Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  Closer. Carson waited until it was only feet away, until its clawed tentacles reached out—

  Oblivious to agony now, he sat up, raised and flung the harpoon with all the strength that remained to him. Or he thought it was all; sudden final strength flooded through him, along with a sudden forgetfulness of pain as definite as a nerve block.

  As the Roller, deeply stabbed by the harpoon, rolled away, Carson tried to get to his feet to run after it. He couldn’t do that; he fell, but kept crawling.

  It reached the end of the rope, and he was jerked forward by the pull of his wrist. It dragged him a few feet and then stopped. Carson kept on going, pulling himself toward it hand over hand along the rope.

  It stopped there, writhing tentacles trying in vain to pull out the harpoon. It seemed to shudder and quiver, and then it must have realized that it couldn’t get away, for it rolled back toward him, clawed tentacles reaching out.

  Stone knife in hand, he met it. He stabbed, again and again, while those horrid claws ripped skin and flesh and muscle from his body.

  He stabbed and slashed, and at last it was still.

  ~ * ~

  A bell was ringing, and it took him a while after he’d opened his eyes to tell where he was and what it was. He was strapped into the seat of his scouter, and the visiplate before him showed only empty space. No Outsider ship and no impossible planet.

  The bell was the communications plate signal; someone wanted him to switch power into the receiver. Purely reflex action enabled him to reach forward and throw the lever.

  The face of Brander, captain of the Magellan, mother-ship of his group of scouters, flashed into the screen. His face was pale and his black eyes glowed with excitement.

  “Magellan to Carson,” he snapped. “Come on in. The fight’s over. We’ve won!”

  The screen went blank; Brander would be signaling the other scouters of his command.

  Slowly, Carson set the controls for the return. Slowly, unbelievingly, he unstrapped himself from the seat and went back to get a drink at the cold-water tank. For some reason, he was unbelievably thirsty. He drank six glasses.

  He leaned there against the wall, trying to think.

  Had it happened? He was in good health, sound, uninjured. His thirst had been mental rather than physical; his throat hadn’t been dry. His leg—

  He pulled up his trouser leg and looked at the calf. There was a long white scar there, but a perfectly healed scar. It hadn’t been there before. He zipped open the front of his shirt and saw that his chest and abdomen were criss-crossed with tiny, almost unnoticeable, perfectly healed scars.

  It had happened.

  The scouter, under automatic control, was already entering the hatch of the mother-ship. The grapples pulled it into its individual lock, and a moment later a buzzer indicated that the lock was air-filled. Carson opened the hatch and stepped outside, went through the double door of the lock.

  He went right to Brander’s office, went in, and saluted.

  Brander still looked dizzily dazed. “Hi, Carson,” he said. “What you missed! What a show!”

  “What happened, sir?”

  “Don’t know, exactly. We fired one salvo, and their whole fleet went up in dust! Whatever it was jumped from ship to ship in a flash, even the ones we hadn’t aimed at and that were out of range! The whole fleet disintegrated before our eyes, and we didn’t get the paint of a single ship scratched!

  “We can’t even claim credit for it. Must have been some unstable component in the metal they used, and our sighting shot just set it off. Man, oh man, too bad you missed all the excitement.”

  Carson managed to grin. It was a sickly ghost of a grin, for it would be days before he’d be over the mental impact of his experience, but the captain wasn’t watching, and didn’t notice.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. Common sense, more than modesty, told him he’d be branded forever as the worst liar in space if he ever said any more than that. “Yes, sir, too bad I missed all the excitement.”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE ROGER BACON FORMULA

  by Fletcher Pratt

  I MET the old man as the result of three beers and an argument. I never even knew his name. He may be one of the greatest scientists alive; he may even not have been human; and in either of these cases, I would hold through him the key to an almost infinite enrichment of the human spirit. On the other hand, he may merely have been one of those people of whom the law takes a justifiably dim view, and in that case, it wouldn’t even do for me to be inquiring after him. I work in a bank, and it would be as much as my job is worth.

  So all I have is a rather incredible story. All right, I admit I wouldn’t believe it myself if somebody else told it. But just listen, will you? You can check if you want to.

  It starts in one of those restaurant-bars in Greenwich Village, where they have booths opposite the bar, a radio that goes all the time, and as little light as possible. The gang used to meet there because it was less depressing than getting together in anyone’s furnished room and just about as cheap as long as you stuck to beer. It was a good gang, even if most of them were a bunch of lousy Reds—or thought they were in those days. I noticed that with most of them, the closer they got to fifty bucks a week, the farther they got from the party line. That was the dividing line, fifty per; once they hit it, they were all through as Commies.

  At the time I’m telling about, it was different, and I was practically the only one who blew a fuse whenever the name of Karl Marx was mentioned. They used to gang up on me, with a lot of scientific terms, and they knew most of the arguments I used, so I was always having to think up new ones. On this night I’m talking about, I’d been doing a little reading, so I let them have it with something about Roger Bacon, the medieval friar, you know, who did so much monkeying around both with philosophy and the physical sciences. “Go on, look him up some time,” I told them. “You’ll find that every real argument of the Marxian dialectic has been anticipated and answered before it was ever written down. Marx was just ignoramus enough not to know that he was digging up dead rats.”

  That let things loose, especially as none of them really knew any more about Roger Bacon than I did, and for that matter, they hadn’t read Marx at first hand, either. We all talked loud enough to keep down the noise of the radio and to try to keep down each other, so that after about the third beer, the bartender came around and told us to pipe down a little. I had had my fun by that time, so I tried to change the subject to something safe, like baseball, and when the rest wouldn’t, I got up and went home.

  Or started for home. I was just going around the corner when this old man sidled up to me. “Pardon me, sir,” he said apologetically.

  The Village is full of panhandlers. I glanced at him for long enough to see that he was very short, had white hair and no hat, and a tear in his coat. I said, “Sorry, chum, I haven’t got any money.”

  “I don’t want money,” he said. “It’s about—that is, I heard you mention Roger Bacon.”

  I looked at him again then. He had a kind of pear-shaped head with a little fluffy crown of hair on the top of it, and a rim of more hair around over the ears, and the longest and thinnest hands I ever saw on a human being. The tendons stood out on the backs of those hands and made it look as though there were no flesh between them at all. I said, “I’m afraid I’m really not much of a Bacon student.”

  He looked so disappointed that I thought he was going to burst into tears. I tried to comfort him with, “But I do think the Bacon manuscripts are remarkable productions, whether they are forged or not.”

  “Forged?” he said, his voice going up thinly. “I don’t . . . Oh, you mean the Parma manuscripts, the ones Newbold tried to translate when he achieved such curiously correct results by the wrong method. But those only describe annular eclipses and plant reproduction. They are the least part of the work. If the world had listened to the full doctrine of Roger Bacon, it would be six centuries fu
rther along the path of civilization.”

  “Do you think so?” I said. This sounded like the beginning of one of the arguments of the gang.

  “I know it! Can you spare a few moments to come up to my place? I have something that will interest any student of Roger Bacon. There are so few.”

  If there is one thing the Village has more of than panhandlers, it is nuts, but the night was young and the old bird sounded so wistful that it was hard to turn him down. Besides, even a nut can be interesting. I let him lead me around a couple of corners to Bank Street and up interminable flights of stairs in a rickety building to where he flung open a door on an attic room of surprising size.

  Its layout resembled the tower of a medieval alchemist more than anything it could have been designed for. There was a long library table in black wood, stained and scarred, on which stood a genuine alembic, which had been abandoned to distill some pungent liquid over a low flame. All around about the alembic was a furious litter of papers, chemical apparatus and bottled reagents. A cabinet opposite held rolls of something that appeared to be sheepskin; there was a sextant on the cot, and a telescope stood by the window. To complete the picture, a huge armillary sphere occupied the corner of the room between the cot and the telescope.

  I realized the old duffer was talking in his piping voice: “—the unity of all the sciences, Roger Bacon’s greatest contribution to human knowledge. Your modern specialists are only beginning to realize that every experimenter must understand other sciences before he can begin to deal with his own. What would the zoologist do without a knowledge of some chemistry, the chemist without geology, and the geologist without physics? Science is all one. I will show—”

  He was at the cabinet, producing one of the sheepskin rolls. It was covered with the crabbed and illegible writing of the Middle Ages, made more illegible still by the wear and tear of centuries.

  “A genuine Roger Bacon. You know there are some years following his stay in Paris that have never been accounted for publicly? Ha! Certainly you do not know that he spent them at Citeaux, the headquarters of the order to which he belonged. I have been to Citeaux. I found them restoring the place after the damage caused by the war. Fortunate circumstance that you—that we have wars. The vaults had been damaged by shellfire; it was easy to search among them and gather—these!” He waved one of his skeleton-like hands toward the sheepskin rolls. “The greatest of Roger Bacon’s works.”

  “But didn’t the French government—?” I asked.

  “French government! What does any government that represents only a tiny portion of the world know about something that affects the whole? The French government never heard of the manuscripts. I saw to that.” He chuckled.

  “What did you find in them?” I asked.

  “Everything. What would you say to an absolutely flat statement of the nebular hypothesis? An exposition of nuclear theory?”

  “It must be wonderful. Is that all in there?” I was not quite sure what he was talking about, but I knew enough to know I should be startled.

  “All that and more. Didn’t I tell you that Bacon made discoveries that the rest of the world has not yet grasped? Here, look at this—” He shoved one of the sheepskins into my hand. “Wait, you do not know how to read the script. I have the same thing written out and translated.” He fumbled among the papers on the laboratory table and handed me one. His own writing was almost as bad as the medieval script, but I managed to make out something like this:

  “De Transpositio mentis: He that would let hys spirit vade within the launds of fay and fell shall drinke of the drogge mandragoreum till he bee sight out of eye, sowne out of ear, speache out of lips and time out of minde. Lapped in lighte shall he then fare toe many a straunge and horrid earthe beyond the bounds of ocean and what he seeth there shall astounde him much; yet shall he return withouten any hurt.”

  “What do you make of it?” said the old man.

  “That he was probably a drug addict,” I said, frankly. “Mandragora is fairly well known—was well known even in the Middle Ages, I presume.”

  “You are as bad as the rest,” said the old man. “1 had hoped that a Bacon scholar—look, you’re missing all the essentials. You people here never believe in anything but yourselves. Now, look again. He doesn’t say ‘mandragora’ but ‘mandragoreum’ and it’s not a copyist’s error, because it’s written in Bacon’s own hand. Note also that he titles it ‘the transposition of the mind.’ He never imagined, as drug addicts do, that his body was performing strange things. What Roger Bacon is telling us there is that there is a drug which will bring about the dissociation of the mind from the body which seems to occur under hypnotism, but ‘withouten any hurt.’ Also he says ‘lapped in lighte,’ which is more than a hint of employing the force and speed of light. Modern science has not attained anything like that yet. I told you Bacon was ahead not only of his time, but of ours. Moreover—” here he gave me a quick glance “—in another place, I found the formula for compounding his drug mandragoreum, and I can assure you that it is nothing like mandragora. I have even used it myself; it produces a certain ionization among the cells of the inner brain by action on the pineal—but you probably don’t understand; you are willing to remain earthbound.”

  I looked at him, trying to figure out what he was driving at. Was he suggesting that I try out this mandragoreum of his? And why me? Surely, if there were anything in it—

  “You doubt me? I grant it sounds incredible. Your scientists, as they call themselves, would laugh. But here, try it for yourself. It is the authentic mandragoreum of Bacon.” He seized the flask into which the alembic had discharged is contents and thrust it into my hand.

  I hesitated, sniffing. The odor was rather pleasant than otherwise, spicy as though it were some form of liqueur. When I touched a drop of it to my tongue, the flavor confirmed this diagnosis. So genial a beverage could hardly be dangerous. And after all, he believed me a fellow student of Roger Bacon. I seated myself in the one chair the room afforded, and sipped.

  At once the room and surroundings were blotted out in an immense burst of light, so brilliant that I closed my eyes to shield them from it. When I opened them again, the light was still there all about me, but it seemed to be gathering into me from an outside source, as though my own body were draining it away to leave everything else dark. At the same time there was a wonderful sensation of lightness and freedom.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the surrounding dimness, I perceived to my astonishment that I was no longer in the room. There was no trace of a room; I was out under the winter sky, floating along over the lights of New York like a cloud. Beneath and behind me a long trail of phosphorescence like a comet’s tail led back to the roof of one of the buildings, I supposed that from which I had come. It was not a hallucination; I have been over New York in a plane, and everything was in the right position and right proportions. I was actually seeing New York from the air; but that phosphorescent trail held me like a tether, I could not get free from it, nor go farther. I felt someone touching my hand, and as the light around me seemed to burn down, there was another flash, and I was back in the room.

  The old man with the long hands was smiling into my face.

  “An experience, is it not?” he said. “You did not drink enough to gain the full effect. Would you care to try again? Mandragoreum is not easy to make, but I have enough for you.”

  This time I tilted my head back and took a long pull from the flask.

  Again the unbearable flash of light, a sense of swift motion. When I opened my eyes, New York City was far beneath, receding into the distance as I seemed to gather speed. The long cord of light that had bound me to the room trailed off behind me; but either its farther end became so small as to be invisible or I had taken enough of the drug altogether to break the connection. In the single glance backward that my speed allowed, I could not even tell toward what part of the city it led.

  Clear and bright as I rose, Venus hung like a lamp
against the vault of. the sky. If I could direct my course, I decided it would be thither, to the most mysterious of the planets. Old Friar Bacon had promised that his drug would “let hys spirit vade . . . toe many a straunge and horrid earthe beyond the bounds of ocean,” and surely Venus met such a definition better than any other place.

  I looked back. The earth seemed to be beneath me, fading to a black ball, on which land and sea were just barely visible in the darkness. My speed was still mounting. Suddenly I reached the limit of the earth’s shadow; the sun flashed blazingly from behind it, and I beheld the skies as no one on earth has ever seen them—except perhaps Roger Bacon. The nearer planets stood out like so many phases of the moon against the intense blackness of space. The moon itself was a tiny crescent, just visible at the outer edge of the sun, on whose huge disk the earth had sunk to a black spot; yet I found that I could bear to look directly into that glare.

  When I turned to look ahead again, however, it was as though my sense of direction had shifted. Venus, growing from the size of a moon to that of a great shield of silver, was no longer overhead, but beneath me, and I was diving downward to a whirling, tossing mass of clouds that reflected the sunlight with dazzling brilliance. Now it was a sea of clouds that seemed to take the shape of a bowl; I reached them, cleft the radiant depths, and at once was in a soundless and almost lightless mass of mist, with no knowledge of my direction except that I seemed to be following the straight course that had brought me here.