Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “You’ll be welcome. What do we need for the trip?”

  “Nothing. Just lie on these tables and be still.”

  A humming filled the room. A sound of power and energy and warmth.

  They lay on the tables, holding hands, Polly and Peter Horn. A double black hood came down over them. They were both in darkness. From somewhere far off in the hospital, a voice-clock sang, “Tick tock, seven o’clock. Tick tock, seven o’clock …” fading away in a little soft gong.

  The low humming grew louder. The machine glittered with hidden, shifting, compressed power.

  “Will we be killed, is there any chance of that?” cried Peter Horn.

  “No, none!”

  The power screamed! The very atoms of the room divided against each other, into alien and enemy camps. The two sides fought for supremacy. Horn opened his mouth to shout as he felt his insides becoming pyramidal, oblong with the terrific electrical wrestlings in the air. He felt a pulling, sucking, demanding power clawing at his body. Wolcott was on the right track, by heavens! The power yearned and nuzzled and pressed through the room. The dimensions of the black hood over his body were stretched, pulled into wild planes of incomprehension. Sweat, pouring down Horn’s face, seemed more than sweat, it seemed a dimensional essence!

  He felt his body webbed into a dimensional vortex, wrenched, flung, jabbed, suddenly caught and heated so it seemed to melt like running wax.

  A clicking sliding noise.

  Horn thought swiftly, but calmly. How will it be in the future with Polly and I and Py at home and people coming over for a cocktail party? How will it be?

  Suddenly he knew how it would be and the thought of it filled him with a great awe and a sense of credulous faith and time. They would live in the same white house on the same quiet green hill, with a high fence around it to keep out the merely curious. And Dr. Wolcott would come to visit, park his beetle in the yard below, come up the steps and at the door would be a tall slim White Rectangle to meet him with a dry martini in its snake-like hand.

  And in an easy chair across the room would sit a Salt White Oblong seated with a copy of Nietzsche open, reading, smoking a pipe. And on the floor would be Py, running about. And there would be talk and more friends would come in and the White Oblong and the White Rectangle would laugh and joke and offer little finger sandwiches and more drinks and it would be a good evening of talk and laughter.

  That’s how it would be.

  Click.

  The humming noise stopped.

  The hood lifted from Horn.

  It was all over.

  They were in another dimension.

  He heard Polly cry out. There was much light. Then he slipped from the table, stood blinking. Polly was running. She stooped and picked up something from the floor.

  It was Peter Horn’s son. A living, pink-faced, blue-eyed boy, lying in her arms, gasping and blinking and crying.

  The pyramidal shape was gone. Polly was crying with happiness.

  Peter Horn walked across the room, trembling, trying to smile himself, to hold on to Polly and the boy baby, both at the same time, and cry with them.

  “Weill” said Wolcott, standing back. He did not move for a long while. He only watched the White Oblong and the White slim Rectangle holding the Blue Pyramid on the opposite side of the room. An assistant came in the door.

  “Shh,” said Wolcott, hand to his lips. ‘They’ll want to be alone awhile. Come along.” He took the assistant by the arm and tiptoed across the room. The White Rectangle and the White Oblong didn’t even look up when the door closed.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Columbus Was a Dope

  BY LYLE MONROE

  I

  do like to wet down a sale,” the fat man said happily, raising his voice above the sighing of the air-conditioner. “Drink up, Professor, I’m two ahead of you.”

  He glanced up from their table as the elevator door opposite them opened. A man stepped out into the cool dark of the bar and stood blinking, as if he had just come from the desert glare outside.

  “Hey, Fred—Fred Nolan,” the fat man called out. “Come over!” He turned to his guest. “Man I met on the hop from New York. Siddown, Fred. Shake hands with Professor Appleby, Chief Engineer of the Starship Pegasus—or will be when she’s built. I just sold the Professor an order of bum steel for his crate. Have a drink on it.”

  “Glad to, Mr. Barnes,” Nolan agreed. “I’ve met Dr. Appleby. On business—Climax Instrument Company.”

  “Huh?”

  “Climax is supplying us with precision equipment,” offered Appleby.

  Barnes looked surprised, then grinned. “That’s one on me. I took Fred for a government man, or one of you scientific johnnies. What’ll it be, Fred? Old-fashioned? The same, Professor?”

  “Right. But please don’t call me ‘Professor.’ I’m not one and it ages me. I’m still young.”

  “I’ll say you are, uh— Doc Pete! Two old-fashioneds and another double Manhattan! I guess I expected a comic book scientist, with a long white beard. But now that I’ve met you, I can’t figure out one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, at your age you bury yourself in this god-forsaken place—”

  “We couldn’t build the Pegasus on Long Island,” Appleby pointed out, “and this is the ideal spot for the take off.”

  “Yeah, sure, but that’s not it. It’s—well, mind you, I sell steel. You want special alloys for a starship; I sell it to you. But just the same, now that business is out of the way, why do you want to do it? Why try to go to Proxima Centauri, or any other star?”

  Appleby looked amused. “It can’t be explained. Why do men try to climb Mount Everest? What took Peary to the North Pole? Why did Columbus get the Queen to hock her jewels? Nobody has ever been to Proxima Centauri—so we’re going.”

  Barnes turned to Nolan. “Do you get it, Fred?”

  Nolan shrugged. “I sell precision instruments. Some people raise chrysanthemums; some build starships. I sell instruments.”

  Barnes’ friendly face looked puzzled. “Well—” The bartender pat down their drinks. “Say, Pete, tell me something. Would you go along on the Pegasus expedition if you could?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I like it here.”

  Dr. Appleby nodded. “There’s your answer, Barnes, in reverse. Some have the Columbus spirit and some haven’t.”

  “It’s all very well to talk about Columbus,” Barnes persisted, “but he expected to come back. You guys don’t expect to. Sixty years—you told me it would take sixty years. Why, you may not even live to get there.”

  “No, but our children will. And our grandchildren will come back.”

  “But— Say, you’re not married?”

  “Certainly I am. Family men only on the expedition. It’s a two-to-three generation job. You know that.” He hauled out a wallet. ‘There’s Mrs. Appleby, with Diane. Diane is three and a half.”

  “She’s a pretty baby,” Barnes said soberly and passed it on to Nolan, who smiled at it and handed it back to Appleby. Barnes went on. “What happens to her?”

  “She goes with us, naturally. You wouldn’t want her put in an orphanage, would you?”

  “No, but—” Barnes tossed off the rest of his drink. “I don’t get it,” he admitted. “Who’ll have another drink?”

  “Not for me, thanks,” Appleby declined, finishing his more slowly and standing up. “I’m due home. Family man, you know.” He smiled.

  ~ * ~

  Barnes did not try to stop him. He said goodnight and watched Appleby leave.

  “My round,” said Nolan. “The same?”

  “Huh? Yeah, sure.” Barnes stood up. “Let’s get up to the bar, Fred, where we can drink properly. I need about six.”

  “Okay,” Nolan agreed, standing up. “What’s the trouble?”

  ‘Trouble? Did you see that picture?”

  “Well?”<
br />
  “Well, how do you feel about it? I’m a salesman, too, Fred. I sell steel. It don’t matter what the customer wants to use it for; I sell it to him. I’d sell a man a rope to hang himself. But I do love kids. I can’t stand to think of that cute little kid going along on that—that crazy expedition!”

  “Why not? She’s better off with her parents. She’ll get as used to steel decks as most kids are to sidewalks.”

  “But look, Fred. You don’t have any silly idea they’ll make it, do you?”

  “They might.”

  “Well, they won’t. They don’t stand a chance. I know. I talked it over with our technical staff before I left the home office. Nine chances out of ten they’ll burn up on the take off. That’s the best that can happen to them. If they get out of the solar system, which ain’t likely, they’ll still never make it. They’ll never reach the stars.”

  Pete put another drink down in front of Barnes. He drained it and said:

  “Set up another one, Pete. They can’t. It’s a theoretical impossibility. They’ll freeze—or they’ll roast—or they’ll starve. But they’ll never get there.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “No maybe about it. They’re crazy. Hurry up with that drink, Pete. Have one yourself.”

  “Coming up. Don’t mind if I do, thanks.” Pete mixed the cocktail, drew a glass of beer, and joined them.

  “Pete, here, is a wise man,” Barnes said confidentially. “You don’t catch him monkeying around with any trips to the stars. Columbus— Pfui! Columbus was a dope. He shoulda stood in bed.”

  The bartender shook his head. “You got me wrong, Mr. Barnes. If it wasn’t for men like Columbus, we wouldn’t be here today—now, would we? I’m just not the explorer type. But I’m a believer. I got nothing against the Pegasus expedition.”

  “You don’t approve of them taking kids on it, do you?”

  “Well . . . there were kids on the Mayflower, so they tell me.”

  “It’s not the same thing.” Barnes looked at Nolan, then back to the bartender. “If the Lord had intended us to go to the stars, he would have equipped us with jet propulsion. Fix me another drink, Pete.”

  “You’ve had about enough for a while, Mr. Barnes.”

  The troubled fat man seemed about to argue, thought better of it.

  “I’m going up to the Sky Room and find somebody that’ll dance with me,” he announced. “G’night” He swayed softly toward the elevator.

  Nolan watched him leave. “Poor old Barnes.” He shrugged. “I guess you and I are hard-hearted, Pete.”

  “No. I believe in progress, that’s all. I remember my old man wanted a law passed about flying machines, keep ‘em from breaking their fool necks. Claimed nobody ever could fly, and the government should put a stop to it. He was wrong. I’m not the adventurous type myself but I’ve seen enough people to know they’ll try anything once, and that’s how progress is made.”

  “You don’t look old enough to remember when men couldn’t fly.”

  “I’ve been around a long time. Ten years in this one spot.”

  “Ten years, eh? Don’t you ever get a hankering for a job that’ll let you breathe a little fresh air?”

  “Nope. I didn’t get any fresh air when I served drinks on Forty-second Street and I don’t miss it now. I like it here. Always something new going on here, first the atom laboratories and then the big observatory and now the Starship. But that’s not the real reason. I like it here. It’s my home. Watch this.”

  He picked up a brandy inhaler, a great fragile crystal globe, spun it and threw it, straight up, toward the ceiling. It rose slowly and gracefully, paused for a long reluctant wait at the top of its rise, then settled slowly, slowly, like a diver in a slow-motion movie. Pete watched it float past his nose, then reached out with thumb and forefinger, nipped it easily by the stem, and returned it to the rack.

  “See that,” he said. “One-sixth gravity. When I was tending bar on earth my bunions gave me the dickens all the time. Here I weigh only thirty-five pounds. I like it on the Moon.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Attitude

  BY HAL CLEMENT

  D

  r. Little woke up abruptly, with a distinct sensation of having just stepped over a precipice. His eyes flew open and were greeted by the sight of a copper-colored metal ceiling a few feet above; it took him several seconds to realize that it was keeping its distance, and that he was not falling either toward or away from it. When he did, a grimace of disgust flickered across his face; he had lived and slept through enough days and nights in interstellar space to be accustomed to weightlessness. He had no business waking up like a cadet on his first flight, grasping for the nearest support—he had no business waking up at all, in these surround­ings! He shook his head; his mind seemed to be working on slow time, and his pulse, as he suddenly realized as the pounding in his temples forced itself on his awareness, must be well over a hundred.

  This was not his room. The metal of the walls was different, the light was different—an orange glow streaming from slender tubes running along the junction of wall and ceiling. He turned his head to take in the rest of the place, and an agonizing barrage of pins and needles shot the length of his body. An attempt to move his arms and legs met with the same result; but he managed to bend his neck enough to discover that he was envel­oped to the shoulders in a sacklike affair bearing all the earmarks of a regulation sleeping bag. The number stenciled on the canvas was not his own, however.

  In a few minutes he found himself able to turn his head freely and proceeded to take advantage of the fact by examining his surroundings. He found himself in a small chamber, walled completely with the coppery alloy. It was six-sided, like the cells in a beehive; the only opening was a circular hatchway in what Little considered the ceiling—though, in a sec­ond-order flight, it might as well have been a floor or wall. There was no furniture of any description. The walls were smooth, lacking even the rings normally present to accommodate the anchoring snaps of a sleeping bag. There was light shining through the grille which covered the hatchway, but from where he was Little could make out no details through the bars.

  He began to wriggle his toes and fingers, ignoring as best he could the resulting sensations; and in a few minutes he found himself able to move with little effort. He lay still a few minutes longer, and then unsnapped the top fasteners of the bag. The grille interested him, and he was becoming more and more puzzled as to his whereabouts. He had no recollection of any unusual events; he had been checking over the medi­cal stores, he was sure, but he couldn’t recall retiring to his room after­ward. What had put him to sleep? And where had he awakened?

  He grasped the top of the bag and peeled it off, being careful to keep hold of it. He started to roll it up and paused in astonishment. A cloud of dust, fine as smoke, was oozing from the fibers of the cloth with each motion, and hanging about the bag like an atmosphere. He sniffed at it cautiously and started coughing; the stuff was dry, and tickled his throat unpleasantly. There could be only one explanation; the bag had been drift­ing in open space for a length of time sufficient to evaporate every trace of moisture from its fibers. He unrolled it again and looked at the sten­ciled number—GOA-III-NA12-422. The first three groups confirmed his original belief that the bag had belonged to the Gomeisa; the last was a personal number indicating the identity of the former owner, but Little could not remember whose number it was. The fact that it had been ex­posed to the void was not reassuring.

  Dismissing that phase of the problem for the moment, the doctor rolled the bag into a tight bundle. He was drifting weightless midway between ceiling and floor, almost in the center of the room; the hatchway was in one of the six corners of the ceiling. Little hurled the bundle in the opposite direction. It struck the far corner and rebounded without much energy; air friction brought it to a halt a few feet from the wall. The doc­tor drifted more slowly in the direction of the grating. His throw had been accurat
e enough to send him within reach of it; he caught hold of one of the bars and drew himself as close as possible.

  Any lingering doubt that might have remained in his still befuddled brain as to whether or not he were still on board the Gomeisa was driven away as he caught his first glimpse through the grille. It opened—or would have opened had it been unlocked—onto a corridor which extended in two directions as far as the doctor’s limited view could reach. The hall­way was about thirty feet square, but there its orthodox characteristics terminated. It had been built with a sublime disregard for any possible preferred “up” or “down” direction. Hatches opened into all four sides; those opposite Little’s station were circular, like his own, while those in the “side” walls were rectangular. From a point beside each opening, a solidly braced metal ladder extended to the center of the corridor, where it joined a heavy central pillar plentifully supplied with grips for climb­ing. Everything was made of the copperlike material, and the only light came from the orange-glow tubes set in the corners of the corridor.