Amazing Vignettes

by Jerry

  They reached the Swamp-Forest which lay between Ken’s pod-beds and the Great Sea. Ken was forced to talk.

  “If you can handle a gun,” he said, “now’s your chance to show it. This is meebie territory and if we get bogged down we’ll see them. Keep your eyes open.”

  He had to admit the girl was competent. She sat back to back with him, her rifle gripped firmly and her eyes never resting, flitting from object to object, watching the overhanging verdure or casing the clumpy ground.

  Before the magnesium shelter, Ken spun the crawler and killed its turbos. The whine of the motors ceased for the first time in six hours and he got out stiffly. The girl seemed as fresh as ever and the enthusiasm and wonder in her face had removed the last traces of sullenness and anger which Ken had provoked.

  Ken swung open the outer door of the airlock and in his preoccupation with recent events, he forgot to check before he stepped in. His mistake was instantly realized—but too late. Before he could move, tentacular psuedopods had gripped him and he was held immobile in the rigid grasp of a meebie! Lorane, two feet in his wake, stepped back in time and her rifle came up.

  “Don’t shoot!” Ken said desperately, “you’ll miss the cell center in this darkness and the convulsions of the meebie will squash me. Stay back!”

  Ken had seen wounded meebies in their death convulsions. So long as he remained wrapped around his prey, the meebie was content to corrode away with acid juices the pliofilm covering to get at the morsel beneath. He wouldn’t take desparate action unless hurt.

  The girl said calmly. “Ken, don’t move. I’m coming in. I’ve got a light and a pistol. I’ll nail him right in the cell center.”

  Ignoring his warnings, the girl squirmed through the narrow opening between the meeibe’s body and Ken’s immobile frame. Psuedopods made tentative exploration and she was partially engulfed.

  She switched on the light and in one swift moment she swung the beam across the formless, amorphous mass of the meebie. The beam spotted the reddish pulsating cell center. Her pistol came up and she fired once. There was a reflex convulsion, utterly feeble and the tentatcular grips fell away from both she and Ken.

  Ken stood there, less awed by his narrow escape than by the absolute courage and audacity of the girl.

  She was trembling slightly in reaction and instinctively Ken put his arm around her. “It’s all right Lorane,” lie said softly, “I think we’ll make swell partners, me and my assistant . . .”

  “I’m glad Ken,” Lorane said, “I’m glad . . .”

  Prison on Luna

  Lee Owen

  “WILSON,” Colonel Breckinridge said to the young engineer at his side, “you’re looking at a sight I never expected to see.” He cursed bitterly and his lips set themselves into a thin white line.

  “They’re volunteers, sir,” O’Keefe replied. “So what if they are prisoners?” Breckinridge whirled on him: “What kind of people are we? Building the Lunar Base with prison ‘volunteers’! I thought men would fight for a chance, like this. Work on the Moon! The U.S. Lunar Base Command forced to use reprieved prisoners—the thing’s ridiculous.”

  The two men were watching the disembarking of the twenty space-suited figures from an aluminum-surface hut The No. 4 shuttle rocket had just brought them up. The men coming into the “tunnels” were plain ordinary prisoners, riffraff and scum from a Federal prison, given a new lease on life—they’d all been lifers—by the chance of forced labor on the Lunar Base Project. No inducements were enough to get men up there, since already forty men had died in the project. Working Lunar rock and pumice was dangerous and uncertain and the techniques were slowly being worked out, each meter of tunnel costing its measure in blood and sacrifice. Rock falls, tunnels collapsing, tunnels blowing, ejecting their workers into vacuum—it was a heart-breaking affair.

  Authorities on Earth were crying out against “the slaughter” and private and public officials were lending their weight to the opposition of Lunar Base in spite of its obvious necessity. The result was that it was simply impossible to entice many men—especially with skills—for the project of installing the Lunar Base. As a last resort the U.S. Lunar Base Command had appealed to the Federal Prisons and “lifers” were being given a chance to expiate their crimes with a two-year labor period—if they lived.

  The prisoners were put to work at once. Essentially their job was rock-working—it was tunnel-driving on a fantastically difficult scale, since everything had to go through airlocks for disposal, power was limited, and the “lunain” wasn’t really known.

  The definite leader of the prisoners was a tall, muscular Irishman—inevitably “Blackie”—and in the beginning, he worked well. The prisoner gangs which by now had increased to eighty men worked their shifts the clock around, obeyed the technical orders, and did a skillful job—all had some acquaintance with mining techniques. Blackie himself had come out of the West Virginia mines and the transition to the weird Lunar position did not affect his skills a bit.

  Colonel Breckinridge was whistling a different tune a week after the prisoners had been brought up and the work was progressing with surprising speed and effectiveness. He thought of the men as “his boys” and so referred to them, a change of heart which O’Keefe did not fail on more than one occasion to call to his attention.

  The prisoner-workers were by no means white angels. Realizing their privileged position, their remoteness from immediate punishment, they at first tried to take advantage of the situation, but Breckinridge was no amateur and his immediate reaction soon took the starch out of any ideas they may have had of running things. Lunar Base Project was working—with reprieved prison labor.

  Breckinridge, O’Keefe and three engineer had gone into the number three tunnel for a survey and check-up of the bore which was soon to be used for fuel storage and equipment. Number one tunnel was already in use as mess, sleeping and office quarters. This, incidentally, made any sort of rigid discipline ridiculous and the artificial barriers of prisoner-keeper were simply absurd. Everyone was “a man on the Moon”—and that was all.

  The five men went into the tunnel—and they didn’t come out!

  A previously planted charge still remained in the roof of the twenty-foot bore—some said it was a radar pulse which set it off—and the section came down, effectively locking in and trapping five men in a two-hundred-foot tunnel. They’d have air for a while—and then. . . .

  Blackie and seven men came into the central mess tunnel at the sound of the accidental blast. One look at the rock-curtained hole and they knew what had happened.

  “How many men?” Blackie asked Goldstein, the communications man. Whitefaced, he replied, “Five—I think. Including Breckinridge.”

  Immediately they went to work. It was straight pick-and-shovel work too, for the vibrations of a compressor and a drill couldn’t be trusted not to bring down more of the tunnel, which hadn’t been cement-faced along any of its length. Explosives naturally were out.

  They got an opening through. They knew Breckinridge and his men were alive, since they’d been in sonic communication, but as the air pressure dropped slowly through a jar-leak and the air worsened as the oxygen was used up, the replies finally ceased until there was only a chance that the men were alive.

  Blackie didn’t hesitate to be the first man through the hole. The thought that the rest of the tunnel might be sensitized to collapse at a jar never even entered his head. He went in and brought out the men, one by one, although by this time he was half dead from fatigue too.

  It took Breckinridge a lot of conniving and communicating with rank over the micro-wave link, but when he finished, the distinction between workers and “volunteer prison labor” on the Lunar Base were finished. Full and equal rights were immediately restored to the tunnelers and Lunar Base went on.

  When you look at today’s gigantic Lunar Installations, you don’t often think about the fact that a gang of prison volunteers made it possible—in the beginning at least—but t
here is a small plaque that commemmorates the fact. It’s hard to believe that Luna was once too dangerous to attract more adventurous men than a few—and prison volunteers!

  Mercurian Pendulum

  Dee Arlen

  I WENT THROUGH the Mercurian Pendulum.

  Let me say that again: I went through the Mercurian Pendulum.

  It sounds like a simple enough statement, and you’re tempted to lean back and reach for another drink. So what? He went through the Pendulum. That’s some hole on Mercury; they had a write-up on that a couple of months ago in The Spacemen’s Journal. Good, but . . .

  Let me tell about it. As much as the thought of it gives me nightmares, with some sort of perverse fascination I can’t help but think about it.

  It was only two years ago. Atomics were just being shoved into rockets then, and men started—finally—to spread out over the Solar System like a handful of fine sand. I was with Patrol then too, and the first assignment our boat drew was the Mercurian visit. As soon as the ship rolled from the outfitting yards, they began shoving equipment and scientific apparatus aboard her—including a half dozen scientists, long-hairs who didn’t know an injector-steerer from a basic cadmium pile. For most of these guys it was an exploratory lark with interest and honor thrown in—we could use constant acceleration too so they didn’t have to worry about gravity.

  The trip was as dead as anything you’d want, with exceptional flashes of thrill occasionally when you’d glance out through a leaded port and see that enormous disc of the Sun, so incredibly bigger than you’d imagine anything could be. Through the almost Opaque leaded quartzite that monster still flamed unbearably brilliant.

  The Lorraine III made the trip without incident. With atomics it was like floating a canoe on a Terran lake. When atomics came into rocketry, half the danger went out—and all of the discomfort. After all you can’t really get the feel of space until you’ve spent a few weeks steady, in “free-fall.” That separates the men from the boys!

  The landing on Mercury went off simply too. There’s no point in describing that God-forsaken hole either. It’s simply beyond words. Just imagine a piece of hell brought to the Sahara desert, the Sun lowered right on top of it—and that’s Mercury.

  The planet is a flaming hell of barren craggy mountains, of molten lakes of tin and lead. It’s mineral rich and the scientists had a field day.

  One morning—ship’s time—I drew Doc Yeager, an anthropologist, for my party and he and I suited up, went through the airlock into a scooter and decided on a hundred kilometer run to a low range of hills, visible from the peak on which the Lorraine III rested.

  “Doc,” I said as we skimmed low over the Hades beneath us, “you’re crazier than I am. Why are you here? You know nothing can live in this heat.”

  He grinned under the scooter shade. “You’re right Mike,” he admitted, “but maybe something once did live here. That’s what I’m looking for. Any trace at all of life—ever.”

  “That’s possible,” I admitted grudgingly. “Maybe sometime in the past. Maybe the planet even had a larger orbit. Who knows?”

  “I’m not very hopeful, to be honest with you. Lancing thinks that too. But it’s still an interesting trip.”

  My suit was already floating in sweat. “Yeah,” I agreed cynically.

  Suddenly Doc rapped my shoulder. “Look over there Mike,” his voice said excitedly through the phones. I looked.

  Like a pill box set sand hollow, a perfectly symmetrical structure was below and to our right. It was difficult to see because it blended perfectly with the black-red terrain and its surface was roughened and eroded—as if it could be anything but in this “climate.”

  I put the scooter’s nose down and we pulled up to a smooth spot a short distance away. It was just that, a circular building about three hundred meters in diameter. Entrances existed on its surface every fifty meters or so. It stood about fifty meters high and by any standards it was impressive. It just occurred to me that we were gazing at human handiwork—well, the handiwork of living beings of some sort, anyway.

  We walked in. I was in the lead. I had a beam on the floor—and I should have seen it—but I didn’t. I let out a wild shriek, “Doc—!”

  And then I fell endlessly.

  I mean that exactly. I fell endlessly. Free-fall in space is the same thing of course. But this was different in a subtle way. Around me were walls and these rushed by as my speed built up.

  With a spaceman’s instinctive gesture,

  I had reached for my rocket-harness studs. My gloved hands pressed the bulky buttons—and nothing happened.

  All of a sudden a terrific calm overcame me—as nothing happened immediately except that dreadful fall continued.

  I waited to smash against bottom as calmly as if I were waiting for a light for my cigarette.

  Finally sense returned to me and I started to fumble frantically with my harnass hoping to find the failure in my system before I hit bottom. Then a sickly Peeling came over me as my light played aver my harness—it wasn’t the sickness associated with first free-fall either. The harness wires were torn loose where I had grazed the edge of the pit when I fell.

  I was almost in a hypnotic state, a trance that transcended rationality and thought—and yet was part of it.

  I fell. And I didn’t smash against the unyielding bottom as I expected. I just fell.

  The rest requires no telling. I fell through, rose a mere hundred meters above the other side of the planetary surface, stopped, reversed my sense of fall and fell through to the other side.

  They were waiting. They had rimmed the hundred meter pit and Doc Yeager himself picked me up with his harness.

  The tension put me in sick-bay for two weeks. And I still a nervous wreck in a way. Whenever we go into free-fall, I Quiver at the nerve-endings.

  Look up Doc Yeager’s essay, with photographs and story—and speculations—in the Interplanetary Quarterly. He’s got the horror of my feelings down perfectly. How long ago the pit was built, he doesn’t say, but what an engineering race that must have been even if the sole trace of their Mercurian civilization is a single hole right through a planet!