Adventures in the Far Future

by Donald A. Wollheim

  Collins felt his body go dead within him. Around? That meant—

  “There’s only one way,” Owens said. “We’ll have to go … Outside.”

  Stars. It was one thing to view them from the shelter of the control room but a different proposition entirely when seen from Outside. Cold they were, and close—it seemed to Collins that he had only to reach out a spacesuited hand to pluck an ice-diamond from its field of velvet black. If he should lose his footing, float off into nothingness, forever alone-He tried not to think about it. If the dark and brooding Viking had seemed quiet in her strange Odyssey through the star-seas, how much more was he conscious of the silence now. It was not merely silence, but an absence of all sound, utter and complete. The old radios of the suits no longer functioned; the air supply was uncertain. Collins almost fancied that his breathing was already flat and stale.

  Inch by inch, foot by slow agonizing foot, the men pulled themselves like ants along the silent side of the Viking. Collins could see the monstrous, incredible figure of Owens ahead of him, like a robot-suit without a human being in it. Behind him he sensed his people: Webb, Echols, Renaldo, their equipment strapped to their backs, feeling their way along the emergency guy rod even as he was doing. Were they good enough? The thought crept, unbidden, into his mind. They had worked hard, they were good, but they had learned under terrible handicaps. Their tools were inadequate. Could they fix the drive? If not-Getting out of the Viking in their old spacesuits had been something of a feat in itself, although the problem was not in getting through the small air lock but in not getting blown through it into infinity. Getting back into the ship again through the engine room was, to say the least, going to be something else again. Owens had said that there was an operable air lock there that he had seen, one that could be opened from Outside, but—Was the man leading them all to their deaths? Was this all simply a last, ironic gesture of defiance?

  Collins inched his way along. He had no choice, he realized. It was act now or not at all. A chance, however desperate, was still a chance. Owens … there was something strange about the man.

  Collins stared at the cold metal side of the Viking as he crept along it. In there, separated from him by scant feet, were the other men, the children of the revolutionaries. He was in their territory now, their part of the ship, where they gathered around their great synthetic fires and lived then-proud but futile lives, sliding back, back, back into a cold death in an empty ship.

  Could they be saved, turned to use, if the ship were recovered? Collins had always said that they could, and he believed it. For all their differences, for all their strangeness, these were yet people—people who had chosen to follow a different path from his, but people none the less. A common goal, a common hope, might yet unite the two. And all hands would be needed if the Viking were to come through at last.

  Collins smiled bitterly. What was that expression he had read in his youth? Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Collins laughed, and the sound was eerily deafening in the closeness of his suit. He had never seen a chicken, and he was unworried about the hatching of an egg. He didn’t have any eggs.

  His stomach was a hollow knot within him and the palms of his hands, although beginning to freeze, were clammy with sweat. It seemed to him that he had been crawling for an eternity, crawling forever, crawling through the night and under the merciless stars. The engine room—where was the engine room?

  They made it. Somehow, they made it. One minute he was crawling inch by inch along the endless guy rod and the next he had stopped, behind Owens. He breathed a cold breath of relief. There, bulging oddly out from the side of the dark Viking, was an air lock. Owens had maneuvered himself into position in front of it and was attempting to turn a valve handle. It did not move. Owens waved a gloved hand urgently.

  Collins managed to get himself into position next to the other man, and together they twisted at the valve. It didn’t budge. Collins felt the cold seeping into his suit and his lungs were choked and constricted. He looked at Owens. Owens looked at him, and for a moment they hung there, motionless, on the brink of eternity.

  Then Collins waved to Echols, who slowly made his way over to join them. Wordlessly, Collins fumbled with the pack on Echols’ back. It was slow work and his hands were very cold in their thick, insulated gloves. But he finally managed to extract a large hammer. Clumsily, he signaled to Owens and Echols to hold onto him. They braced themselves and got a firm grip on his legs.

  Desperately, Collins swung the hammer at the valve. He knew that he might jam it hopelessly, but he had no time now for niceties. The valve had to be jarred loose somehow, and that very quickly. The cold was growing worse.

  Collins swung the hammer with as much force as he could muster in his awkward position and then the three men hit the valve together, pulling and tugging and clawing at it with the frenzy and the strength of men who see death staring them icily in the face.

  The valve moved. With numbing fingers, they spun it until it would move no more. Then Collins and Owens grasped the handle. Together they heaved with all their strength. Nothing happened. The stars seemed to creep nearer— They pulled again, despair lending strength to their numb muscles. Collins gasped, his heart pounding in his throat. Had it moved? Was it frozen? Therewith a sudden, silent explosion the air-lock door puffed outward. The men held on and then moved into the small air lock one by one, almost completely filling it. Coughing for breath and numb with cold, they sealed the outer door again and went to work on the inner one. Collins tasted blood in his throat and a dead whiteness was washing over his brain.

  This time, it was easier. The inner door burst open as the ship’s air rushed into the air lock and then Collins led his men into the ship. Instantly, without waiting even to look around them, the men ripped off each other’s helmets and gulped in great drafts of heady air. Never before in the lives of any of them had air tasted so sweet; never before had they fully realized the ecstasy of breathing.

  When he had partially recovered, Collins secured a synthetic torch from Renaldo’s pack and coaxed it into flame. Light leaped out, blinding his eyes, and the room jumped into sharp relief. Owens had not lied. Collins felt something that might have been tears start to his eyes as he looked around him.

  They were alone in the engine room.

  Collins rallied his mind, still somewhat stunned from Its brush with an unfamiliar Outside, and set to work. The first requirement was safety and he floated across the chamber and checked the after door. It was closed, but unlocked. He threw the switch on it and then turned back to his companions.

  The next necessity was light. Together, the men kindled torches and planted them strategically around the room. The light was flickering and uneven, but it would have to do. Even at that, it hurt their eyes; Collins doubted that they could have stood much more.

  He looked around the engine room, and his doubts returned.

  The main plutonium pile, together with its water reactant, was of course invisible behind its graphalloy shielding. If the trouble proved to be not at the surface, but deep within the pile itself, Collins knew that the situation was probably hopeless. But he felt a strange exhilaration none the less. Here, at last, was a straight problem in technology: a problem too difficult for his limited means, perhaps, but still a problem he could sink his teeth into.

  Collins eyed the shielding, and the dials and switches with a feeling akin to awe—not superstitious awe, nor unreasoning wonder, but simply a healthy respect for a supreme accomplishment of his people. This was the power that had lifted the Viking long ago from the bonds of Earth, carried her beyond Pluto and into interstellar space. And this was the power that had been silent for more than a century. Had the power failed the men, or had the men failed the power? It was no mere rhetorical problem. Upon its solution hinged the fate of Earth’s first emissary to the stars.

  The men set to work with a will. Collins, Echols, Renaldo, and Webb, the cream of the ship’s scientists now that t
he captain was gone, went at their job with the cool precision of men who have studied and planned for many lonely years for just such an eventuality. Owens stood alone, watching, making no sound, with his face beginning to swell painfully from the blows he had received. The chamber was quiet, but filled with a tense, electric anticipation that was a tangible thing.

  Invisible behind its shield, the great pile waited. Outside, hovering beyond the air lock, the stars floated in austere splendor …

  The crew of four worked on, absorbed in their problem, oblivious to time. The silence was broken only by the harsh breathing and the short, staccato sentences as the men exchanged information and asked questions. They had pitifully little to go on, with their limited instruments, but they had knowledge and understanding. And they had something else— a burning, unquenchable ferocity of purpose that would not be denied.

  Man was writing another chapter now—and Collins and his tiny band would not give up.

  Time passed as the minutes supped into hours and the hours crept forward into a day and on.

  Finally, they had done all they could.

  “It all checks, as far as I can see,” said Webb, rubbing his bloodshot eyes, his great beard floating free in the air.

  Renaldo nodded. “Someone threw the rods,” he agreed. “That’s all—there could have been no other failure. Or why are the rods in place?”

  Echols, thin and pale, said nothing. There was only one thing to try, his expression seemed to say. They must simply try it, and if it failed then that was that.

  Collins was the first to look up. Startled, he surveyed the engine room with quick eyes. “Owens,” he said quietly. “He’s gone.”

  The others followed his gaze to the air-lock door, almost without interest. They had greater problems than Owens to worry about; the man’s usefulness was at an end.

  “He didn’t get out the door into the ship,” Renaldo offered. “I would have noticed that. He’s gone Outside.”

  “Why?” speculated Collins, and then let it drop. It could not concern them now.

  “I guess we’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Webb said shortly, a tight little smile on his lips.

  “Sequence pull,” Collins said.

  No man spoke what was in his heart, for there were no words. Even their thoughts were under control; they thought of the problem before them and nothing else.

  One by one, the damping control rods were pulled. There were eight of them; Renaldo pulled the last.

  Nothing happened. There was a deathly silence. Collins held his breath. It might be that Malcolm, in the control room, had not followed instructions. Or they themselves had miscalculated. Or—

  A tiny, feeble clicking sounded in the room. In the silence, it was almost deafening as each fragile click was magnified in the listeners’ imagination until it became a thundering roar.

  “The counters,” whispered Collins. “The counters—”

  With a mounting intensity, the clicks increased in both numbers and strength. They beat a tattoo in the chamber, a tattoo that modulated into a smooth whir of power.

  Suddenly, there was light: white, blinding light that slashed at the mind and burned into eyeballs. Someone screamed, then choked it off.

  A crushing, terrible force leaped from the floor and smashed the men down. They fell sprawling, gasping for breath, flecks of blood touching the corners of their mouths with crimson. They were pressed into the hard floor—it seemed that they must press through it entirely and out into space to perish.

  A humming roar filled the engine room and the great ship, still for numberless years, vibrated with a surge of power and energy.

  “Wrong,” gasped Echols hoarsely, his mouth pulled out of shape by the terrible pressure. “What went wrong?”

  “Nothing,” coughed Collins, pulling himself along the floor like a snake. “That’s it—don’t you see? Nothing.”

  The four men stared at each other then, wincing from the pressure pull and the glare of the white lights. And there, prostrate, in fearful pain, they smiled.

  The dead Viking had come back from a nameless grave; now, at last, she lived again.

  Captain Kleberg, his iron-gray hair neatly combed, leaned back in his chair and with an expression almost of contentment on his face puffed on a pipe which had seen better days. Mark Langston, Jim McConnell, and Stan Owens challenged their chairs in their usual ways and perhaps drank more of Captain Kleberg’s Scotch than the rule book strictly allowed.

  Mark Langston’s leg was throbbing unpleasantly but he ignored it. The murmur of the vibrations, the distant hum of buzzers, the clicking of instruments, the far-off song of the jets—all these were once more blended together into the music he had known. What he had done, and what he had seen, on the dark Viking had washed his bitterness away as though it had never existed. He could look his fellow man in the eye again, with pride. That was one of those things you never discussed with anyone, that stayed bottled up within you always. But that was also one of the things that counted in the long run.

  “They never would have had a prayer alone,” Stan Owens said. “Not a prayer.”

  “Hardly,” agreed McConnell. “It was almost more than we could manage, even with the power unit from the launch, to clear that drive and rig the rods so they could handle them. They wouldn’t have had as good a chance as a man trying to build a spaceship with a screw driver.”

  “From one point of view they were ridiculously overconfident in even trying to get that ship going again,” Owens said thoughtfully, sipping his drink. “That was one reason the captain had to go—he knew too much to try. As long as he lived, the situation was static; if he had remained in command we couldn’t have done a thing.”

  The captain. Mark Langston chewed on the stem of his pipe but didn’t light it. He could see the captain now, alone in that great control room, his old eyes alert as he listened to them explaining to him why he had to relinquish his command for the good of his ship. He could hear Owens’ quiet voice showing him-how his men put their trust in him as a symbol, and waited for him to save them—waited too long. He could hear the captain’s slow, careful questions. And he could seethe knife, the sudden knife, the knife they had not been able to stop. The captain, sizing up the situation, had taken his own life to give his people the best possible chance. No man had ever given more.

  McConnell hung a cigarette at an impossible angle out of his mouth. “You feeling any better?” he asked Owens. “You took quite a beating in there.”

  Stan Owens fingered his battered face ruefully. “I didn’t see any other way to handle it,” he said. “Next time I’ll just walk through a meat grinder.”

  Stan Owens. Mark Langston looked at his friend. It had all been his plan, his responsibility—and he, more than any other man, had brought life again to the lost Viking. The old captain, his son Collins, Webb, Renaldo, Echols, the strange and wonderful Englishman Malcolm—these would one day be household names, known to every schoolboy from the saga of the first of the interstellar ships. But who would ever hear the name of Stan Owens, save perhaps as a dimly remembered legend, a ghost-name? Would historians of the future ever figure out what really had happened on that dark ship—and would they correctly identify Owens as the “savage” who had led Collins to the engine room? Would they puzzle unduly over the extra air lock that had not been present when the ship left Earth? Would they ever understand that a switch had been made with Collins’ original prisoner, with Owens taking over with his story of a vanishing air supply to goad the desperate Collins into action?

  It had been a masterly plan, considering the time handicaps under which H was devised and executed. The prisoner they had removed from under old Malcolm’s eyes had been closeted and given a strong psychological conditioning—he himself had helped in that—so that he would exert a favorable influence among his people when the ship came to life again.

  It would take the Viking thirty years or more to finish her incredible voyage to Capella. But she woul
d get there and find a subtly directed welcome that would surpass her wildest dreams. Civilization would thrill to her story, and Collins and Webb and Renaldo and Echols would be immortalized in story, picture, and legend.

  And Stan Owens? Jim McConnell? Captain Kleberg? Members of the complement of the Wilson Langford, inexcusably late on a standard run from Earth—except in a few forever-secret records, they would be unknown.

  And it did not matter—that was the best part of it.

  Collins stood alone in the midst of the noise and activity of the control room. The white lights beat down on him and even behind his standard dark glasses his eyes hurt. To every man, woman, and child on the ship, he was the captain now— with one exception. To Collins himself, there would always be only one captain.

  He walked carefully over to the viewport, forcing his untrained muscles to carry him through the light gravity. It would be years, he knew, before they could stand one-half normal gravity—but they would make it.

  Collins stood alone, looking out at the stars his father had loved. Very softy then, so that only he could hear, he whispered a promise:

  “We’re coming.”

  OVERDRIVE

  By Murray Leinster

  I

  JIM BRENT woke up when the Delilah’s overdrive field went off ahead of time. A space-liner’s overdrive goes on and stays on. A liner goes from one place to another place, on schedule, and there is no nonsense about it. The Delilah was en route from Khem IV to Loren II, and it had been in overdrive for two weeks and it should have stayed in overdrive for two weeks more. But the drive went off and Brent woke up. Anybody would. His stomach turned over twice, and he was swallowing hard as he struggled dizzily to a sitting position. He hung to the sides of his bunk as the universe went into that dizzy, diminishing spiral which ended in a fraction of a second but felt like hours. Then he opened his eyes. Instantly, he thought of the girl named Kit.

  A voice said soothingly from the speaker in the ceiling of his cabin: