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

by Various

  Mike had friends--friends who would never rat on him while their police records remained in Mike's safe and they could count on him for protection.

  She started to rise, to go to Joe and warn him that Mike would be coming back. But despair flooded her and the impulse died. The way Joe felt about her was a thing too big to stop ...

  Joe saw her slim against the light, and his thoughts were like the sea surge, wild, unruly.

  Maybe Mike will get me. Maybe I'll be dead by this time tomorrow. Maybe I'm crazy to love her the way I do ...

  Her hair against the light, a tumbled mass of spun gold.

  Always a woman bothering me for as long as I can remember. Molly, Anne, Janice ... Some were good for me and some were bad.

  You see a woman on the street walking ahead of you, hips swaying, and you think: I don't even know her name but I'd like to crush her in my arms!

  I guess every guy feels like that about every pretty woman he sees. Even about some that aren't so pretty. But then you get to know and like a woman, and you don't feel that way so much. You respect her and you don't let yourself feel that way.

  Then something happens. You love her so much it's like the first time again but with a whole lot added. You love her so much you'd die to make her happy.

  * * * * *

  Joe was shaking when he slipped into the chair left vacant by Mike and reached out for both her hands.

  "I'm taking you away tonight," he said. "You're coming with me."

  Joe was scared, she knew. But he didn't want her to know. His hands were like ice and his fear blended with her own fear as their hands met.

  "He'll kill you, Joe! You've got to forget me!" she sobbed.

  "I'm not afraid of him. I'm stronger than you think. He won't dare come at me with a gun, not here before all these people. If he comes at me with his fists I'll hook a solid left to his jaw that will stretch him out cold!"

  She knew he wasn't deceiving himself. Joe didn't want to die any more than she did.

  The Man from Time had an impulse to get up, walk over to the two frightened children and comfort them with a reassuring smile. He sat watching, feeling their fear beating in tumultuous waves into his brain. Fear in the minds of a boy and a girl because they desperately wanted one another!

  He looked steadily at them and his eyes spoke to them ...

  Life is greater than you know. If you could travel in Time, and see how great is man's courage--if you could see all of his triumphs over despair and grief and pain--you would know that there is nothing to fear! Nothing at all!

  Joe rose from the table, suddenly calm, quiet.

  "Come on," he said quietly. "We're getting out of here right now. My car's outside and if Mike tries to stop us I'll fix him!"

  The boy and the girl walked toward the door together, a young and extremely pretty girl and a boy grown suddenly to the full stature of a man.

  Rather regretfully Moonson watched them go. As they reached the door the girl turned and smiled and the boy paused too--and they both smiled suddenly at the man in the bathing trunks.

  Then they were gone.

  Moonson got up as they disappeared, left the tavern.

  It was dark when he reached the cabin. He was dog-tired, and when he saw the seated man through the lighted window a great longing for companionship came upon him.

  He forgot that he couldn't talk to the man, forgot the language difficulty completely. But before this insurmountable element occurred to him he was inside the cabin.

  Once there he saw that the problem solved itself--the man was a writer and he had been drinking steadily for hours. So the man did all of the talking, not wanting or waiting for an answer.

  A youngish, handsome man he was, with graying temples and keenly observant eyes. The instant he saw Moonson he started to talk.

  "Welcome, stranger," he said. "Been taking a dip in the ocean, eh? Can't say I'd enjoy it, this late in the season!"

  Moonson was afraid at first that his silence might discourage the writer, but he did not know writers ...

  "It's good to have someone to talk to," the writer went on. "I've been sitting here all day trying to write. I'll tell you something you may not know--you can go to the finest hotels, and you can open case after case of the finest wine, and you still can't get started sometimes."

  The writer's face seemed suddenly to age. Fear came into his eyes and he raised the bottle to his lips, faced away from his guest as he drank as if ashamed of what he must do to escape despair every time he faced his fear.

  He was trying to write himself back into fame. His greatest moment had come years before when his golden pen had glorified a generation of madcaps.

  For one deathless moment his genius had carried him to the heights, and a white blaze of publicity had given him a halo of glory. Later had come lean and bitter years until finally his reputation dwindled like a gutted candle in a wintry room at midnight.

  He could still write but now fear and remorse walked with him and would give him no peace. He was cruelly afraid most of the time.

  Moonson listened to the writer's thoughts in heart-stricken silence--thoughts so tragic they seemed out of keeping with the natural and beautiful rhythms of his speech. He had never imagined that a sensitive and imaginative man--an artist--could be so completely abandoned by the society his genius had helped to enrich.

  Back and forth the writer paced, baring his inmost thoughts ... His wife was desperately ill and the future looked completely black. How could he summon the strength of will to go on, let alone to write?

  He said fiercely, "It's all right for you to talk--"

  He stopped, seeming to realize for the first time that the big man sitting in an easy chair by the window had made no attempt to speak.

  It seemed incredible, but the big man had listened in complete silence, and with such quiet assurance that his silence had taken on an eloquence that inspired absolute trust.

  He had always known there were a few people like that in the world, people whose sympathy and understanding you could take for granted. There was a fearlessness in such people which made them stand out from the crowd, stone-markers in a desert waste to lend assurance to a tired wayfarer by its sturdy permanence, its sun-mirroring strength.

  There were a few people like that in the world but you sometimes went a lifetime without meeting one. The big man sat there smiling at him, calmly exuding the serenity of one who has seen life from its tangled, inaccessible roots outward and testifies from experience that the entire growth is sound.

  The writer stopped pacing suddenly and drew himself erect. As he stared into the big man's eyes his fears seemed to fade away. Confidence returned to him like the surge of the sea in great shining waves of creativeness.

  * * * * *

  He knew suddenly that he could lose himself in his work again, could tap the bright resonant bell of his genius until its golden voice rang out through eternity. He had another great book in him and it would get written now. It would get written ...

  "You've helped me!" he almost shouted. "You've helped me more than you know. I can't tell you how grateful I am to you. You don't know what it means to be so paralyzed with fright that you can't write at all!"

  The Man from Time was silent but his eyes shone curiously.

  The writer turned to a bookcase and removed a volume in a faded cover that had once been bright with rainbow colors. He sat down and wrote an inscription on the flyleaf.

  Then he rose and handed the book to his visitor with a slight bow. He was smiling now.

  "This was my first-born!" he said.

  The Man from Time looked at the title first ... THIS SIDE OF PARADISE.

  Then he opened the book and read what the author had written on the flyleaf:

  With warm gratefulness for a courage which brought back the sun.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Moonson bowed his thanks, turned and left the cabin.

  Morning found him walking across fresh meadowla
nds with the dew glistening on his bare head and broad, straight shoulders.

  They'd never find him, he told himself hopelessly. They'd never find him because Time was too vast to pinpoint one man in such a vast waste of years. The towering crests of each age might be visible but there could be no returning to one tiny insignificant spot in the mighty ocean of Time.

  As he walked his eyes searched for the field and the winding road he'd followed into town. Only yesterday this road had seemed to beckon and he had followed, eager to explore an age so primitive that mental communication from mind to mind had not yet replaced human speech.

  Now he knew that the speech faculty which mankind had long outgrown would never cease to act as a barrier between himself and the men and women of this era of the past. Without it he could not hope to find complete understanding and sympathy here.

  He was still alone and soon winter would come and the sky grow cold and empty ...

  The Time machine materialized so suddenly before him that for an instant his mind refused to accept it as more than a torturing illusion conjured up by the turbulence of his thoughts. All at once it towered in his path, bright and shining, and he moved forward over the dew-drenched grass until he was brought up short by a joy so overwhelming that it seemed to him that his heart must burst.

  * * * * *

  Rutella emerged from the machine with a gay little laugh, as if his stunned expression was the most amusing in the world.

  "Hold still and let me kiss you, darling," her mind said to his.

  She stood in the dew-bright grass on tiptoe, her sleek dark hair falling to her shoulders, an extraordinarily pretty girl to be the wife of a man so tormented.

  "You found me!" his thoughts exulted. "You came back alone and searched until you found me!"

  She nodded, her eyes shining. So Time wasn't too vast to pinpoint after all, not when two people were so securely wedded in mind and heart that their thoughts could build a bridge across Time.

  "The Bureau of Emotional Adjustment analyzed everything I told them. Your psycho-graph ran to fifty-seven pages, but it was your desperate loneliness which guided me to you."

  She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it.

  "You see, darling, a compulsive fear isn't easy to conquer. No man or woman can conquer it alone. Historians tell us that when the first passenger rocket started out for Mars, Space Fear took men by surprise in the same way your fear gripped you. The loneliness, the utter desolation of space, was too much for a human mind to endure."

  She smiled her love. "We're going back. We'll face it together and we'll conquer it together. You won't be alone now. Darling, don't you see--it's because you aren't a clod, because you're sensitive and imaginative that you experience fear. It's not anything to be ashamed of. You were simply the first man on Earth to develop a new and completely different kind of fear--Time Fear."

  Moonson put out his hand and gently touched his wife's hair.

  Ascending into the Time Observatory a thought came unbidden into his mind: Others he saved, himself he could not save.

  But that wasn't true at all now.

  He could help himself now. He would never be alone again! When guided by the sure hand of love and complete trust, self-knowledge could be a shining weapon. The trip back might be difficult, but holding tight to his wife's hand he felt no misgivings, no fear.

  * * *

  Contents

  THE MAN THE MARTIANS MADE

  By Frank Belknap Long

  No mortal had ever seen the Martians, but they had heard their whisperings--without knowing the terrible secret they kept hidden.

  There was death in the camp.

  I knew when I awoke that it had come to stand with us in the night and was waiting now for the day to break and flood the desert with light. There was a prickling at the base of my scalp and I was drenched with cold sweat.

  I had an impulse to leap up and go stumbling about in the darkness. But I disciplined myself. I crossed my arms and waited for the sky to grow bright.

  Daybreak on Mars is like nothing you've ever dreamed about. You wake up in the morning, and there it is--bright and clear and shining. You pinch yourself, you sit up straight, but it doesn't vanish.

  Then you stare at your hands with the big callouses. You reach for a mirror to take a look at your face. That's not so good. That's where ugliness enters the picture. You look around and you see Ralph. You see Harry. You see the women.

  On Earth a woman may not look her glamorous best in the harsh light of early dawn, but if she's really beautiful she doesn't look too bad. On Mars even the most beautiful woman looks angry on arising, too weary and tormented by human shortcomings to take a prefabricated metal shack and turn it into a real home for a man.

  You have to make allowances for a lot of things on Mars. You have to start right off by accepting hardship and privation as your daily lot. You have to get accustomed to living in construction camps in the desert, with the red dust making you feel all hollow and dried up inside. Making you feel like a drum, a shriveled pea pod, a salted fish hung up to dry. Dust inside of you, rattling around, canal water seepage rotting the soles of your boots.

  So you wake up and you stare. The night before you'd collected driftwood and stacked it by the fire. The driftwood has disappeared. Someone has stolen your very precious driftwood. The Martians? Guess again.

  You get up and you walk straight up to Ralph with your shoulders squared. You say, "Ralph, why in hell did you have to steal my driftwood?"

  In your mind you say that. You say it to Dick, you say it to Harry. But what you really say is, "Larsen was here again last night!"

  You say, I put a fish on to boil and Larsen ate it. I had a nice deck of cards, all shiny and new, and Larsen marked them up. It wasn't me cheating. It was Larsen hoping I'd win so that he could waylay me in the desert and get all of the money away from me.

  You have a girl. There aren't too many girls in the camps with laughter and light and fire in them. But there are a few, and if you're lucky you take a fancy to one particular girl--her full red lips and her spun gold hair. All of a sudden she disappears. Somebody runs off with her. It's Larsen.

  In every man there is a slumbering giant. When life roars about you on a world that's rugged and new you've got to go on respecting the lads who have thrown in their lot with you, even when their impulses are as harsh as the glint of sunlight on a desert-polished tombstone.

  You think of a name--Larsen. You start from scratch and you build Larsen up until you have a clear picture of him in your mind. You build him up until he's a great shouting, brawling, golden man like Paul Bunyon.

  Even a wicked legend can seem golden on Mars. Larsen wasn't just my slumbering giant--or Dick's, or Harry's. He was the slumbering giant in all of us, and that's what made him so tremendous. Anything gigantic has beauty and power and drive to it.

  Alone we couldn't do anything with Larsen's gusto, so when some great act of wickedness was done with gusto how could it be us? Here comes Larsen! He'll shoulder all the guilt, but he won't feel guilty because he's the first man in Eden, the child who never grew up, the laughing boy, Hercules balancing the world on his shoulders and looking for a woman with long shining tresses and eyes like the stars of heaven to bend to his will.

  If such a woman came to life in Hercules' arms would you like the job of stopping him from sending the world crashing? Would you care to try?

  Don't you see? Larsen was closer to us than breathing and as necessary as food and drink and our dreams of a brighter tomorrow. Don't think we didn't hate him at times. Don't think we didn't curse and revile him. You may glorify a legend from here to eternity, but the luster never remains completely untarnished.

  Larsen wouldn't have seemed completely real to us if we hadn't given him muscles that could tire and eyes that could blink shut in weariness. Larsen had to sleep, just as we did. He'd disappear for days.

  We'd wink and say, "Larsen's getting a good long rest this time. But he'
ll be back with something new up his sleeve, don't you worry!"

  We could joke about it, sure. When Larsen stole or cheated we could pretend we were playing a game with loaded dice--not really a deadly game, but a game full of sound and fury with a great rousing outburst of merriment at the end of it.

  But there are deadlier games by far. I lay motionless, my arms locked across my chest, sweating from every pore. I stared at Harry. We'd been working all night digging a well, and in a few days water would be bubbling up sweet and cool and we wouldn't have to go to the canal to fill our cooking utensils. Harry was blinking and stirring and I could tell just by looking at him that he was uneasy too. I looked beyond him at the circle of shacks.

  Most of us were sleeping in the open, but there were a few youngsters in the shacks and women too worn out with drudgery to care much whether they slept in smothering darkness or under the clear cold light of the stars.

  I got slowly to my knees, scooped up a handful of sand, and let it dribble slowly through my fingers. Harry looked straight at me and his eyes widened in alarm. It must have been the look on my face. He arose and crossed to where I was sitting, his mouth twitching slightly. There was nothing very reassuring about Harry. Life had not been kind to him and he had resigned himself to accepting the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without protest. He had one of those emaciated, almost skull-like faces which terrify children, and make women want to cry.

  "You don't look well, Tom," he said. "You've been driving yourself too hard."

  I looked away quickly. I had to tell him, but anything terrifying could demoralize Harry and make him throw his arm before his face in blind panic. But I couldn't keep it locked up inside me an instant longer.

  "Sit down, Harry," I whispered. "I want to talk to you. No sense in waking the others."

  "Oh," he said.