The Lost Master - The Collected Works

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  'Galatea!' he cried distractedly. 'Oh, my dearest-what a terrible thought!'

  'More terrible than you know,' she: whispered, still very close to him. 'It is more than violation of a law; it is rebellion. Everything is planned, everything was foreseen, except this; and if I bear no child, her place will be left unfilled, and the places of her children, and of their children, and so on until some day the whole great plan of Paracosma fails of whatever its destiny was to be.' Her whisper grew very faint and fearful. 'It is destruction, but I love you more than I fear death!'

  Dan's arms were about her. 'No, Galatea! No! Promise me!'

  She murmured, 'I can promise and then break my promise.' She drew his head down; their lips touched, and he felt a fragrance and a taste like honey in her kiss. 'At least,' she breathed. 'I can give you a name by which to love you. Philometros! Measure of my love!'

  'A name?' muttered Dan. A fantastic idea shot through his mind-a way of proving to himself that all this was reality, and not just a page that any one could read who wore old Ludwig's magic spectacles. If Galatea would speak his name! Perhaps, he thought daringly, perhaps then he could stay! He thrust her away.

  'Galatea!' he cried. 'Do you remember my name?'

  She nodded silently, her unhappy eyes on his.

  'Then say it! Say it, dear!'

  She stared at him dumbly, miserably, but made no sound.

  'Say it, Galatea!' he pleaded desperately. 'My name, dear-just my name!' Her mouth moved; she grew pale with effort and Dan could have sworn that his name trembled on her quivering lips, though no sound came.

  At last she spoke. 'I can't, dearest one! Oh, I can't. A law forbids it!' She stood suddenly erect, pallid as an ivory carving. 'Leucon calls!' she said, and darted away. Dan followed along the pebbled path, but her speed was beyond his powers; at the portal he found only the Gray Weaver standing cold and stern. He raised his hand as Dan appeared.

  'Your time is short,' he said. 'Go, thinking of the havoc you have done.'

  'Where's Galatea?' gasped Dan.

  'I have sent her away.' The old man blocked the entrance; for a moment Dan would have struck him aside, but something withheld him. He stared wildly about the meadow-there! A flash of silver beyond the river, at the edge of the forest. He turned and raced toward it, while motionless and cold the Gray Weaver watched him go.

  'Galatea!' he called. 'Galatea!'

  He was over the river now, on the forest bank, running through columned vistas that whirled about him like mist. The world had gone cloudy; fine flakes danced like snow before his eyes; Paracosma was dissolving around him. Through the chaos he fancied a glimpse of the girl, but closer approach left him still voicing his hopeless cry of 'Galatea!'

  After an endless time, he paused; something familiar about the spot struck him, and just as the red sun edged above him, he recognized the place-the very point at which he had entered Paracosma! A sense of futility overwhelmed him as for a moment he gazed at an unbelievable apparition-a dark window hung in mid-air before him through which glowed rows of electric lights. Ludwig's window!

  It vanished. But the trees writhed and the sky darkened, and he swayed dizzily in turmoil. He realized suddenly that he was no longer standing, but sitting in the midst of the crazy glade, and his hands clutched something smooth and hard-the arms of that miserable hotel chair. Then at last he saw her, close before him-Galatea, with sorrow-stricken features, her tear-filled eyes on his. He made a terrific effort to rise, stood erect, and fell sprawling in a blaze of coruscating lights.

  He struggled to his knees; walls-Ludwig's room-encompassed him; he must have slipped from the chair. The magic spectacles lay before him, one lens splintered and spilling a fluid no longer water-clear, but white as milk.

  'God!' he muttered. He felt shaken, sick, exhausted, with a bitter sense of bereavement, and his head ached fiercely. The room was drab, disgusting; he wanted to get out of it. He glanced automatically at his watch: four o'clock-he must have sat here nearly five hours. For the first time he noticed Ludwig's absence; he was glad of it and walked dully out of the door to an automatic elevator. There was no response to his ring; someone was using the thing. He walked three flights to the street and back to his own room.

  In love with a vision! Worse-in love with a girl who had never lived, in a fantastic Utopia that was literally nowhere! He threw himself on his bed with a groan that was half a sob.

  He saw finally the implication of the name Galatea. Galatea- Pygmalion's statue, given life by Venus in the ancient Grecian myth. But his Galatea, warm and lovely and vital, must remain forever without the gift of life, since he was neither Pygmalion nor God.

  He woke late in the morning, staring uncomprehendingly about for the fountain and pool of Paracosma. Slow comprehension dawned; how much- how much of last night's experience had been real? How much was the product of alcohol? Or had old Ludwig been right, and was there no difference between reality and dream?

  He changed his rumpled attire and wandered despondently to the street. He found Ludwig's hotel at last; inquiry revealed that the diminutive professor had checked out, leaving no forwarding address.

  What of it? Even Ludwig couldn't give what he sought, a living Galatea. Dan was glad that he had disappeared; he hated the little professor. Professor? Hypnotists called themselves 'professors.' He dragged through a weary day and then a sleepless night back to Chicago.

  It was mid-winter when he saw a suggestively tiny figure ahead of him in the Loop. Ludwig! Yet what use to hail him? His cry was automatic. 'Professor Ludwig!'

  The elfin figure turned, recognized him, smiled. They stepped into the shelter of a building.

  'I'm sorry about your machine, Professor. I'd be glad to pay for the damage.'

  'Ach, that was nothing-a cracked glass. But you-have you been ill? You look much the worse.'

  'It's nothing,' said Dan. 'Your show was marvelous, Professor- marvelous! I'd have told you so, but you were gone when it ended.'

  Ludwig shrugged. 'I went to the lobby for a cigar. Five hours with a wax dummy, you know!'

  'It was marvelous,' repeated Dan.

  'So real?' smiled the other. 'Only because you co-operated, then. It takes self-hypnosis.'

  'It was real, all right,' agreed Dan glumly. 'I don't understand it -that strange beautiful country.'

  'The trees were club-mosses enlarged by a lens,' said Ludwig. 'All was trick photography, but stereoscopic, as I told you-three dimensional. The fruits were rubber; the house is a summer building on our campus-Northern University. And the voice was mine; you didn't speak at all, except your name at the first, and I left a blank for that. I played your part, you see; I went around with the photographic apparatus strapped on my head, to keep the viewpoint always that of the observer. See?' He grinned wryly. 'Luckily I'm rather short, or you'd have seemed a giant.'

  'Wait a minute!' said Dan, his mind whirling. 'You say you played my part. Then Galatea-is she real too?'

  'She's real enough,' said the Professor. 'My niece, a senior at Northern, and likes dramatics. She helped me out with the thing. Why? Want to meet her?'

  Dan answered vaguely, happily. An ache had vanished; a pain was eased. Paracosma was attainable at last!

  Redemption Cairn

  HAVE you ever been flat broke, hungry as the very devil, and yet so down and out that you didn't even care? Looking back now, after a couple of months, it's hard to put it into words, but I think the low point was the evening old Captain Harris Henshaw dropped into my room—my room, that is, until the twenty-four-hour notice to move or pay up expired.

  There I sat, Jack Sands, ex-rocket pilot. Yeah, the same Jack Sands you're thinking of, the one who cracked up the Gunderson Europa expedition trying to land at Young's Field, Long Island, in March, 2110. Just a year and a half ago! It seemed like ten and a half. Five hundred idle days. Eighteen months of having your friends look the other way when you happened to pass on the street, partly because they're ashamed to nod to a pi
lot that's been tagged yellow, and partly because they feel maybe it's kinder to just let you drop out of sight peacefully.

  I didn't even look up when a knock sounded on my door, because I knew it could only be the landlady. "Haven't got it," I growled. "I've got a right to stay out my notice."

  "You got a right to make a damn fool of yourself," said Henshaw's voice. "Why don't you tell your friends your address?"

  "Harris!" I yelled. It was "Captain" only aboard ship. Then I caught myself. "What's the matter?" I asked, grinning bitterly. "Did you crack up, too? Coming to join me on the dust heap, eh?"

  "Coming to offer you a job," he growled.

  "Yeah? It must be a swell one, then. Carting sand to fill up the blast pits on a field, huh? And I'm damn near hungry enough to take it—but not quite."

  "It's a piloting job," said Henshaw quietly.

  "Who wants a pilot who's been smeared with yellow paint? What outfit will trust its ships to a coward? Don't you know that Jack Sands is tagged forever?"

  "Shut up, Jack," he said briefly. "I'm offering you the job as pilot under me on Interplanetary's new Europa expedition."

  I started to burn up then. You see, it was returning from Jupiter's third moon, Europa, that I'd smashed up the Gunderson outfit, and now I got a wild idea that Henshaw was taunting me about that. "By Heaven!" I screeched. "If you're trying to be funny—"

  But he wasn't. I quieted down when I saw he was serious, and he went on slowly, "I want a pilot I can trust, Jack. I don't know anything about your cracking up the Hera; I was on the Venus run when it happened. All I know is that I can depend on you."

  After a while I began to believe him. When I got over the shock a little, I figured Henshaw was friend enough to be entitled to the facts.

  "Listen, Harris," I said. "You're taking me on, reputation and all, and it looks to me as if you deserve an explanation. I haven't been whining about the bump I got, and I'm not now. I cracked up Gunderson and his outfit all right, only—" I hesitated; it's kind of tough to feel that maybe you're squirming in the pinch—"only my co-pilot, that fellow Kratska, forgot to mention a few things, and mentioned a few others that weren't true. Oh, it was my shift, right enough, but he neglected to tell the investigating committee that I'd stood his shift and my own before it. I'd been on for two long shifts, and this was my short one."

  "Two long ones!" echoed Henshaw. "You mean you were on sixteen hours before the landing shift?"

  "That's what I mean. I'll tell you just what I told the committee, and maybe you'll believe me. They didn't. But when Kratska showed up to relieve me he was hopped. He had a regular hexylamine jag, and he couldn't have piloted a tricycle. So I did the only possible thing to do; I sent him back to sleep it off, and I reported it to Gunderson, but that still left me the job of getting us down.

  "It wouldn't have been so bad if it had happened in space, because there isn't much for a pilot to do out there except follow the course laid out by the captain, and maybe dodge a meteor if the alarm buzzes. But I had sixteen solid hours of teetering down through a gravitational field, and by the time my four-hour spell came around I was bleary."

  "I don't wonder," said the captain. "Two long shifts!"

  Maybe I'd better explain a rocket's pilot system. On short runs like Venus or Mars, a vessel could carry three pilots, and then it's a simple matter of three eight-hour shifts. But on any longer run, because air and weight and fuel and food are all precious, no rocket ever carries more than two pilots.

  So a day's run is divided into four shifts, and each pilot has one long spell of eight hours, then four hours off, then four hours on again for his short shift, and then eight hours to sleep. He eats two of his meals right at the control desk, and the third during his short free period. It's a queer life, and sometimes men have been co-pilots for years without really seeing each other except at the beginning and the end of their run.

  I went on with my story, still wondering whether Henshaw would feel as if I were whining. "I was bleary," I repeated, "but Kratska showed up still foggy, and I didn't dare trust a hexylamine dope with the job of landing. Anyway, I'd reported to Gunderson, and that seemed to shift some of the responsibility to him. So I let Kratska sit in the control cabin, and I began to put down."

  Telling the story made me mad all over. "Those lousy reporters!" I blazed. "All of them seemed to think landing a rocket is like settling down in bed; you just cushion down on your underblast. Yeah; they don't realize that you have to land blind, because three hundred feet down from the ground the blast begins to splash against it.

  "You watch the leveling poles at the edge of the field and try to judge your altitude from them, but you don't see the ground; what you see under you are the flames of Hell. And another thing they don't realize: lowering a ship is like bringing down a dinner plate balanced on a fishing rod. If she starts to roll sideways—blooey! The underjets only hold you up when they're pointing down, you know."

  Henshaw let me vent my temper without interruption, and I returned to my story. "Well, I was getting down as well as could be expected. The Hera always did have a tendency to roll a little, but she wasn't the worst ship I've put to ground.

  "But every time she slid over a little, Kratska let out a yell; he was nervous from his dope jag, and he knew he was due to lose his license, and on top of that he was just plain scared by the side roll. We got to seventy feet on the leveling poles when she gave a pretty sharp roll, and Kratska went plain daffy."

  I hesitated. "I don't know exactly how to tell what happened. It went quick, and I didn't see all of it, of course. But suddenly Kratska, who had been fumbling with the air lock for ten minutes, shrieked something like `She's going over!' and grabbed the throttle. He shut off the blast before I could lift an eyelash, shut it off and flung himself out. Yeah; he'd opened the air lock.

  "Well, we were only seventy feet—less than that—above the field. We dropped like an overripe apple off a tree. I didn't have time even to move before we hit, and when we hit, all the fuel in all the jets must have let go. And for what happened after that you'd better read the newspapers."

  "Not me," said Henshaw. "You spill it."

  "I can't, not all of it, because I was laid out. But I can guess, all right. It seems that when the jets blew off, Kratska was just picked up in a couple of cubic yards of the soft sand he had landed in, and tossed clear. He had nothing but a broken wrist. And as for me, apparently I was shot out of the control room, and banged up considerably. And as for Gunderson, his professors, and everyone else on the Hera—well, they were just stains on the pool of molten ferralumin that was left."

  "Then how," asked Henshaw, "did they hang it on you?"

  I tried to control my voice. "Kratska," I said grimly. "The field was clear for landing; nobody can stand in close with the blast splashing in a six-hundred-foot circle. Of course, they saw someone jump from the nose of the ship after the jets cut off, but how could they tell which of us? And the explosion shuffled the whole field around, and nobody knew which was what."

  "Then it should have been his word against yours."

  "Yeah; it should have been. But the field knew it was my shift because I'd been talking over the landing beam, and besides, Kratska got to the reporters first. I never even knew of the mess until I woke up at Grand Mercy Hospital thirteen days later. By that time Kratska had talked and I was the goat."

  "But the investigating committee?"

  I grunted. "Sure, the investigating committee. I'd reported to Gunderson, but he made a swell witness, being just an impurity in a mass of ferralumin alloy. And Kratska had disappeared anyway."

  "Couldn't they find him?"

  "Not on what I knew about him. We picked him up at Junopolis on Io, because Briggs was down with white fever. I didn't see him at all except when we were relieving each other, and you know what that's like, seeing somebody in a control cabin with the sun shields up. And on Europa we kept to space routine, so I couldn't even give you a good description of hi
m. He had a beard, but so have ninety per cent of us after a long hop, and he said when we took him on that he'd just come over from the Earth." I paused. "I'll find him some day."

  "Hope you do," said Henshaw briskly. "About this present run, now. There'll be you and me, and then there'll be Stefan Coretti, a physical chemist, and an Ivor Gogrol, a biologist. That's the scientific personnel of the expedition."

  "Yeah, but who's my co-pilot? That's what interests me."

  "Oh, sure," said Henshaw, and coughed. "Your co-pilot. Well, I've been meaning to tell you. It's Claire Avery." "Claire Avery!"

  "That's right," agreed the captain gloomily. "The Golden Flash herself. The only woman pilot to have her name on the Curry cup, winner of this year's Apogee race."

  "She's no pilot!" I snapped. "She's a rich publicity hound with brass nerves. I was just curious enough to blow ten bucks rental on a 'scope to watch that race. She was ninth rounding the Moon. Ninth! Do you know how she won? She gunned her rocket under full acceleration practically all the way back, and then fell into a braking orbit.

  "Any sophomore in Astronautics II knows that you can't calculate a braking orbit without knowing the density of the stratosphere and ionosphere, and even then its a gamble. That's what she did—simply gambled, and happened to be lucky. Why do you pick a rich moron with a taste for thrills on a job like this?"

  "I didn't pick her, Jack. Interplanetary picked her for publicity purposes. To tell the truth, I think this whole expedition is an attempt to get a little favorable advertising to offset that shady stock investigation this spring. Interplanetary wants to show itself as the noble patron of exploration. So Claire Avery will take off for the television and papers, and you'll be politely ignored."