Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "Rabbits on your grave, Mr. Blair?"

  He looked up slowly. "Sorry. I was just wondering. Did Miss Simmons have a job while she was here?"

  "No, she didn't. One thing she did do was rent a place. Used to be Blands Hardware. Paid a month's rent, too. Said some friends of hers were plannin' to open a mortuary. Seemed like a funny way for people to do business, but then, no affair of mine."

  Funny? No, not funny at all, but icily, eerily logical. There had to be an undertaking parlor where he could send the funeral expenses. He wondered if Helen had laughed when she opened the letter. Everyone his, or her, own undertaker. And the carefully cultivated friend in the coroner's office. For stationery.

  He got to his feet. "Thanks a lot, Miss Collins. You've been a great deal of help." He almost smiled as he asked, "I don't suppose she left a forwarding address?"

  The old head shook decisively. "Not a thing. Just packed and left, one Monday morning."

  All the loose ends tied up tight on a Monday morning. Nothing to cause suspicion. Nothing to worry about. Only a woman's almost paranoid hysteria,--and a glance at a clock. Not very much to unmask--incubus. And what could he do? What could he do? Start talking and land in an institution? Well, there was one thing.

  "Thanks again, Miss Collins."

  He went out.

  * * * * *

  Swanson didn't look like the general conception of a small-town newspaperman. One knew instinctively that his beard wouldn't have been tobacco-stained even if he'd cared to grow one. And he didn't have a bottle of bourbon in the file marked Miscellaneous, or if he did he didn't bring it out.

  "That never came from my paper," he said precisely. He handed the clipping back to Jim. "We don't use that type, for one thing. For another, Miss Simmons, so far as I know, wasn't killed here or anywhere else."

  "You knew her?"

  "I knew of her. I never met her."

  "What about this report of her death?"

  Swanson shrugged; tented manicured fingers. "It's a hoax. Any job printing shop with a Linotype could do it. In all likelihood it was some place in San Francisco. That's closest. It would be very difficult to check." His curiosity was showing.

  "I see. Well, thanks for your time and trouble, Mr. Swanson."

  "Not at all. Sorry I couldn't be of more help."

  One thing to do. One thing that must be done.

  Motors over the mountains. And riding with them, the numb resolve. Motors over the salt pans, the wheat lands, the corn belt.

  The stewardess stops again. "Coffee, sir? A sandwich, perhaps?"

  "I beg your-- Oh, no. No, thanks."

  She watches him covertly, uneasily, longing for the end of the run.

  Motors in the night.

  And the dull determination growing, strengthening.

  The airport, baggage, the ancient taxi with the piston slap, and at last the dark, familiar street.

  "Jim, you're back! Oh, Jim, darling. Next time they send you west I'm going too. I am!"

  "Okay, Jean, sure. Why not?"

  "What's the matter, dear? Oh, you're tired, of course. I should have known. Sit down, Jim. Let me get you a drink."

  "In a minute, Jean." Do it now now NOW! "Where's Joanna?"

  "She's in bed. Hours ago. Jim, has something--?"

  "Nothing, dear. I just want to look in on her. And freshen up a bit, of course."

  "Jim--"

  He smoothed away the worried frown with his forefinger.

  "In a minute, dear."

  She smiled uncertainly. "Hurry back, Jim."

  * * * * *

  The stairs unwind irrevocably, slow motion in a nightmare. The bedroom door opens, the hall light dim on the bed and the child's face. Incubus in the half dark.

  For a moment Jim remembered wondering somewhere, sometime, what strange powers of protection might be implicit in such a creature. As the thought came into his mind, Joanna stirred. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  He took one step toward the bed.

  The little girl eyes over their dusting of freckles slitted. Then they opened wide, became two glowing golden lakes that grew, and grew--

  There was the feeling of a great soundless explosion in his mind. Waves of cool burning in his brain, churning and bubbling in every unknown corner, every cranny. Here and there a cell, or a group of cells, blanked out, the complex molecules reverting, becoming new again. Ready for fresh punch marks. Synapses shorted with soundless cold fire, and waited in timeless stasis for rechannelling. The waves frothed, became ripples, were gone. He stood unmoving.

  What was it he was supposed to do? Let's see-- Tuck Joanna's blanket around her. But she was covered up snugly. Sleeping soundly, too, and for a few seconds he'd thought she was awake. And Jean was waiting downstairs, Jean and a cool drink.

  Oh, yes, stop in the bathroom.

  The stairs wind up again. It is good to be with one's family, relaxed in the well known chair. Not a worry in the world.

  He sat there, his mind at ease, not caring much about anything. He didn't even look up when the clock on the mantel whirred, and the ridiculous bird popped out of its nest to herald a new day.

  * * *

  Contents

  LAST RESORT

  by Stephen Bartholomew

  The phenomenon of "hysterical strength" at the physical level is well known. Wonder what the equivalent phenomenon at the psychological level might do....

  I inflated a rubber balloon and set it adrift. The idea was that in free fall the balloon would drift slowly in the direction of the leak. This was the first thing I did after I had discovered the trouble. I mean it was the first action I took. I had been thinking about it for some time. I had been thinking about what a great distance it was from Pacific Grove, California to Mars, and how I would never breathe the odor of eucalyptus again.

  I watched the white balloon floating in the middle of the cabin. Light reflected from a spot on its surface, and it made me think of a Moonglobe I used to keep on my desk when I was in college. I had turned off the fan, and tried to hold my breath to keep from disturbing the air. The balloon drifted slowly a few feet aft, wobbled there for a minute or two, then began to drift forward again. I decided to indulge in the rare luxury of a cigarette. I lighted one, reached over, and popped the balloon. The piece of rubber hung in the air, limp and twisted. I had not expected that trick to work.

  The rate of leakage was very low. It had been some thirty-six hours since I'd first noticed it. This was one of those things, of course, that were not supposed to happen in space, and often did. Every precaution had been taken against it. The outer shell of the ship was tough enough to stop medium-velocity meteoroids, and inside the shell was a self-sealing goo, like a tubeless tire. Evidently the goo hadn't worked. Something had got through the hull and made a pinhole leak. In fact the hole was so small that it had taken me nearly thirty-five hours to compute the rate of leakage exactly. But it was big enough, it would do.

  I had held the clipboard in my hand for a long time, rechecking the little black numbers on it again and again. Then I had warmed up the transmitter, raised Lunar Base, and reported what had happened. I had not reported before because I had not even been sure I had a leak. There's a normal seepage rate, of course; a certain amount of air will seep right through the molecular structure of the hull. That's what the reserve tanks are for. But I had been out a long time, and there wasn't enough left in the tanks to compensate for this. Not quite.

  So I reported to Base. The operator on the other end told me to stand by for instructions. That was for my morale. Then I spent some time thinking about Pacific Grove, and the white house there, and the stand of eucalyptus. Then I blew up the balloon and popped it. As I was watching the piece of rubber hang motionless in the air the receiver began clicking. I waited till it stopped, then pulled out the tape and read it. It said, HAVE YOU INSPECTED HULL? I switched on the send key and tapped out, JUST GOING TO. STAND BY.

  I opened the locker and broke
out my spacesuit. This was the first time I had put it on since lift-off. Without help, it took me nearly half an hour to get it on and then check it out. I always did hate wearing a spacesuit, it's like a straitjacket. In theory I could have kept it on, plugged directly into the ship's oxygen supply, and ridden all the way back to Earth that way. The trouble with that idea was that the suit wasn't designed for it. You couldn't eat or drink through the helmet, and no one had ever thought up a satisfactory method of removing body wastes. That would be the worst way to go, I thought, poisoned slowly in my own juices.

  When I finally did get the thing on, I went out the air lock. If the leak had been bad enough, I would have been able to see the air spurting out through the hole, a miniature geyser. But I found no more than what I expected. I crawled around the entire circumference of the hull and found only a thin silvery haze. The air as it leaked out formed a thin atmosphere around the hull, held there by the faint gravity of the ship's mass. Dust motes in the air, reflecting sunlight, were enough to hide any microscopic geyser spout. Before I re-entered the air lock I looked out into space, in the direction away from the sun. Out there, trailing far away, the air had formed a silver tail, I saw it faintly shimmering in the night. I was going to make a good comet.

  I got back inside and stripped off the suit. Then I raised Lunar Base again and tapped out, HAVE INSPECTED HULL. RESULTS NEGATIVE. A few minutes later the reply came back, STAND BY FOR INSTRUCTIONS. For my morale.

  * * * * *

  I lighted another cigarette and thought about it some more. I looked around at the interior of my expensive, ten-foot coffin. I figured I would last for about another seventy-five hours. Of course I could take cyanide and get it over with. But this wouldn't be such a bad way to go. Within seventy-five hours the last of my reserve tanks would be empty. Then I would just wait for the rest of the air to leak out of the cabin. First I would lose consciousness with anoxia. I'd hardly even notice. Then as the pressure got lower my body fluids would begin to evaporate.

  Once I had seen a mummy in a museum, it was some old prospector who had been lying in the Nevada desert for a hundred years or so. I was going to look like him, dried up, yellow, my teeth protruding in a grin, perfectly preserved. With no pilot, the ship would go into a cometary orbit around the sun. Maybe in a hundred years or so someone would come and take me back to a museum on earth.

  I began to think about my wife, Sandy. I got out a piece of paper and wrote a long letter to her. I thought, maybe she'll even get to read it some day. Writing gave me something to do. I wrote about the time we had gone up to the Sierras together and slept in a sleeping bag at the edge of a four-thousand foot cliff. And about the times we had gone out in our cabin cruiser, the time we both nearly drowned. And asked about our daughter Wendy, who would be four now. I remembered part of an old poem:

  Christ! That my love were in my arms, And I in my bed again!

  Writing was all right, until I realized that I had begun feeling sorry for myself, and I was letting it get into the letter. I put the letter aside and wondered what else I could do to kill time. I got out some of the film plates I'd made of the surface of Mars. Of course I had transmitted them all to Lunar Base, but it would have been nice if I could have delivered the original plates. I studied them for a while but didn't find anything I hadn't seen before. Well, I had done my job at least. I had orbited Mars, I had the glory of being the first American to do that. I had dropped the instrument package and transmitted all the data I could get back to Lunar. My only failure would be in not bringing back the ship.

  I remembered a conversation I'd had at the last International Space Symposium in Geneva. A buddy of mine and I had taken out one of the Soviet cosmonauts and got him drunk. He was a dignified sort of drunk, a Party member who told long, pointless Russian jokes with an unwavering, serious expression. He sat sideways on the bar stool, holding his glass of vodka between two fingers and staring straight ahead. He said one thing that I had never forgotten.

  "Do you know why we are ahead of you in space?" he had said, staring with dignity at the tall blonde at a nearby table. "It is because of your bourgeois sentimentality. You do not like risking men. You build a skyscraper in New York to house some insurance company. Two or three construction workers are maimed or killed on the job. One of your coal mines collapses and fifty men are trapped. Yet, look. You are afraid of losing men in space because of what the people at home might think. So you are too conservative, you avoid risks. So we are ahead of you. We send out a ship with three men aboard when you would risk only one. We are not sentimental, that is all. That is why we are ahead of you." He ordered another drink and stared into the mirror for several minutes, letting us think that over. Then he went on.

  "Yes, you are less scientific than we, less logical. Yet that is your advantage, too. You are more alert to the unprecedented, the unpredictable. You are always ready for the Wild Chance, the impossible possibility. You expect the unexpected. You hope for the hopeless. Being sentimental, you have imagination."

  His words came back to me. The unpredictable, the wild chance, the impossible possibility. That was all that could save me now. But what? Maybe another meteor would come along and plug the hole the first one had made. No. I had to think my way out of this one. But what if there was no way out?

  I pushed myself to the aft bulkhead, turned and looked forward to the instrument panel. I picked out the smallest meter face. I could just read the numbers on it. I told myself: When I can't read the numbers any more I'll know my vision is blurring from the beginning of anoxia. I thought: When that happens I'll key in the transmitter and tap out, TELL SANDY GOOD-BY.

  It would be dramatic anyhow.

  A withered mummy in a flying tomb.

  * * * * *

  The receiver began clicking again. They're still worried about my morale, I thought. I went over and pulled out the tape. It said:

  BRONSON HERE. SUGGEST YOU TRY LAST RESORT.

  Dr. Bronson was the project director. It was a moment before I realized what he meant. When I did I hesitated for several minutes. Then I shrugged and tapped out, O.K.

  I knew what had been happening down there. They had fed all the data I could give them through a computer, and the computer had said no dice. There was no solution to the problem, at least none that a computer could think of with the data available. There was still the Last Resort.

  I wondered if cyanide might not be more pleasant. Well, the exects would have scientific interest anyway. The Last Resort was still Top Secret. And highly experimental. It was a new drug with a name a foot long, called LRXD for short. It had come out of the old experiments with lysergic acid and mescalin. I had never heard of its existence until a few hours before lift-off from Lunar Base. Then Dr. Bronson had given me a single ampule of the stuff. He had held it up to the light, looking through it. He said, "This is called LRXD. No one knows exactly what it will do. The lab boys say the 'LR' stands for Last Resort."

  What it was supposed to do was increase mental efficiency in human beings. Sometimes it did. They had given it to one volunteer and then shown him an equation which it had taken a computer ten minutes to solve. He wrote down the answer at once, apparently having gone through the entire process in his head instantaneously.

  Dr. Bronson told me, "It isn't just a matter of I.Q. It increases the total level of consciousness. Ordinarily the human brain screens out thousands of irrelevant stimuli. You're not aware of your watch ticking, or the fly on the wall, or your own body odor. You just don't notice them. But under LRXD, the brain becomes aware of everything simultaneously. Nothing is screened out. Furthermore, the subject is capable of correlating everything. The human brain becomes as efficient as a Mark 60 computer, with the advantage of imagination and intuition. We don't know how it works yet, or exactly what it does. I hate to say this. But there's even some evidence that the drug increases telepathic ability."

  But then again, three of the volunteers had gone insane after taking the drug. T
wo had died. On some of the others there was no apparent effect at all.

  "We don't even know whether the effects are permanent or temporary," Bronson had added.

  So now I was supposed to take this Last Resort and then try to think of a way out of my predicament, with my I.Q. boosted up to a thousand or so. It made me think of my college days, when I had stayed up all night on benzedrine, writing term papers. I remembered Bronson's description of one of the volunteers who had gone insane, and shuddered. Well, I had nothing to lose.

  "It is what its name implies," Bronson had said. "To be used only in extreme emergency. Only when you have nothing to lose."

  I had put the ampule away in the medicine locker and deliberately forgotten about it. Now I got it out again and held it up to the light as Bronson had done. Milky, white. I strapped myself to the acceleration couch, filled a syringe, and swabbed my arm. I looked at the letter I had started and probably would never finish. I rammed the needle in.

  * * * * *

  The hallucinations began within five minutes. This was normal, Bronson had said. I waited, gripping the armrests of the couch, hoping I would not begin believing in what I saw.

  First there was the meter face directly in front of me. It was blue-green. I had never really seen before what color it was. It was like a round, bright flame. I stared at it, becoming hypnotized. Finally I couldn't stand it any more, I reached over and switched off the panel lights. Then the meter face became the blackest darkness I had ever seen, it was no longer a flat disk, but the entrance to a long, black tunnel, endless and narrow. I wanted to enter the tunnel and--Quickly I shifted my gaze. A gas tube rectifier caught my attention. This was like the meter face, only worse. A cloud of intense blue, flickering, shimmering--As I stared at it the cloud seemed to be expanding, growing, forever flickering and shimmering until it became vast, it filled the universe, pulsating with energy, it was a kind of blue I had never seen before.... I had never seen color before. There was a red plastic safety guard over one of the toggle switches. Suddenly it seemed alive, rather the red was alive, the color was no longer part of the object, it was an entity in itself, blazing like flame, liberated from matter, it was a living drop of blood, afire.