(1/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  "Don't think you've pulled the wool over my eyes, Effie," Hank went on with a screechy laugh, disregarding the other man completely. "Don't think I don't know why you're suddenly going to have a child after four long years."

  At that moment the cat came nosing up to his feet. Patrick watched him narrowly, shifting his weight forward a little, but Hank only kicked the animal aside without taking his eyes off them.

  "Even that business of carrying the wristwatch in your pocket instead of on your arm," he went on with channeled hysteria. "A neat bit of camouflage, Effie. Very neat. And telling me it was my child, when all the while you've been seeing him for months!"

  "Man, you're mad; I've not touched her!" Patrick denied hotly though still calculatingly, and risked a step forward, stopping when the gun instantly swung his way.

  "Pretending you were going to give me a healthy child," Hank raved on, "when all the while you knew it would be--either in body or germ plasm--a thing like that!"

  He waved his gun at the malformed cat, which had leaped to the top of the table and was eating the remains of Patrick's food, though its watchful green eyes were fixed on Hank.

  "I should shoot him down!" Hank yelled, between sobbing, chest-racking inhalations through the mask. "I should kill him this instant for the contaminated pariah he is!"

  All this while Effie had not ceased to smile compassionately. Now she stood up without haste and went to Patrick's side. Disregarding his warning, apprehensive glance, she put her arm lightly around him and faced her husband.

  "Then you'd be killing the bringer of the best news we've ever had," she said, and her voice was like a flood of some warm sweet liquor in that musty, hate-charged room. "Oh, Hank, forget your silly, wrong jealousy and listen to me. Patrick here has something wonderful to tell us."

  * * * * *

  Hank stared at her. For once he screamed no reply. It was obvious that he was seeing for the first time how beautiful she had become, and that the realization jolted him terribly.

  "What do you mean?" he finally asked unevenly, almost fearfully.

  "I mean that we no longer need to fear the dust," she said, and now her smile was radiant. "It never really did hurt people the way the doctors said it would. Remember how it was with me, Hank, the exposure I had and recovered from, although the doctors said I wouldn't at first--and without even losing my hair? Hank, those who were brave enough to stay outside, and who weren't killed by terror and suggestion and panic--they adapted to the dust. They changed, but they changed for the better. Everything--"

  "Effie, he told you lies!" Hank interrupted, but still in that same agitated, broken voice, cowed by her beauty.

  "Everything that grew or moved was purified," she went on ringingly. "You men going outside have never seen it, because you've never had eyes for it. You've been blinded to beauty, to life itself. And now all the power in the dust has gone and faded, anyway, burned itself out. That's true, isn't it?"

  She smiled at Patrick for confirmation. His face was strangely veiled, as if he were calculating obscure changes. He might have given a little nod; at any rate, Effie assumed that he did, for she turned back to her husband.

  "You see, Hank? We can all go out now. We need never fear the dust again. Patrick is a living proof of that," she continued triumphantly, standing straighter, holding him a little tighter. "Look at him. Not a scar or a sign, and he's been out in the dust for years. How could he be this way, if the dust hurt the brave? Oh, believe me, Hank! Believe what you see. Test it if you want. Test Patrick here."

  "Effie, you're all mixed up. You don't know--" Hank faltered, but without conviction of any sort.

  "Just test him," Effie repeated with utter confidence, ignoring--not even noticing--Patrick's warning nudge.

  "All right," Hank mumbled. He looked at the stranger dully. "Can you count?" he asked.

  Patrick's face was a complete enigma. Then he suddenly spoke, and his voice was like a fencer's foil--light, bright, alert, constantly playing, yet utterly on guard.

  "Can I count? Do you take me for a complete simpleton, man? Of course I can count!"

  "Then count yourself," Hank said, barely indicating the table.

  "Count myself, should I?" the other retorted with a quick facetious laugh. "Is this a kindergarten? But if you want me to, I'm willing." His voice was rapid. "I've two arms, and two legs, that's four. And ten fingers and ten toes--you'll take my word for them?--that's twenty-four. A head, twenty-five. And two eyes and a nose and a mouth--"

  "With this, I mean," Hank said heavily, advanced to the table, picked up the Geiger counter, switched it on, and handed it across the table to the other man.

  But while it was still an arm's length from Patrick, the clicks began to mount furiously, until they were like the chatter of a pigmy machine gun. Abruptly the clicks slowed, but that was only the counter shifting to a new scaling circuit, in which each click stood for 512 of the old ones.

  * * * * *

  With those horrid, rattling little volleys, fear cascaded into the room and filled it, smashing like so much colored glass all the bright barriers of words Effie had raised against it. For no dreams can stand against the Geiger counter, the Twentieth Century's mouthpiece of ultimate truth. It was as if the dust and all the terrors of the dust had incarnated themselves in one dread invading shape that said in words stronger than audible speech, "Those were illusions, whistles in the dark. This is reality, the dreary, pitiless reality of the Burrowing Years."

  Hank scuttled back to the wall. Through chattering teeth he babbled, "... enough radioactives ... kill a thousand men ... freak ... a freak ..." In his agitation he forgot for a moment to inhale through the respirator.

  Even Effie--taken off guard, all the fears that had been drilled into her twanging like piano wires--shrank from the skeletal-seeming shape beside her, held herself to it only by desperation.

  Patrick did it for her. He disengaged her arm and stepped briskly away. Then he whirled on them, smiling sardonically, and started to speak, but instead looked with distaste at the chattering Geiger counter he held between fingers and thumb.

  "Have we listened to this racket long enough?" he asked.

  Without waiting for an answer, he put down the instrument on the table. The cat hurried over to it curiously and the clicks began again to mount in a minor crescendo. Effie lunged for it frantically, switched it off, darted back.

  "That's right," Patrick said with another chilling smile. "You do well to cringe, for I'm death itself. Even in death I could kill you, like a snake." And with that his voice took on the tones of a circus barker. "Yes, I'm a freak, as the gentleman so wisely said. That's what one doctor who dared talk with me for a minute told me before he kicked me out. He couldn't tell me why, but somehow the dust doesn't kill me. Because I'm a freak, you see, just like the men who ate nails and walked on fire and ate arsenic and stuck themselves through with pins. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen--only not too close!--and examine the man the dust can't harm. Rappaccini's child, brought up to date; his embrace, death!

  "And now," he said, breathing heavily, "I'll get out and leave you in your damned lead cave."

  He started toward the window. Hank's gun followed him shakingly.

  "Wait!" Effie called in an agonized voice. He obeyed. She continued falteringly, "When we were together earlier, you didn't act as if ..."

  "When we were together earlier, I wanted what I wanted," he snarled at her. "You don't suppose I'm a bloody saint, do you?"

  "And all the beautiful things you told me?"

  "That," he said cruelly, "is just a line I've found that women fall for. They're all so bored and so starved for beauty--as they generally put it."

  "Even the garden?" Her question was barely audible through the sobs that threatened to suffocate her.

  He looked at her and perhaps his expression softened just a trifle.

  "What's outside," he said flatly, "is just a little worse than either of you can imagine." He tapped his tem
ple. "The garden's all here."

  "You've killed it," she wept. "You've killed it in me. You've both killed everything that's beautiful. But you're worse," she screamed at Patrick, "because he only killed beauty once, but you brought it to life just so you could kill it again. Oh, I can't stand it! I won't stand it!" And she began to scream.

  Patrick started toward her, but she broke off and whirled away from him to the window, her eyes crazy.

  "You've been lying to us," she cried. "The garden's there. I know it is. But you don't want to share it with anyone."

  "No, no, Euphemia," Patrick protested anxiously. "It's hell out there, believe me. I wouldn't lie to you about it."

  "Wouldn't lie to me!" she mocked. "Are you afraid, too?"

  With a sudden pull, she jerked open the window and stood before the blank green-tinged oblong of darkness that seemed to press into the room like a menacing, heavy, wind-urged curtain.

  At that Hank cried out a shocked, pleading, "Effie!"

  She ignored him. "I can't be cooped up here any longer," she said. "And I won't, now that I know. I'm going to the garden."

  Both men sprang at her, but they were too late. She leaped lightly to the sill, and by the time they had flung themselves against it, her footsteps were already hurrying off into the darkness.

  "Effie, come back! Come back!" Hank shouted after her desperately, no longer thinking to cringe from the man beside him, or how the gun was pointed. "I love you, Effie. Come back!"

  Patrick added his voice. "Come back, Euphemia. You'll be safe if you come back right away. Come back to your home."

  No answer to that at all.

  They both strained their eyes through the greenish murk. They could barely make out a shadowy figure about half a block down the near-black canyon of the dismal, dust-blown street, into which the greenish moonlight hardly reached. It seemed to them that the figure was scooping something up from the pavement and letting it sift down along its arms and over its bosom.

  "Go out and get her, man," Patrick urged the other. "For if I go out for her, I warn you I won't bring her back. She said something about having stood the dust better than most, and that's enough for me."

  But Hank, chained by his painfully learned habits and by something else, could not move.

  And then a ghostly voice came whispering down the street, chanting, "Fire can hurt me, or water, or the weight of Earth. But the dust is my friend."

  Patrick spared the other man one more look. Then, without a word, he vaulted up and ran off.

  Hank stood there. After perhaps a half minute he remembered to close his mouth when he inhaled. Finally he was sure the street was empty. As he started to close the window, there was a little mew.

  He picked up the cat and gently put it outside. Then he did close the window, and the shutters, and bolted them, and took up the Geiger counter, and mechanically began to count himself.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE NOTHING EQUATION

  By TOM GODWIN

  The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace and he was alone in the observation bubble, ten thousand light-years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him.

  Of one thing he was already certain; he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. The first bubble attendant had committed suicide and the second was a mindless maniac on the Earthbound cruiser but it must have been something inside the bubble that had caused it. Or else they had imagined it all.

  He went across the small room, his magnetized soles loud on the thin metal floor in the bubble's silence. He sat down in the single chair, his weight very slight in the feeble artificial gravity, and reviewed the known facts.

  The bubble was a project of Earth's Galactic Observation Bureau, positioned there to gather data from observations that could not be made from within the galaxy. Since metallic mass affected the hypersensitive instruments the bubble had been made as small and light as possible. It was for that reason that it could accommodate only one attendant.

  The Bureau had selected Horne as the bubble's first attendant and the cruiser left him there for his six months' period of duty. When it made its scheduled return with his replacement he was found dead from a tremendous overdose of sleeping pills. On the table was his daily-report log and his last entry, made three months before:

  I haven't attended to the instruments for a long time because it hates us and doesn't want us here. It hates me the most of all and keeps trying to get into the bubble to kill me. I can hear it whenever I stop and listen and I know it won't be long. I'm afraid of it and I want to be asleep when it comes. But I'll have to make it soon because I have only twenty sleeping pills left and if--

  The sentence was never finished. According to the temperature recording instruments in the bubble his body ceased radiating heat that same night.

  * * * * *

  The bubble was cleaned, fumigated, and inspected inside and out. No sign of any inimical entity or force could be found.

  Silverman was Horne's replacement. When the cruiser returned six months later bringing him, Green, to be Silverman's replacement, Silverman was completely insane. He babbled about something that had been waiting outside the bubble to kill him but his nearest to a rational statement was to say once, when asked for the hundredth time what he had seen:

  "Nothing--you can't really see it. But you feel it watching you and you hear it trying to get in to kill you. One time I bumped the wall and--for God's sake--take me away from it--take me back to Earth ..."

  Then he had tried to hide under the captain's desk and the ship's doctor had led him away.

  The bubble was minutely examined again and the cruiser employed every detector device it possessed to search surrounding space for light-years in all directions. Nothing was found.

  When it was time for the new replacement to be transferred to the bubble he reported to Captain McDowell.

  "Everything is ready, Green," McDowell said. "You are the next one." His shaggy gray eyebrows met in a scowl. "It would be better if they would let me select the replacement instead of them."

  He flushed with a touch of resentment and said, "The Bureau found my intelligence and initiative of thought satisfactory."

  "I know--the characteristics you don't need. What they ought to have is somebody like one of my engine room roustabouts, too ignorant to get scared and too dumb to go nuts. Then we could get a sane report six months from now instead of the ravings of a maniac."

  "I suggest," he said stiffly, "that you reserve judgement until that time comes, sir."

  * * * * *

  And that was all he knew about the danger, real or imaginary, that had driven two men into insanity. He would have six months in which to find the answer. Six months minus-- He looked at the chronometer and saw that twenty minutes had passed since he left the cruiser. Somehow, it seemed much longer ...

  He moved to light a cigarette and his metal soles scraped the floor with the same startling loudness he had noticed before. The bubble was as silent as a tomb.

  It was not much larger than a tomb; a sphere eighteen feet in diameter, made of thin sheet steel and criss-crossed outside with narrow reinforcing girders to keep the internal air pressure from rupturing it. The floor under him was six feet up from the sphere's bottom and the space beneath held the air regenerator and waste converter units, the storage batteries and the food cabinets. The compartment in which he sat contained chair, table, a narrow cot, banks of dials, a remote-control panel for operating the instruments mounted outside the hull, a microfilm projector, and a pair of exerciser springs attached to one wall. That was all.

  There was no means of communication since a hyperspace communicator would have affected the delicate instruments with its radiations but there was a small microfilm library to go with the projector so that he should be able to pass away the time pleasantly
enough.

  But it was not the fear of boredom that was behind the apprehension he could already feel touching at his mind. It had not been boredom that had turned Horne into a suicide and Silverman into--

  Something cracked sharply behind him, like a gunshot in the stillness, and he leaped to his feet, whirling to face it.

  It was only a metal reel of data tape that had dropped out of the spectrum analyzer into the storage tray.

  His heart was thumping fast and his attempt to laugh at his nervousness sounded hollow and mirthless. Something inside or outside the bubble had driven two men insane with its threat and now that he was irrevocably exiled in the bubble, himself, he could no longer dismiss their fear as products of their imagination. Both of them had been rational, intelligent men, as carefully selected by the Observation Bureau as he had been.

  He set in to search the bubble, overlooking nothing. When he crawled down into the lower compartment he hesitated then opened the longest blade of his knife before searching among the dark recesses down there. He found nothing, not even a speck of dust.

  Back in his chair again he began to doubt his first conviction. Perhaps there really had been some kind of an invisible force or entity outside the bubble. Both Horne and Silverman had said that "it" had tried to get in to kill them.

  They had been very definite about that part.

  * * * * *

  There were six windows around the bubble's walls, set there to enable the attendant to see all the outside-mounted instruments and dials. He went to them to look out, one by one, and from all of them he saw the same vast emptiness that surrounded him. The galaxy--his galaxy--was so far away that its stars were like dust. In the other directions the empty gulf was so wide that galaxies and clusters of galaxies were tiny, feeble specks of light shining across it.