The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  The Astrarch shook his pale head. “I’m the madman,” he whispered. “To speak of changing even two minutes of the past!” His hollow eyes clung to Brek. “Though you have done amazing things, Veronar.”

  The Earthman continued to stare at his huge creation. “The autosight itself brought me one clue, before the battle,” he breathed slowly. “The detector fields caught a beam of Tony Grimm’s, and analyzed the frequencies. He’s using achronic radiation a whole octave higher than anything I’ve tried. That must be the way to the sensitivity and penetration I have hoped for.”

  Hope flickered in the Astrarch’s eyes. “You believe you can save us? How?”

  “If the high-frequency beam can search out the determiner factors,” Brek told him, “it might be possible to alter them, with a sufficiently powerful field. Remember that we deal with probabilities, not with absolutes. And that small factors can determine vast results.

  “The pick-ups will have to be rebuilt. And we’ll have to have power. Power to project the tracer fields. And a river of power—if we can trace out a decisive factor and attempt to change it. But the power plants are dead.”

  “Rebuild your pick-ups,” the Astrarch told him. “And you’ll have power—if I have to march every man aboard into the conversion furnaces, for fuel.”

  Calm again, and confident, the short man surveyed the tall, gaunt Earthman with wondering eyes.

  “You’re a strange individual, Veronar,” he said. “Fighting time and destiny to crush the planet of your birth! It isn’t strange that men call you the Renegade.”

  Silent for a moment, Brek shook his haggard head. “I don’t want to be baked alive,” he said at last. “Give me power—and we’ll fight that battle again.”

  The wreck dropped Sunward. A score of expert technicians toiled, under Brek’s expert direction, to reconstruct the achronic pick-ups. And a hundred men labored, beneath the ruthless eye of the Astrarch himself, to repair the damaged atomic converters.

  They had crossed the orbit of Venus, when the autosight came back to humming life. The Astrarch was standing beside Brek, at the curved control table. The shadow of doubt had returned to his reddened, sleepless eyes. “Now,” he demanded, “what can you do about the battle?”

  “Nothing, directly,” Brek admitted. “First we must search the past. We must find the factor that caused Tony Grimm to invent a better autosight than mine. With the high-frequency field—and the full power of the ship’s converters, if need be—we must reverse that factor. Then the battle should have a different outcome.”

  The achron-integrators whirred, as Brek manipulated the controls, and the huge black cube began to flicker with the passage of ghostly images. Symbols of colored fire flashed and vanished within it.

  “Well?” anxiously rasped the Astrarch.

  “It works!” Brek assured him. “The tracer fields are following all the world lines that intersected at the battle, back across the months and years. The analyzers will isolate the smallest—and hence most easily altered—essential factor.”

  The Astrarch gripped his shoulder. “There—in the cube—yourself!”

  The ghostly shape of the Earthman flickered out, and came again. A hundred times, Brek Veronar glimpsed himself in the cube. Usually the scene was the great arsenal laboratory, at Astrophon. Always he was differently garbed, always younger.

  Then the background shifted. Brek caught his breath as he recognized glimpses of barren, stony, ocher-colored hills, and low, yellow adobe buildings. He gasped to see a freckled, red-haired youth and a slim, tanned, dark-eyed girl.

  “That’s on Mars!” he whispered. “At Toran. He’s Tony Grimm. And she’s Elora Ronee—the Martian girl we loved.”

  The racing flicker abruptly stopped, upon one frozen tableau. A bench on the dusty campus, against a low adobe wall. Elora Ronee, with a pile of books propped on her knees to support pen and paper. Her dark eyes were staring away across the campus, and her sun-brown face looked tense and troubled.

  In the huge dim room aboard the wrecked warship, a gong throbbed softly. A red arrow flamed in the cube, pointing down at the note on the girl’s knee. Cryptic symbols flashed above it. And Brek realized that the humming of the achron-integrators had stopped.

  “What’s this?” rasped the anxious Astrarch. “A schoolgirl writing a note—what has she to do with a space battle?”

  Brek scanned the fiery symbols. “She was deciding the battle—that day twenty years ago!” His voice rang with elation. “You see, she had a date to go dancing in Toran with Tony Grimm that night. But her father was giving a special lecture on the new theories of achronic force. Tony broke the date, to attend the lecture.”

  As Brek watched the motionless image in the cube, his voice turned a little husky. “Elora was angry—that was before she knew Tony very well. I had asked her for a date. And, at the moment you see, she has just written a note, to say that she would go dancing with me.”

  Brek gulped. “But she is undecided, you see. Because she loves Tony. A very little would make her tear up the note to me, and write another to Tony, to say that she would go to the lecture with him.”

  The Astrarch stared cadaverously. “But how could that decide the battle?”

  “In the past that we have lived,” Brek told him, “Elora sent the note to me. I went dancing with her, and missed the lecture. Tony attended it—and got the germ idea that finally caused his autosight to be better than mine.

  “But, if she had written to Tony instead, he would have offered, out of contrition, to cut the lecture—so the analyzers indicate. I should have attended the lecture in Tony’s place, and my autosight would have been superior in the end.”

  The Astrarch’s waxen head nodded slowly. “But—can you really change the past?”

  Brek paused for a moment, solemnly. “We have all the power of the ship’s converters,” he said at last. “We have the high-frequency achronic field, as a lever through which to apply it. Surely, with the millions of kilowatts to spend, we can stimulate a few cells in a schoolgirl’s brain. We shall see.”

  His long, pale fingers moved swiftly over the control keys. At last, deliberately, he touched a green button. The converters whispered again through the silent ship. The achron-integrators whirred again. Beyond, giant transformers began to whine.

  And that still tableau came to sudden life.

  Elora Ronee tore up the note that began, “Dear Bill—” Brek and the Astrarch leaned forward, as her trembling fingers swiftly wrote: “Dear Tony—I’m so sorry that I was angry. May I come with you to father’s lecture? Tonight—”

  The image faded.

  “Minus four—”

  The metallic rasp of the speaker brought Brek Veronar to himself with a start. Could he have been dozing—with contact just four minutes away? He shook himself. He had a queer, unpleasant feeling—as if he had forgotten a nightmare dream in which the battle was fought and lost.

  He rubbed his eyes, scanned the control board. The autosight was set, the pick-ups were tuned, the director relays tested. His part was done. He tried to relax the puzzling tension in him.

  “Minus three—”

  Sodium bombs filled the void ahead with vast silver plumes and streamers. Staring into the black cube of the screen, Brek found once more the six tiny black motes of Tony Grimm’s ships. He couldn’t help an uneasy shake of his head.

  Was Tony mad? Why didn’t he veer aside, delay the contact? Scattered in space, his ships could harry the Astrarchy’s commerce, and interrupt bombardment of the Earth. But, in a head-on battle, they were doomed.

  Brek listened to the quiet hum of the achron-integrators. Under these conditions, the new autosight gave an accuracy of fire of forty percent. Even if Tony’s gunnery was perfect, the odds were still two to one against him.

  “Minus two—”

  Two minutes! Brek looked down at the jeweled chronometer on his wrist. For a moment he had an odd feeling that the design was unfamiliar. Strange, when he had w
orn it for twenty years.

  The dial blurred a little. He remembered the day that Tony and Elora gave it to him—the day he left the university to come to Astrophon. It was too nice a gift. Neither of them had much money.

  He wondered if Tony had ever guessed his love for Elora. Probably it was better that she had always declined his attentions. No shadow of jealousy had ever come over their friendship.

  “Minus one—”

  This wouldn’t do! Half angrily, Brek jerked his eyes back to the screen. Still, however, in the silvery sodium clouds, he saw the faces of Tony and Elora. Still he couldn’t forget the oddly unfamiliar pressure of the chronometer on his wrist—it was like the soft touch of Elora’s fingers, when she had fastened it there.

  Suddenly the black flecks in the screen were not targets any more. Brek caught a long gasping breath. After all, he was an Earthman. After twenty years in the Astrarch’s generous pay, this timepiece was still his most precious possession.

  His gray eyes narrowed grimly. Without the autosight, the Astrarch’s fleet would be utterly blind in the sodium clouds. Given any sort of achronic range finder, Tony Grimm could wipe it out.

  Brek’s gaunt body trembled. Death, he knew, would be the sure penalty. In the battle or afterward—it didn’t matter. He knew that he would accept it without regret.

  “Zero!”

  The achron-integrators were whirring busily, and the Warrior Queen quivered to the first salvo of her guns. Then Brek’s clenched fists came down on the carefully set keyboard. The autosight stopped humming. The guns ceased to fire.

  Brek picked up the Astrarch’s telephone. “I’ve stopped the autosight.” His voice was quiet and low. “It is quite impossible to set it again in two minutes.”

  The telephone clicked and was dead.

  The vessel shuddered and the lights went out. Sirens wailed. Air valves clanged. The lights came on, went off again. Presently, there were no more hits. Smothered in darkness, the great room remained very silent.

  The tiny racing tick of the chronometer was the only sound.

  After an eternal time, feeble emergency lights came on. The Astrarch came stumbling into the room, looking dazed and pale.

  A group of spacemen followed him. Their stricken, angry faces made an odd contrast with their gay uniforms. Before their vengeful hatred, Brek felt cold and ill. But the Astrarch stopped their ominous advance.

  “The Earthman has doomed himself as well,” the shaken ruler told them. “There’s not much more that you can do. And certainly no haste about it.”

  He left them muttering at the door and came slowly to Brek.

  “Crushed,” he whispered. “You destroyed me, Veronar.” A trembling hand wiped at the pale waxen mask of his face. “Everything is lost. The Queen disabled. None of our ships able to undertake rescue. We’ll be baked alive.”

  His hollow eyes stared dully at Brek. “In those two minutes, you destroyed the Astrarchy.” His voice seemed merely tired, strangely without bitterness. “Just two minutes,” he murmured wearily. “If time could be recaptured—”

  “Yes,” Brek said, “I stopped the autosight.” He lifted his gaunt shoulders defiantly, and met the menacing stares of the spacemen. “And they can do nothing about it!”

  “Can you?” Hope flickered in the Astrarch’s eyes.

  “Once you told me, Veronar, that the past could be changed. Then I wouldn’t listen. But now—try anything you can. You might be able to save yourself from the unpleasantness that my men are planning.”

  Looking at the muttering men, Brek shook his head. “I was mistaken,” he said deliberately. “I failed to take account of the two-way nature of time. But the future, I see now, is as real as the past. Aside from the direction of entropy change and the flow of consciousness, future and past cannot be distinguished.

  “The future determines the past, as much as the past does the future. It is possible to trace out the determiner factors, and even, with sufficient power, to cause a local deflection of the geodesics. But world lines are fixed in the future, as rigidly as in the past. However the factors are rearranged, the end result will always be the same.”

  The Astrarch’s waxen face was ruthless. “Then, Veronar, you are doomed.”

  Slowly, Brek smiled. “Don’t call me Veronar,” he said softly. “I remembered, just in time, that I am William Webster, Earthman. You can kill me in any way you please. But the defeat of the Astrarchy and the new freedom of Earth are fixed in time—forever.”

  VAULT OF THE BEAST

  by A. E. van Vogt

  THE CREATURE CREPT. IT WHIMPERED FROM FEAR AND PAIN, A THING, slobbering sound horrible to hear. Shapeless, formless thing yet changing shape and form with every jerky movement.

  It crept along the corridor of the space freighter, fighting the terrible urge of its elements to take the shape of its surroundings. A gray blob of disintegrating stuff, it crept, it cascaded, it rolled, flowed, dissolved, every movement an agony of struggle against the abnormal need to become a stable shape.

  Any shape! The hard, chilled-blue metal wall of the Earth-bound freighter, the thick, rubbery floor. The floor was easy to fight. It wasn’t like the metal that pulled and pulled. It would be easy to become metal for all eternity.

  But something prevented it. An implanted purpose. A purpose that drummed from electron to electron, vibrated from atom to atom with an unvarying intensity that was like a special pain: Find the greatest mathematical mind in the Solar System, and bring it to the vault of the Martian ultimate metal. The Great One must be freed! The prime number time lock must be opened!

  That was the purpose that hummed with unrelenting agony through its elements. That was the thought that had been seared into its fundamental consciousness by the great and evil minds that had created it.

  There was movement at the far end of the corridor. A door opened. Footsteps sounded. A man whistling to himself. With a metallic hiss, almost a sigh, the creature dissolved, looking momentarily like diluted mercury. Then it turned brown like the floor. It became the floor, a slightly thicker stretch of dark-brown rubber spread out for yards.

  It was ecstasy just to lie there, to be flat and to have shape, and to be so nearly dead that there was no pain. Death was so sweet, so utterly desirable. And life such an unbearable torment of agony, such a throbbing, piercing nightmare of anguished convulsion. If only the life that was approaching would pass swiftly. If the life stopped, it would pull it into shape. Life could do that. Life was stronger than metal, stronger than anything. The approaching life meant torture, struggle, pain.

  The creature tensed its now flat, grotesque body—the body that could develop muscles of steel—and waited in terror for the death struggle.

  Spacecraftsman Parelli whistled happily as he strode along the gleaming corridor that led from the engine room. He had just received a wireless from the hospital. His wife was doing well, and it was a boy. Eight pounds, the radiogram had said. He suppressed a desire to whoop and dance. A boy. Life sure was good.

  Pain came to the thing on the floor. Primeval pain that sucked through its elements like acid burning, burning. The brown floor shuddered in every atom as Parelli strode over it. The aching urge to pull toward him, to take his shape. The thing fought its horrible desire, fought with anguish and shivering dread, more consciously now that it could think with Parelli’s brain. A ripple of floor rolled after the man.

  Fighting didn’t help. The ripple grew into a blob that momentarily seemed to become a human head. Gray, hellish nightmare of demoniac shape. The creature hissed metallically in terror, then collapsed palpitating, slobbering with fear and pain and hate as Parelli strode on rapidly—too rapidly for its creeping pace.

  The thin, horrible sound died; the thing dissolved into brown floor, and lay quiescent yet quivering in every atom from its unquenchable, uncontrollable urge to live—live in spite of pain, in spite of abysmal terror and primordial longing for stable shape. To live and fulfill the purpose of its lusting and
malignant creators.

  Thirty feet up the corridor, Parelli stopped. He jerked his mind from its thoughts of child and wife. He spun on his heels, and stared uncertainly along the passageway from the engine room.

  “Now, what the devil was that?” he pondered aloud.

  A sound—a queer, faint yet unmistakably horrid sound was echoing and re-echoing through his consciousness. A shiver ran the length of his spine. That sound—that devilish sound.

  He stood there, a tall, magnificently muscled man, stripped to the waist, sweating from the heat generated by the rockets that were decelerating the craft after its meteoric flight from Mars. Shuddering, he clenched his fists, and walked slowly back the way he had come.

  The creature throbbed with the pull of him, a gnawing, writhing, tormenting struggle that pierced into the deeps of every restless, agitated cell, stabbing agonizingly along the alien nervous system; and then became terrifyingly aware of the inevitable, the irresistible need to take the shape of the life.

  Parelli stopped uncertainly. The floor moved under him, a visible wave that reared brown and horrible before his incredulous eyes and grew into a bulbous, slobbering, hissing mass. A venomous demon head reared on twisted, half-human shoulders. Gnarled hands on apelike, malformed arms clawed at his face with insensate rage—and changed even as they tore at him.

  “Good God!” Parelli bellowed.

  The hands, the arms that clutched him grew more normal, more human, brown, muscular. The face assumed familiar lines, sprouted a nose, eyes, a red gash of mouth. The body was suddenly his own, trousers and all, sweat and all.

  “—God!” his image echoed; and pawed at him with letching fingers and an impossible strength.

  Gasping, Parelli fought free, then launched one crushing blow straight into the distorted face. A drooling scream of agony came from the thing. It turned and ran, dissolving as it ran, fighting dissolution, uttering strange half-human cries.