Somebody yelled at Sam. He got out of the truck, looking at the damage and trying to figure out how it was that neither he nor Rosie had been killed, and trying worriedly to think how he was going to explain to the telephone company that he’d let Rosie drive.
The voice yelled louder. Right at the edge of the woodland, there was a reddish-haired character screaming at him and tugging at his hip pocket. The words he used were not fit for Rosie’s shell-like ears—even if they probably came near matching the way she felt. The reddish-haired man said more nasty words at the top of his voice. His hand came out of his hip pocket with something glittering in it.
Sam was swinging when the glitter began and he connected before the gun fired. There was a sort of squashy, smacking sound and the reddish-haired man lay down quietly in the road.
“Migawd!” said Sam blankly. “This was the fella in front of the bank! He’s one of those robbers!”
He stared. There was a loud crashing in the brushwood. The accident had happened at the edge of some woodland, and Sam did not need a high I.Q. to know that the friends of the red-haired man must be on the way.
A second later, he saw them. Rosie was just getting out of the car then. She was very pale and there wasn’t time to tell her to get started up if possible and away from there.
One of the two running men was carrying a canvas bag with the words BANK OF DUNNSVILLE on it.
The men came at Sam, meanwhile expressing opinions of the state of things, of Sam, of the Cosmos—of everything but the weather—in terms even more reprehensible than the first man had used.
They saw the reddish-haired man lying on the ground. One of them—he’d come out into the road behind the truck and was running toward Sam—jerked out a pistol. He was about to use it on Sam at a range of something like six feet when there was a peculiar noise behind him. It was a sort of hollow klunk which, even at such a time, needed to have attention paid to it. He jerked his head around to see.
The klunk had been made by Rosie’s monkey wrench, falling imperatively on the head of the second man to come out of the woods. She had carried it to use on Sam, but she used it instead on a total stranger. He fell down and lay peacefully still.
Then Sam swung a second time, at the second man to draw a pistol on him.
Then there was only the sweet singing of birds among the trees and the whirrings and other insect-noises of creatures in the grass and brushwood.
Presently there were other noises, but they were made by Rosie. She wept, hanging onto Sam.
He unwound her arms from around his neck and thoughtfully went to the back of the truck and got out some phone wire and his pliers. He fastened the three strangers’ hands together behind them, and then their feet, and he piled them in the back of the light truck, along with the money they had stolen.
They came to, one by one, and Sam explained severely that they must watch their language in the presence of a lady. The three were so dazed, though, by what had befallen them that the warning wasn’t really necessary.
Rosie’s parents would have been pleased at how completely proper their behavior was, while they took the three bank robbers into town and turned them over to the sheriff.
That night, Rosie sat out on the porch with Sam and they discussed the particular event of the day in some detail. But Rosie was still concerned about the other Sam. So Sam decided to assert himself.
About half-past nine, he said firmly, “Well, Rosie, I guess I’d better be getting along home. I’ve got to try one more time to call myself up on the telephone and tell me to mind my own business.”
“Says who?” demanded Rosie. “You’re staying locked up right here tonight and I’m riding with you tomorrow. If I kept you honest this far, I can keep it up till sundown tomorrow! Then maybe it’ll stick!”
Sam protested, but Rosie was adamant—not only about keeping him from being a crook, but from having any fun to justify his virtue.
She shooed him into her brother’s room and her father locked him in. And Sam did not sleep very well, because it looked as though virtue wasn’t even its own reward.
He sat up, brooding. It must have been close to dawn when the obvious hit him. Then he gazed blankly at the wall and said, “Migawd! O’course!”
He grinned, all by himself, practically from head to foot. And at breakfast, he hummed contentedly as he stuffed himself with pancakes and syrup, and Rosie’s depressed expression changed to a baffled alarm.
He smiled tenderly upon her when she came doggedly out to the truck, wearing her blue jeans and with the monkey wrench in her pocket. They started off the same as any other day and he told her amiably, “Rosie, the sheriff says we get five thousand dollars reward from the bankers’ association, and there’s more from the insurance company, and there’s odd bits of change offered for those fellas for past performances. We’re going to be right well off.”
Rosie looked at him gloomily. There was still the matter of the other Sam in the middle of the week after next. And just then, Sam, who had been watching the telephone lines beside the road as he drove, pulled off the road and put on his climbing irons.
“What’s this?” asked Rosie frightenedly. “You know—”
“You listen,” said Sam, completely serene.
He climbed zestfully to the top of the pole. He hooked in the little gadget that didn’t make private conversations possible on a party line, but did make it possible for a man to talk to himself ten days in the future.
Or the past.
“Hello!” said Sam, up at the top of the telephone pole. “Sam, this is you.”
A voice he knew perfectly well sounded in the receiver.
“Huh? Who’s that?”
“This is you,” said Sam. “You, Sam Yoder. Don’t you recognize your own voice? This is you, Sam Yoder, calling from the twelfth of July. Don’t hang up!”
He heard Rosie gasp, all the way down there in the banged-up telephone truck. Sam had seen the self-evident, at last, and now, in the twelfth of July, he was talking to himself on the telephone. Only instead of talking to himself in the week after next, he was talking to himself in the week before last—he being, back there ten days before, working on this very same telephone line on this very same pole. And it was the same conversation, word for word.
* * * *
When he came down the pole, rather expansively, Rosie grabbed him and wept.
“Oh, Sam!” she sobbed. “It was you all the time!”
“Yeah,” said Sam complacently. “I figured it out last night. That me back there in the second of July, he’s cussing me out. And he’s going to tell you about it and you’re going to get all wrought up. But I can make that dumb me back yonder do what has to be done. And you and me, Rosie, have got a lot of money coming to us. I’m going to carry on through so he’ll earn it for us. But I’m warning you, Rosie, he’ll be back at my house waiting for me to talk to him tonight, and I’ve got to be home to tell him to go over to your house. I’m goin’ to say ‘ha-ha, ha-ha’ at him.”
“A-all right,” said Rosie, wide-eyed. “You can.”
“But I remember that when I call me up tonight, back there ten days ago, I’m going to be right busy here and now. I’m going to make me mad, because I don’t want to waste time talking to myself back yonder. Remember? Now what,” asked Sam mildly, “would I be doing tonight that would make me not want to waste time talking to myself ten days ago? You got any ideas, Rosie?”
“Sam Yoder! I wouldn’t! I never heard of such a thing!”
Sam looked at her and shook his head regretfully. “Too bad. If you won’t, I guess I’ve got to call me up in the week after next and find out what’s cooking.”
“You—you shan’t!” said Rosie fiercely. “I’ll get even with you! But you shan’t talk to that—” Then she wailed. “Darn you, Sam! Even if I do have to marry you so you’ll be wanting to talk to me instead of that dumb you ten days back, you’re not going to—you’re not—”
Sam grinned. He k
issed her. He put her in the truck and they rode off to Batesville to get married. And they did.
But you’re not supposed to believe all this, and if you ask Sam Yoder about it, he’s apt to say it’s all a lie. He doesn’t want to talk about private party lines, either. And there are other matters. For instance, Sam’s getting to be a pretty prominent citizen these days. He makes a lot of money, one way and another. Nobody around home will ever bet with him on who’s going to win at sports and elections, anyhow.
WHITE SPOT (1955)
CHAPTER 1
The planet did not look promising, but they had no choice. When a ship’s drive blows between star systems, it has to be fixed. If metal parts must be recast and machined, and burned-out wiring has to be pieced together and insulated by hand, the job takes literally months. And if, then, getting home is a matter of more months of journeying with a drive that still limps, while coughing and cutting off for seconds or until it is tinkered with—why, the traveler has to find some way to renew his food supply.
It is for such occasions that the Interstellar Code requires all ships to carry an emergency kit with seeds and agricultural directions.
The Danaë, therefore, limped to the nearest Soltype star to hunt for a planet on which to plant some crops. There was Borden and his wife, Ellen. There was Sattell, whom they would be glad to part with when they got home. There was Jerry, who was diffident enough to be tolerable in spite of his lack of years. They were all at the forward vision port when they approached the only possible planet.
“It’s fifty million miles out,” Borden said. “A bit on the hot side. But the sun is smaller than Sol, so it may not be too bad. At least there are polar caps—small ones.”
They went in closer, circling as they headed for atmosphere.
“No seas,” Sattell said. “Pretty barren.”
The others said nothing. It did not look at all encouraging.
The Danaë went in on a spiral descending orbit. Borden looked for other planets. He found a gas giant with a high
speed rotation. It was flattened, oblate. He checked it with
the two polar caps on the nearer world and said worriedly:
“If the ecliptic’s where I think it is, there’ll be no seasons to speak of. I was hoping this planet was near its equinox, because the icecaps are so nearly the same size.”
Ellen said absorbedly, “I think I see a tinge of olive green around that icecap. The smaller one.”
“Probably vegetation,” agreed her husband. “But I don’t see any more. The place does look to be mostly desert.”
Then Jerry said: “Could that be ice, there?”
There was a white spot in the middle of the sandy-colored northern hemisphere. It was the size of a pin head to the naked eye. Borden swung a telescope on it. They were nearly above the point now, where day turned into night.
The sunlight fell upon the white spot at a flat angle. If the whiteness were perpetual snow on the tops of mountains, the mountains should cast shadows. But Borden could not make out shadows near the white. Automatically he snapped the telecamera before he gave up the effort to understand the white spot.
“I doubt it’s snow,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Surely you can make a guess!” said Sattell, with that elaborate courtesy which was getting on everyone’s nerves.
“I can’t,” Borden said.
The ship moved to the dark side of the planet, and presently plunged into its shadow.
They went on, watching for lights. There were none. When they came out to sunlight again, they had descended a long way during their time in the planet’s night.
They could see that the surface of the planet was pure tumbled sand dunes with occasional showings of stone. They were three-quarters of the way around when they saw the white spot again. This time they were no more than four or five hundred miles high. They could tell its size.
It was all of three hundred miles long, north and south, and from fifty to seventy-five miles wide. There were thin hairlines running from it, remarkably straight on the whole, to the north and south. They were very, very fine lines. The patch was still white. As they came to be in line between it and the sun, their shadow would have passed almost over it.
The white spot changed abruptly. One instant it was white, the next, a patch of it had turned silver. That silvery appearance spread out and out in a swift rippling motion. The patch became silver all over its entire surface.
Then it turned to flame.
There was a screaming of alarm gongs. The emergency feedback screens went on and everything went black outside. The lights in the ship dimmed down to mere dull red glows.
There was silence.
The ports showed blackness. The drive, of course, ceased to operate. The ship had sealed itself in a shell of screening, through which nothing at all could penetrate, but which drew upon the ship’s power tanks for as much energy as it neutralized outside. And the drain was so great that the interior lights were dim red spots and not lights at all.
For five heartbeats the blackness persisted while the four in the ship stayed frozen.
The feedback screen cut off. Again they saw the planet below. The white patch once more was white, instead of flame. But as they looked, the silvery look spread out all over it in glittering ripples, and they seemed to look into the heart of a sun’s ravening furnaces before the feedback screen came into existence for their defense. The ports were blacked out again.
The ship hurtled on toward emptiness. It was blind. It was helpless.
Borden moved an emergency light to shine on the output meter. The needle was fast against the pin. The feedback screen was not only drawing maximum safe power. It was working on an effective short circuit of the ship’s entire power supply. Busbars carrying that current would be heating up. They would melt at any instant.
Borden’s fingers moved swiftly. He set up a shunt for on-switch operation of the feedback field.
He threw the last cross-over tumbler and waited, with sweat beading his forehead. Something had flung a beam of pure heat energy at the Danaë. It should have volatilized the small spacecraft immediately, but it had been left on for four seconds.
When it ended, the feedback screen cut off too. Then the Danaë had been detected a second time and the planetary weapon used again. Now, with the feedback field on switch instead of relay, if the heat ray turned off again the feedback field wouldn’t, and the Danaë should be indetectable to anything but a permeability probe. The spaceship would seem to have been destroyed, if the heat-beam went off before the ship’s power failed.
It did. A relay clicked somewhere, cutting a current flow of some tens of thousands of amperes. The lights inside the ship flashed to full brightness. Borden’s eyes flicked to the power meters. The operational power tank meter read zero. The emergency reserve power tank meter showed a reading that made fresh sweat come out on Borden’s face.
But the ports stayed black. Absolutely any form of energy striking the feedback field outside would be neutralized. No light would be reflected. Any detector field would be exactly canceled, as if nothing whatever existed where the Danaë hurtled onward some few hundred miles above the planet’s surface.
The Danaë, at the moment, was in the position of having made a hole about itself to crawl into. But it couldn’t use its drive. It couldn’t see out. It was hiding in blackness of its own creation, like a cuttlefish in its own ink.
“Dee,” Ellen Borden asked her husband in a shaky voice, “what happened?”
“Something threw a heat ray at us,” said Borden. He mopped his forehead. “We should have exploded to incandescent gas. But our feedback field stopped it. The heat ray cut off when we should have been destroyed—and so did our field, so there we were again! And so we got a second beaming. But now we aren’t. At least we appear not to be. So we can live until we crash.”
Sattell said in a suddenly high-pitched voice, “How long will that be?”
�
�I don’t know the gravity,” Borden told him. “But it does take time to fall four hundred miles. We have some velocity, too. It’s under orbital speed but it’ll help. I’m going to figure something out.”
He swung in the control chair and hit keys on the computer. The size of the white spot. It had all turned silvery, then all of it had flamed. Why? The amount of power in the heat ray—a rough guess. Nobody could have figures on what a ship’s tanks would yield on short circuit, but the field had had to neutralize some hundreds of megawatts of pure heat.
The amount of overlap—the size of the heat ray itself—was another guess and a wild one. And why had all of the white spot spat flame? Every bit of it? Three hundred miles by an average of sixty … Even at low power—
The computer clicked.
“Sun power,” Borden said grimly, after a moment. “That figures out just about right. Not more than a kilowatt to the square yard, but eighteen thousand square miles has plenty of square yards! We’ve been on the receiving end of a sun mirror heat ray, and if it had been accurately figured we’d have fried.” Then he said, “But a sun mirror doesn’t work at night!”
He punched keys again. Presently he looked at his wrist chronometer. He waited.
“We’re falling!” Sattell cried. “Do something!”
“Forty seconds more,” said Borden. “I’m gambling your life, Sattell, but I’m gambling Ellen’s and mine too, not to mention Jerry’s. Calm down.”
His eyes turned to the meter that showed the feedback field drain. It was drawing precisely the amount of power needed to cancel out the sunlight falling on it, as well as the starlight, and the light reflected from the day side of the world below them. That drain was less than it had been. They were crossing the planet’s terminator—the line dividing the light side from the dark side—as they plunged toward the sandy deserts.
The drain dropped abruptly. They had moved into the planet’s shadow. Into night.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 111
