(3/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume III: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  "You didn't see Trippitt die," replied James.

  "What was it?" asked Frankston. "What killed Trippitt? So quickly, too. He was only outside a few minutes like the rest of us, and eight hours later he was dead."

  "We couldn't be sure," answered James. "Some virus. There are countless varieties. People live in a contaminated atmosphere all their lives, build up a resistance to them. Sometimes a particularly virulent strain will produce an epidemic, but most people, if they're affected, will have a mild case of whatever it is and recover. But after thirty years in space, thirty years of breathing perfectly pure, uncontaminated air, Trippitt had no antibodies in his bloodstream. The virus hit and he died."

  "But why didn't the rest of us get it?" asked Gregory.

  "We were lucky. Viruses are like that."

  "Those people talked about building a home for us," muttered Frankston. "Why didn't they?"

  "It wouldn't have been any different," answered James gently. "It would have been the same, almost an exact duplicate of the ship, everything but the rockets. Same metal and plastic and filtered air and synthetic food. It couldn't have had wool rugs or down pillows or smiling wives or fresh air or eggs for breakfast. It would have been just like this. So, since the ship was obsolete, they gave it to us, and a plot of ground to anchor it to, and we're home. They did the best they could for us, the very best they could."

  "But I feel stifled, shut in!"

  "The ship is large, Frankston. We all crowd into this section because, without each other, we'd go mad." James kicked the edge of the magazine on the floor. "Thank God we're not allergic to decontaminated paper. There's still reading."

  "We're getting old," said Gregory. "Some day one of us will be here alone."

  "God help him then," answered James, with more emotion than was usual for him.

  * * * * *

  During the latter part of the conversation, the little red signal had been flashing persistently. Finally James saw it. Ross was in the outer lock. James threw the decontaminator switch and the signal winked out. Every trace of dust and pollen would have to be removed from Ross's suit before he could come inside the ship.

  "Just like on an alien planet," commented Gregory.

  "Isn't that what this is to us--an alien planet?" asked Frankston, and neither of the other men dared answer his bitter question.

  A few minutes later, Ross was back in the cabin, and James helped him out of his spacesuit.

  "How are the geraniums, Ross?" asked Gregory.

  "Fine," said Ross enthusiastically. "They're doing just fine."

  He walked over to his bunk and lay down on his side so he could see out of the viewport. There would be an hour left before darkness fell, an hour to watch the geraniums. They were tall and red, and swayed slightly in the evening breeze.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE METEOR GIRL

  By Jack Williamson

  Through the complicated space-time of the fourth dimension goes Charlie King in an attempt to rescue the Meteor Girl.

  "What's the good in Einstein, anyhow?"

  I shot the question at lean young Charlie King. In a moment he looked up at me; I thought there was pain in the back of his clear brown eyes. Lips closed in a thin white line across his wind-tanned face; nervously he tapped his pipe on the metal cowling of the Golden Gull's cockpit.

  "I know that space is curved, that there is really no space or time, but only space-time, that electricity and gravitation and magnetism are all the same. But how is that going to pay my grocery bill--or yours?"

  "That's what Virginia wants to know."

  "Virginia Randall!" I was astonished. "Why, I thought--"

  "I know. We've been engaged a year. But she's called it off."

  Charlie looked into my eyes for a long minute, his lips still compressed. We were leaning on the freshly painted, streamline fuselage of the Golden Gull, as neat a little amphibian monoplane as ever made three hundred miles an hour. She stood on the glistening white sand of our private landing field on the eastern Florida coast. Below us the green Atlantic was running in white foam on the rocks.

  In the year that Charlie King and I had been out of the Institute of Technology, we had built the nucleus of a commercial airplane business. We had designed and built here in our own shops several very successful seaplanes and amphibians. Charlie's brilliant mathematical mind was of the greatest aid, except when he was too far lost in his abstruse speculations to descend to things commercial. Mathematics is painful enough to me when it is used in calculating the camber of an airplane wing. And pure mathematics, such as the theories of relativity and equivalence, I simply abhor.

  I was amazed. Virginia Randall was a girl trim and beautiful as our shining Golden Gull. I had thought them devotedly in love, and had been looking forward to the wedding.

  "But it isn't two weeks, since Virginia was out here! You took her up in our Western Gull IV!"

  * * * * *

  Nervously Charlie lit his pipe, drew quickly on it. His face, lean and drawn beneath the flying goggles pushed up on his forehead, sought mine anxiously.

  "I know. I drove her back to the station. That was when--when we quarreled."

  "But why? About Einstein? That's silly."

  "She wanted me to give it up here, and go in with her father in his Wall Street brokerage business. The old gent is willing to take me, and make a business man of me."

  "Why, I couldn't run the business without you, Charlie!"

  "We talked about that, Hammond. I don't really do much of the work. Just play around with the mathematics, and leave the models and blueprints to you."

  "Oh, Charlie, that's not quite--"

  "It's the truth, right enough," he said, bitterly. "You design aircraft, and I play with Einstein. And as you say, a fellow can't eat equations."

  "I'd hate to see you go."

  "And I'd hate to give up you, and our business, and the math. Really no need of it. My tastes are simple enough. And old 'Iron-clad' Randall has made all one family needs. Virginia's not exactly a pauper, herself. Two or three millions, I think."

  "And where did Virginia go?"

  "She took the Valhalla yesterday at San Francisco. Going to join her father at Panama. He cruises about the world in his steam yacht, you know, and runs Wall Street by radio. I was to telegraph her if I'd changed my mind. I decided to stick to you, Hammond. I telegraphed a corsage of orchids, and sent her the message, 'Einstein forever!'"

  "If I know Virginia, those were not very politic words."

  "Well, a man--"

  * * * * *

  His words were cut short by a very unusual incident.

  A thin, high scream came suddenly from above our neat stuccoed hangars at the edge of the white field. I looked up quickly, to catch a glimpse of a bright object hurtling through the air above our heads. The bellowing scream ended abruptly in a thunderous crash. I felt a tremor of the ground underfoot.

  "What--" I ejaculated.

  "Look!" cried Charlie.

  He pointed. I looked over the gleaming metal wing of the Golden Gull, to see a huge cloud of white sand rising like a fountain at the farther side of the level field. Deliberately the column of debris rose, spread, rained down, leaving a gaping crater in the earth.

  "Something fell?"

  "It sounded like a shell from a big gun, except that it didn't explode. Let's get over and see!"

  We ran to where the thing had struck, three hundred yards across the field. We found a great funnel-shaped pit torn in the naked earth. It was a dozen yards across, fifteen feet deep, and surrounded with a powdery ring of white sand and pulverized rock.

  "Something like a shell-hole," I observed.

  "I've got it!" Charlie cried. "It was a meteor!"

  "A meteor? So big?"

  "Yes. Lucky for us it was no bigger. If it had been like the one that fell in Siberia a few years ago, or the one that made the Winslow crater in Arizona--we wouldn't have been talking about it. Prob
ably we have a chunk of nickel-iron alloy here."

  "I'll get some of the men out here with digging tools, and we'll see what we can find."

  Our mechanics were already hurrying across the field. I shouted at them to bring picks and shovels. In a few minutes five of us were at work throwing sand and shattered rock out of the pit.

  * * * * *

  Suddenly I noticed a curious thing. A pale bluish mist hung in the bottom of the pit. It was easily transparent, no denser than tobacco smoke. Passing my spade through it did not seem to disturb it in the least.

  I rubbed my eyes doubtfully, said to Charlie, "Do you see a sort of blue haze in the pit?"

  He peered. "No. No.... Yes. Yes, I do! Funny thing. Kind of a blue fog. And the tools cut right through it without moving it! Queer! Must have something to do with the meteor!" He was very excited.

  We dug more eagerly. An hour later we had opened the hole to a depth of twenty feet. Our shovels were clanging on the gray iron of the rock from space. The mist had grown thicker as the excavation deepened; we looked at the stone through a screen of motionless blue fog.

  We had found the meteor. There were several queer things about it. The first man who touched it--a big Swede mechanic named Olson--was knocked cold as if by a nasty jolt of electricity. It took half an hour to bring him to consciousness.

  As fast as the rugged iron side of the meteorite was uncovered, a white crust of frost formed over it.

  "It was as cold as outer space, nearly at the absolute zero," Charlie explained. "And it was heated only superficially during its quick passage through the air. But how it comes to be charged with electricity--I can't say."

  He hurried up to his laboratory behind the hangars, where he had equipment ranging from an astronomical telescope to a delicate seismograph. He brought back as much electrical equipment as he could carry. He had me touch an insulated wire to the frost-covered stone from space, while he put the other end to one post of a galvanometer.

  I think he got a current that wrecked the instrument. At any rate, he grew very much excited.

  "Something queer about that stone!" he cried. "This is the chance of a lifetime! I don't know that a meteor has ever been scientifically examined so soon after falling."

  * * * * *

  He hurried us all across to the laboratory. We came back with a truck load of coils and tubes and batteries and potentiometers and other assorted equipment. He had men with heavy robber gloves lift the frost-covered stone to a packing box on a bench. The thing was irregular in shape, about a foot long; it must have weighed two hundred pounds. He sent a man racing on a motorcycle to the drug store to get dry ice (solidified carbon dioxide) to keep the iron stone at its low temperature.

  In a few hours he had a complete laboratory set up around the meteorite. He worked feverishly in the hot sunshine, reading the various instruments he had set up, and arranging more. He contrived to keep the stone cold by packing it in a box of dry ice.

  The mechanics stopped for dinner, and I tried to get him to take time to eat.

  "No, Hammond," he said. "This is something big! We were talking about Einstein. This rock seems energized with a new kind of force: all meteors are probably the same way, when they first plunge out of space. I think this will be to relativity what the falling apple is to gravity. This is a big thing."

  He looked up at me, brown eyes flashing.

  "This is my chance to make a name, Hammond. If I do something big enough--Virginia might reconsider her opinion."

  Charlie worked steadily through the long hot afternoon. I spent most of the time helping him, or gazing in fascination at the curious haze of luminous blue mist that clung like a sphere of azure fog about the meteoric stone. I did not completely understand what he did; the reader who wants the details may consult the monograph he is preparing for the scientific press.

  He had the men string up a line from our direct current generator in the shops, to supply power for his electrical instruments. He mounted a powerful electromagnet just below the meteorite, and set up an X-ray tube to bombard it with rays.

  * * * * *

  Night came, and the fire of the white sun faded from the sky. In the darkness, the curious haze about the stone became luminescent, distinct, a dim, motionless sphere of blue light. I fancied that I saw grotesque shapes flashing through it. A ball of blue fire, shimmering and ghost-like, shrouded the instruments.

  Charlie's induction coil buzzed wickedly, with purple fire playing about the terminals. The X-ray tube flickered with a greenish glow. He manipulated the rheostat that controlled the current through the electromagnet, and continued to read his instruments.

  "Look at that!" he cried.

  The bluish haze about the stone grew brighter; it became a ball of sapphire flame, five feet thick, bright and motionless. A great sphere of shimmering azure fire! Wisps of pale, sparkling bluish mist ringed it. The stone in its box, the X-ray bulb and other apparatus were hidden. The end of the table stuck oddly from the ball of light.

  I heard Charlie move a switch. The hum of the coils changed a note.

  The ball of blue fire vanished abruptly. It became a hole, a window in space!

  Through it, we saw another world!

  The darkness of the night hung about us. Where the ball had been was a circle of misty blue flame, five feet across. Through that circle I could see a vast expanse of blue ocean, running in high, white-capped rollers, beneath a sky overcast with low gray clouds.

  It was no flat picture like a movie screen. The scene had vast depth; I knew that we were really looking over an infinite expanse of stormy ocean. It was all perfectly clear, distinct, real!

  * * * * *

  Astounded, I turned to find Charlie standing back and looking into the ring of blue fire, with a curious mixture of surprise and delighted satisfaction.

  "What--what--" I gasped.

  "It's amazing! Wonderful! More than I had dared hope for! The complete vindication of my theory! If Virginia cares for scientific reputation--"

  "But what is it?"

  "It's hard to explain without mathematical language. You might say that we are looking through a hole in space. The new force in the meteorite, amplified by the X-rays and the magnetic field, is causing a distortion of space-time coordinates. You know that a gravitational field bends light; the light of a star is deflected in passing the sun. The field of this meteorite bends light through space-time, through the four-dimensional continuum. That scrap of ocean we can see may be on the other side of the earth."

  I walked around the circle of luminous smoke with the marvelous picture in the center. It seemed that the window swung with me. I surveyed the whole angry surface of that slate-gray, storm-beaten sea, to the misty horizon. Nowhere was it broken by land or ship.

  Charlie fell to adjusting his rheostat and switches.

  It seemed that the gray ocean moved swiftly beyond the window. Vast stretches of it raced below our eyes. Faint black stains of steamer smoke appeared against the blue-gray horizon and swept past. Then land appeared--a long, green-gray line. We had a flash of a long coast that unreeled in endless panorama before us. It was such a view as one might get from a swift airplane--a plane flying thousands of miles per hour.

  The Golden Gate flashed before us, with the familiar skyline of San Francisco rising on the hills behind it.

  "San Francisco!" Charlie cried. "This is the Pacific we've been seeing. Let's find the Valhalla. We might be able to see Virginia!"

  * * * * *

  The coast-line vanished as he manipulated his instruments. Staring into the circle of shining blue mist, I saw the endless ocean racing below us again. We picked up a pleasure yacht, running under bare poles.

  "I didn't know there was such a storm on," Charlie murmured.

  Other vessels swam past below us, laboring against heavy seas.

  Then we looked upon an ocean whipped into mighty white-crowned waves. Rain beat down in sheets from low dense clouds; vivid violet lightnings flash
ed before us. It seemed very strange to see such lightning and hear not the faintest whisper of thunder--but no sound came from anything we saw through the blue-rimmed window in space.

  "I hope the Valhalla isn't in weather like this!" cried Charlie.

  In a few minutes a dark form loomed through the wind-riven mist. Swiftly it swam nearer; became a black ship.

  "Only a tramp," Charlie said, breathing a sigh of relief.

  It was a dingy tramp steamer, her superstructure wrecked. Her fires seemed dead. She lay across the wind, rolling sluggishly, threatening to sink with every monstrous wave. We saw no living person aboard her; she seemed a sinking derelict. We made out the name Roma on her side.

  Charlie moved his dials again.

  In a few minutes the slender prow of another great steamer came through the sheets of rain. It was evidently a passenger vessel. She seemed limping along, half wrecked, with mighty waves breaking over her rail.

  Charlie grew white with alarm. "The Valhalla!" he gasped. "And she's headed straight for that wreck!"

  In a moment, as he brought the liner closer below our blue-rimmed window, I, too, made out the name. The wet, glistening decks were almost deserted. Here and there a man struggled futilely against the force of the storm.

  * * * * *

  In a few minutes the drifting wreck of the Roma came into our view, dead ahead of the limping liner. Through the mist and falling rain, the derelict could not have been in sight of the lookout of the passenger vessel until she was almost upon it.

  We saw the white burst of steam as the siren was blown. We watched the desperate effort of the liner to check her way, to come about. But it was too much for the already crippled ship. Charlie cried out as a mighty wave drove the Valhalla down upon the sluggishly drifting wreck.

  All the mad scene that ensued was strangely silent. We heard no crash when the collision occurred; heard no screams or shouts while the mob of desperate, white-faced passengers were fighting their way to the deck. The vain struggle to launch the boats was like a silent movie.

  One boat was splintered while being lowered. Another, already filled with passengers, was lifted by a great ware and crushed against the side of the ship. Only shivered wood and red foam were left. The ship listed so rapidly that the boats on the lee side were useless. It was impossible to launch the others in that terrible, lashing sea.