look stunned. He barred the entrance as a group of Patrolmen leaped forward. “Grab them? Clap them in irons? Why?”

  “That’s all right, Peters. You can relax now. I’ll take over. We’ll find out which of them is Ras Tirl, beat the warlike ideas out of his head, and—”

  “But, dammit!” exploded Rusty, “you don’t have to beat nothin’ out o’ nobody! This here’s Ras Tirl! Hey, Ras! C’mere’n meet the boss o’ the Space Patrol. Ras,” he added to the shocked colonel, “is a great guy. Him an’ me’s old pals now.”

  The outlaw chieftain ambled forward. Seven feet of brute strength surmounted by a foolish grin. Ras Tirl was a little bit drunk. He was also, it developed, a little bit on the amative side. He said, “Um frens Rusty, um frens Ras. Hokay. Murkissumuss!” He tried to kiss the colonel. The colonel backed away. Ras Tirl, still grinning, fell forward onto Baldy’s shoulder, held on for dear life.

  Rusty said, “See? It’s all fixed up, Colonel, just like the Council wanted. We got peace at last. I opened up the outer lock, let ‘em come in. Then I shot ‘em a big dose of nitrous oxide; got ‘em feelin’ jovial. By the time they come out of it, me an’ the men had carted ‘em all into the banquet hall. Made a couple friendly speeches, told ‘em from now on we was all buddies.

  “They went for it like homeless pups. For years us Earthmen been pushin’ ‘em around, scarin’ ‘em, chasin’ ‘em, never givin’ ‘em a break. They almost wep’ with joy. An’ when they got their paws on that good food—the best they ever et in their lives—

  “Well, anyhow, Ras give me his pledge that from now on his people’d keep peace with Earthmen. An’ anybody will tell you that one thing a ‘Ranie never does is go back on his word of honor. So—peace is here. And I’m sorry I misjudged the Patrol, Colonel. Only yesterday I was tellin’ Baldy the S. S. P. was a pack of bullies. I was wrong. It took kind hearts an’ good guys to think up the ideer of makin’ peace with the ‘Ranies on this particular date. Hadn’t it been for that fact, I’d of never thought of the ideer—”

  “Day?” said Baldy. “What the blue blazes has the date got to do with it?”

  “Yes, Peters,” chimed in Colonel Cochrane. “Just why should you decide to adopt this successful but peaceful plan of operations on—of all days—Empire Day?”

  Rusty’s jaw sagged.

  “Em-empire Day?”

  “Why, yes. You knew, of course, that—”

  “Omigawd! Empire Day!” Rusty put his head in his hands, wagged it violently back and forth. “How the hell should I know! I done all this because I ... I thought today was Chris’mas!”

  He stared at Baldy dazedly. Ras Tirl, head cradled on Baldy’s shoulder, opened his eyes and muttered, “Murkissmus!” and went back to sleep again. Baldy looked at the colonel. It seemed he should say something. He had to say something. He found the right words at last. He said:

  “Colonel . . . suppose we all have a drink—”

  Which wasn’t a bad idea, at that.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Margaret St. Clair

  THE PILLOWS

  Here is a really sinister “life” form, found only on Triton, one of the two known moons of distant Neptune. The object lesson is clear: Outside the atmosphere of our own Earth, everything is unknown? nothing can be taken at its face value. Some interesting parallels can be drawn between man’s blithe acceptance of the “pillows” and his comfortable reliance on machinery, as described in “Completely Automatic.” In other words, in space the watchword must always be—”Vigilance!”

  ~ * ~

  “THEY’RE lucky,” McTeague said with emphasis. “I told Thelma— she’s secretary to one of the big shots in the company—they ought to bring that out more in the advertising, stress it, like, and she said nobody had ever written in about it. People just buy the pillows for novelties, and once in a while to keep their hands warm.

  “But anybody that works around the pillows knows that they’re the luckiest damn’ things in the Universe. Look at me. Before I got this job with Interplanetary Novelties, I’d just spent three months in the hospital with a fractured pelvis. Lolli and I were quarreling all the time, and I was sure she was planning to leave me. I just got out of the hospital when Lottie, that’s our kid, came home from school with a stiff neck and a sore throat, and two days later the clinician said it was almost certain to be infantile paralysis, the third type. They’ve never found a cure for that. That really broke me up. I spent most of the first leg of the trip taking soma and trying not to think about things.

  “Listen, when we hit Aphrodition there was a ‘gram from Lolli telling me not to worry, Lottie was better and it seemed to be type one after all. Lottie was all over it in a month, and she’s never been sick, not even the sniffles, since. For that matter, none of us have. I don’t even cut myself or get hangovers any more. And Lolli and I get along like—like a couple of Venusian quohogs.”

  “Then you think the pillows aren’t fakes?” Kent asked. They were two days out from Terra, on board the Tryphe, traveling at one sixtieth the velocity of light. He leaned back in his bunk and drew deeply on the tube of cocohol-cured tobacco.

  “Fakes? How do you mean, fakes? I know they’re lucky—ask anyone on the ship—and I know they stay hot. Lottie’s had one I brought her from Triton, on that first voyage out to Neptune’s moon, sitting on the shelf in her bedroom ever since, and it’s still as hot as it was when I dug it out.”

  Kent sighed. He rumpled up his blond hair and frowned. Here it was again, the evidence, so utterly at variance with what he’d been able to get in the laboratory. Stick a thermometer near one of the pillows, and it registered forty-four degrees Celsius at first, then showed a very gradual cooling until the pillow reached room temperature, where it remained. And yet everyone who’d ever handled a pillow or bought one at a novelty store knew they stayed hot.

  “Maybe there’s some kind of gimmick in it,” he suggested, “something like those Mexican jumping beans my grandfather used to tell me about. Or maybe it’s something the company rigged up, a little atomic motor, say.”

  McTeague snorted. “Anytime you can make an atomic motor to sell for six bits,” he said, “let me know. I’ll buy ‘em up, sell ‘em on the open market for five dollars, and become a millionaire. I never heard of Mexican jumping beans before, so for all I know they’re the same sort of thing. All I know is, you dig the pillows up out of the rock on Triton, which the long-hairs say is probably the coldest spot in the known universe, and they’re hot, nice and hot. You can dig up some in a few days and see for yourself.”

  “How do you locate them?”

  “Oh, we’ve got a darkside Mercurian hexapod. He hates hunting them. Sits down and shivers when he finds a colony. That’s how we know where to dig.”

  “What do you use to dig with?”

  “Atom blast, special design.”

  “Ever damage the pillows with it?”

  “Naw, you have to train one right on them for about fifteen minutes to make a dent in them. They’re not only hot, and lucky—they’re tough.”

  Kent was thoughtful. “You know, that’s really remarkable.”

  “Hell, they’re just novelties.” McTeague spat into the incinerator, reached for the cards, and began to lay out an elaborate three-deck solitaire. Kent went on thinking.

  It was that attitude, that “hell, they’re just novelties,” that had made him decide to spend his vacation working f
or the Interplanetary Novelty Company. He’d brought four or five of the pillows (they were a couple of inches in diameter—about the size of sand dollars—and black and puffy) into the laboratory and thrown a bunch of experiments at them; his fellow workers had kidded him both ways from the abscissa, and Dr. Roberts had called him into the office and told him gently that he really wasn’t employed to investigate—ah—children’s toys, and that there was a group of very interesting experiments he’d like him to try on the low radioactives. So now he was an A.B.S. on the S.S. Tryphe, bound for Triton.

  “Anything else on Triton?” he asked.