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

by Various

  He turned to the radio operator. "Tune in the control room. Tell the captain I want every member of the crew lined up on this screen immediately."

  The face in the visiplate paled. "I can't do that, sir. Ship's regulations--"

  Lawton transfixed the operator with an irate stare. "The captain told you to report directly to me, didn't he?"

  "Yes sir, but--"

  "If you don't want to be cashiered, snap into it."

  "Yes--yessir."

  The captain's startled face preceded the duty-muster visiview by a full minute, seeming to project outward from the screen. The veins on his neck were thick blue cords.

  "Dave," he croaked. "Are you out of your mind? What good will talking do now?"

  "Are the men lined up?" Lawton rapped, impatiently.

  Forrester nodded. "They're all in the engine room, Dave."

  "Good. Block them in."

  The captain's face receded, and a scene of tragic horror filled the opalescent visiplate. The men were not standing at attention at all. They were slumping against the Perseus' central charging plant in attitudes of abject despair.

  * * * * *

  Madness burned in the eyes of three or four of them. Others had torn open their shirts, and raked their flesh with their nails. Petty officer Caldwell was standing as straight as a totem pole, clenching and unclenching his hands. The second assistant engineer was sticking out his tongue. His face was deadpan, which made what was obviously a terror reflex look like an idiot's grimace.

  Lawton moistened his lips. "Men, listen to me. There is some sort of plant outside that is giving off deliriant fumes. A few of us seem to be immune to it.

  "I'm not immune, but I'm fighting it, and all of you boys can fight it too. I want you to fight it to the top of your courage. You can fight anything when you know that just around the corner is freedom from a beastliness that deserves to be licked--even if it's only a plant.

  "Men, we're blasting our way free. The bubble's wearing thin. Any minute now the plants beneath us may fall with a soggy plop into the Atlantic Ocean.

  "I want every man jack aboard this ship to stand at his post and obey orders. Right this minute you look like something the cat dragged in. But most men who cover themselves with glory start off looking even worse than you do."

  He smiled wryly.

  "I guess that's all. I've never had to make a speech in my life, and I'd hate like hell to start now."

  It was petty officer Caldwell who started the chant. He started it, and the men took it up until it was coming from all of them in a full-throated roar.

  I'm a tough, true-hearted skyman, Careless and all that, d'ye see? Never at fate a railer, What is time or tide to me?

  All must die when fate shall will it, I can never die but once, I'm a tough, true-hearted skyman; He who fears death is a dunce.

  Lawton squared his shoulders. With a crew like that nothing could stop him! Ah, his energies were surging high. The deliriant weed held no terrors for him now. They were stout-hearted lads and he'd go to hell with them cheerfully, if need be.

  It wasn't easy to wait. The next half hour was filled with a steadily mounting tension as Lawton moved like a young tornado about the ship, issuing orders and seeing that each man was at his post.

  "Steady, Jimmy. The way to fight a deliriant is to keep your mind on a set task. Keep sweating, lad."

  "Harry, that winch needs tightening. We can't afford to miss a trick."

  "Yeah, it will come suddenly. We've got to get the rotaries started the instant the bottom drops out."

  He was with the captain and Slashaway in the control room when it came. There was a sudden, grinding jolt, and the captain's desk started moving toward the quartz port, carrying Lawton with it.

  "Holy Jiminy cricket," exclaimed Slashaway.

  The deck tilted sharply; then righted itself. A sudden gush of clear, cold air came through the ventilation valves as the triple rotaries started up with a roar.

  Lawton and the captain reached the quartz port simultaneously. Shoulder to shoulder they stood staring down at the storm-tossed Atlantic, electrified by what they saw.

  Floating on the waves far beneath them was an undulating mass of vegetation, its surface flecked with glinting foam. As it rose and fell in waning sunlight a tainted seepage spread about it, defiling the clean surface of the sea.

  But it wasn't the floating mass which drew a gasp from Forrester, and caused Lawton's scalp to prickle. Crawling slowly across that Sargasso-like island of noxious vegetation was a huge, elongated shape which bore a nauseous resemblance to a mottled garden slug.

  Forrester was trembling visibly when he turned from the quartz port.

  "God, Dave, that would have been the last straw. Animal life. Dave, I--I can't realize we're actually out of it."

  "We're out, all right," Lawton said, hoarsely. "Just in time, too. Skipper, you'd better issue grog all around. The men will be needing it. I'm taking mine straight. You've accused me of being primitive. Wait till you see me an hour from now."

  Dr. Stephen Halday stood in the door of his Appalachian mountain laboratory staring out into the pine-scented dusk, a worried expression on his bland, small-featured face. It had happened again. A portion of his experiment had soared skyward, in a very loose group of highly energized wavicles. He wondered if it wouldn't form a sort of sub-electronic macrocosm high in the stratosphere, altering even the air and dust particles which had spurted up with it, its uncharged atomic particles combining with hydrogen and creating new molecular arrangements.

  If such were the case there would be eight of them now. His bubbles, floating through the sky. They couldn't possibly harm anything--way up there in the stratosphere. But he felt a little uneasy about it all the same. He'd have to be more careful in the future, he told himself. Much more careful. He didn't want the Controllers to turn back the clock of civilization a century by stopping all atom-smashing experiments.

  * * *

  Contents

  NINE MEN IN TIME

  By Noel Loomis

  The idea of sending a man back in time to re-do a job he's botched, so that a deadline can still be met--added to the thought of duplicating a man so there'll be two doing the same work at the same time--adds up to a production-manager's dream. But any dream can suddenly shift into a nightmare...

  The receivers, two of them lawyers, had long faces when they sat down across from my desk in the office of the Imperial Printing Company.

  "Frankly, Mr. Shane," said the older one, "it is a very grave question in our minds whether we should try to continue to operate the business or whether we should close the plant and liquidate the machinery and equipment the best we can."

  I was stunned. "I don't understand," I said helplessly. "We've been doing a nice business--and at a profit--in the year I've been here." It was my first big job, and I wanted to make good. I thought I had made good, but here they were jerking the floor out from under me, and I couldn't make any sense out of it.

  "Well," said one, "the business isn't showing the profit we expected."

  "What you need is a used-car lot," I said pointedly.

  The elder man cleared his throat. "Now look, Mr. Shane, suppose we say three months."

  "What do you mean--three months?"

  "We'll allow you to go ahead for three months. If the business doesn't show a distinct upturn by then--" He raised his eyebrows.

  I swallowed hard. So that was it, then.

  They even had the date set for the execution, and I knew they intended to go through with it. Only a revolution would change that.

  I wanted that job; it was my chance to make a name for myself. If they should close the plant now, I'd have a black eye. You can't go around asking for a job and saying, "But I was making money for them." They'll wonder what else was wrong.

  I thought I knew why they were so willing to close the plant; it was part of an estate, and the way things were, it took a lot of their time each month for not too big a fe
e. But if the estate should be liquidated--well, figure it out yourself. This business was all mixed up between an administratorship and a receivership, and the attorney's fees for liquidation would be a percentage of a hundred-thousand-dollar shop. It could run to a nice sum. They'd sell out, collect their fee, and forget it. A nice clean deal for them. And no more worry.

  That is what I was up against, so perhaps it was inevitable that I should find Dr. Hudson--Lawrence Edward Hudson. That was 1983, really about the beginning of the scientific age in industry, and I dug this idea up out of the back of my head where it had been for some time. Dr. Hudson was the result. I did not label him efficiency-expert, for printers have always been notoriously allergic to that title. I called him production-engineer.

  He was a small, thin-faced man with a face that seemed to all flow into a point where his nose should have been, and he started talking things over with me before he got his coat off.

  "Printing," he said, "is really the backward industry. There has been no basic advance since the invention of the linecasting machine around 1890, and possibly the development of offset printing."

  "That," I said, "is why you are here--to bring out something startling."

  "Well," he said, "you've heard the old one about the man who had something to do with each hand, and if you'd give him a broom he could sweep out the shop, too?" He leaned forward, his nose jutting at me, and said impressively, "Mr. Shane, we shall make that come literally true; we'll have men working in two places at once before we're through."

  "Okay."

  "In the meantime, there are certain old-fashioned fundamental principles on which we shall start. I shall be here at seven-thirty in the morning."

  I should have known. Man, being mass, possesses inertia, mentally as well as physically, and therefore offers a certain amount of resistance to being kicked around. That applies to printers as well as to people. But at that time I was too worried. I gave Dr. Hudson full authority.

  * * * * *

  He was there at seven-thirty the next morning, as he had said. At eight, the printers were standing around the time-clock, waiting for it to click the hour. It clicked, but the man nearest it was smoking a cigarette. He punched his card and then stood there, finishing the cigarette.

  Dr. Hudson stepped up. "Gentlemen," he said, "it is now four minutes past eight. Starting-time is eight o'clock." He looked at his watch and compared it with the clock. "Please do your visiting and your smoking on your own time," he said coldly.

  Well, it bothered me a little. I'd never handled them that way--and anyway, who cared about five minutes? The men would set just so much type, or do so much work. If they lost five minutes in one place, they generally made it up somewhere else. But this was Dr. Hudson's job.

  It was nice that there had been no insolence--only a couple of raised eyebrows. Dr. Hudson's gesture had had its effect. They knew now who was boss.

  For the next few days they kept their heads up. Production did not improve much, but I personally had not expected it to do that. I think Dr. Hudson had not expected it, either.

  It was about three days after Dr. Hudson arrived, that a big job came in from the Legal Publishing Company--a three-volume, four-thousand-page record for the U. S. circuit court. They could not handle the typesetting, so they farmed that part out to us.

  It had to be delivered exactly one week before the deadline that had been set by the receivers for closing the plant. I very nearly turned it down, but Dr. Hudson's eyes glittered when he saw it. "Just what we need," he said.

  "That's almost two thousand galleys of type," I reminded him, "besides our regular stuff." I was very dubious.

  But Dr. Hudson was enthusiastic. "We'll make history," he promised.

  Well, we did. Union or not, the men would have to learn to do things the modern way. That is what I told the chairman when he protested against having the men go back in time to set a job over. That had been my first idea, executed by Dr. Hudson.

  As I said, Dr. Hudson was an experimental physicist. He was, you might say, a super-physicist, because he had specialized in finding ways to do all the things which traditionally were impossible, like traveling in time.

  So when the Monotype casterman set a job in Caslon that should have been set in Century, I turned him over to Dr. Hudson. The doctor took him into the laboratory and sent him back two days in time and had him do the job over--but right. The casterman didn't like it, but he didn't know what to do about it.

  There was plenty of buzzing that afternoon among the men, especially when the job, re-set in the correct face--or rather, set in the correct face, because this now was the first time it had been set--was put on the dump. I gave the boys five minutes to crowd around and look at the proof and then I broke it up. I was exultant. It didn't occur to me then that a man could be too ambitious.

  That afternoon the chairman came in, and I was ready for him. "We are not," I pointed out, "violating our union contract."

  "But you made the casterman set the job twice, and he doesn't get paid for it."

  "We pay the casterman two dollars an hour for seven hours a day. When he's here more than seven hours, he'll get time and a half," I said triumphantly.

  The chairman frowned, but I didn't relax; I was on top and I knew it. "He set the job wrong in the first place," I pointed out, "and he got paid for that. Is there any reason why he shouldn't correct his own mistake, if it doesn't take any of his time?"

  "It does take time," he insisted.

  "No. He's only re-living that four hours and doing the job right instead of wrong; you can't find any fault with that."

  And he couldn't. I felt wonderful. I wanted to jump and shout, but I compromised by taking Dr. Hudson down for a gleeful drink and planning our next tactic.

  We also settled a point of strategy. We decided to confuse them with a few minor things before springing our next real item--which would be, to put it mildly, revolutionary.

  Things looked pretty good. The only thing that bothered me was that we hadn't started the big job yet.

  * * * * *

  The next morning I saw a new face at the keyboard of one of our linecasting machines. I had long ago adopted democracy as a good policy, so now I stopped to introduce myself. "I'm J. J. Shane, the manager."

  His hands, with incredibly long fingers, had been just flowing over the keyboard--that is the only way to describe it--with the long fingers moving down an inch or so whenever they were above the right key, and doing it all so smoothly it was hard to realize he was actually composing lines. His hands seemed to flow back and forth like the tide, and yet he was setting twenty ems eight-point and keeping the machine hung. Here, I thought right away, was a valuable man. This fellow could be a pace-setter if we would handle him right.

  But when I spoke to him and held out my hand, he looked at me for a second without missing a stroke, then his hands dropped away from the keyboard and he started to unfold himself from the chair.

  "You don't need to get up," I said hastily. "I don't want to take up any of your time."

  But he finished unfolding himself and stood up. "I have plenty of time," he said. He was over seven feet tall, and that meant a foot and a half over me--and very thin. His clothes looked pretty weatherbeaten, as if maybe he'd been caught in a few rainstorms.

  "Jones," said his booming voice from somewhere far above me. "High-Pockets Jones, sometimes known as the Dean of Barn-stormers."

  I leaned back to look up at him. His face was as weatherbeaten as his clothes. I recognized the reddish tan that comes from facing a hot wind on the top of a moving boxcar. He was obviously a bum, and probably wouldn't be with us long, but there was something almost of nobility in his eyes--calmness, gentleness, or perhaps just the knowledge of having been in many, many situations and the experience gained from getting out of them, and the self-assurance that he would always be able to get out of any situation.

  I reached up to shake hands. "Yes, I've heard of you," I said. "You're sort of
a throwback to the days when they needed barnstormers to correct bad working-conditions, aren't you?"

  He chose to pass that remark, "I've heard of you, too," he said, that last word sounding like the low string on a bull fiddle.

  I laughed quickly but efficiently--shortly, I believe they call it. "Nothing good, I hope."

  High-Pockets Jones paused a moment before he answered: "Not bad, until lately."

  It took me a moment or two to realize what he had said. I bent back to look at his face. He was quite sober about it.

  "Okay," I said hastily. "I don't want to keep you from your work."

  I worried a little about High-Pockets. I had heard a lot about him; he was a sort of mystery man in the printing business, going from place to place, wherever printers felt they were having trouble, and trying to straighten things out.

  The stories about him indicated that he had some odd ways of doing that, based largely on a sort of legendary influence that he had over machinery. I remembered even the theory that all machinery was negatively charged with some sort of "personal" electricity, and that High-Pockets--having been hit by lightning--had a terrifically high charge of positive electricity of the same sort, which enabled him to do miraculous things on occasion with machinery--especially linecasting machines.

  Well, I dismissed that as a bunch of talk, but what I didn't quite like was the fact that High-Pockets traditionally appeared in places where he was needed to straighten out things for the men.

  * * * * *

  I went into conference with Dr. Hudson, and he agreed with me that we should go right ahead; but we'd keep an eye on High-Pockets Jones, and at the first sign of interference Mr. Jones would find himself in a great deal of trouble. I would even, I decided, stoop to having him thrown in jail on a phony charge, if that should be necessary.

  By this time we had started on the Legal Printing Company job, and we went ahead with our next offensive. Mind-reading came first. Dr. Hudson installed a black box at the water-fountain, and he explained to the men what it was for. He had a private wire to his desk, and a transformer that turned the current from the box back into thoughts. It was quite efficient. Some of the thoughts we got the first day were vituperative, some were quite obscene, and some were pretty feeble, but that didn't matter. It got the boys to worrying, and it saved us a bottle of spring water a day.