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

by Various

"Why all this, then, Doc? Why?"

  "Because," the little doctor hesitated--and then shrugged. "I may as well tell you. It's not going to make any difference now, anyway. It was all done to put him out for several hours until--"

  "Until what, Doc?" Donnelly's tone was harsh and uncompromising.

  "You must understand that I'm under orders. I'm doing what is done in all these cases. Though heaven help me, I wish I didn't have to--"

  "Doc," Donnelly roared. "You have been contradicting yourself all along and I intend to find out why."

  "There isn't much more to find out.... Wait."

  The doctor strode quickly over to the radio, and glanced at his wristwatch. His face haggard with strain, he turned to Williams. "Will you contact the MR4, please?"

  He held up a silencing hand to Donnelly. "There's a reason behind all this. Just wait for a moment, please. Just wait and listen--"

  * * * * *

  It was a fumbling-fingered ten minutes later, after Donnelly had signed off, that Hal Burnett finally found the tiny red plastic box in the little emergency medical kit. Trembling he held it in his hand as he floated in free fall.

  It was a little red key--a key to Earth, to life and to the chance to ram every cold, precise, contemptuous word down his father's over-analytical mouth.

  He didn't really hate the old man but he knew that he feared him. He feared also that his father might be right about him after all. Who in his own mind, he thought bitterly, should know a son better than that son's own father.

  A quick surge of elation swept over him as he swam quickly to the Tele-screen and switched it on. It wasn't a bit like saying good-bye to an old friend, he thought, as he gazed at the flaming prominences not so far below him. After a while he switched the instrument off and swam triumphantly back to his bunk.

  There were some tri-dimensional color slides in the ditty bag hanging by his bunk. He took them out and looked at them. None of them were of his father.

  The girl was there, though. She was a small, cute girl with a rainbow of laughter wreathed about her. She hadn't been really important before, but she sure was important now that he was going to live. His old man had foretold that, too.

  After a little while he put the slides back in the portable holder and broke open the plastic box. It contained a gleaming hypo filled with what looked like a small quantity of water. There was an odd peppermint-like odor about it.

  There were no instructions. Just the needle and the little red box.

  He wondered how many hours he would have to wait before help would come. But that didn't matter. He would be asleep, anyway.

  The temperature had climbed. It was burning, roaring hot.

  Gently he slid the needle into his arm and depressed the plunger....

  * * * * *

  The MR4 continued to spin even more lazily in space. Her sun-blackened hull, pitted by the glancing blows of by-passing meteor fragments, was slowly overheating. Her refrigeration units were gradually breaking down under their tremendous overload.

  She was inching in ever-shortening circles always in the direction of the massive, molten globe not so far below....

  Sometime later, Hal Burnett awakened slowly, as if from some distant and dimly-remembered dream. The haze of a deep and foggy sleep clung to the unfamiliar mass that was his mind.

  A distant alarm bell had rung deep within the primitive, subcortical levels of his brain. It had rung--but not loudly nor insistently enough. It had failed to cut through the eddying fog that was rising slowly into his ebbing consciousness.

  He did not remember undoing the straps with benumbed and aching fingers. He did not remember the befogged and stumbling "walk" into the Control Room. Dimly, as if viewing himself and the room from a distant world, he switched on the dying hum of the radio and tried futilely to transmit a message.

  The faint crackle of the radio grew more distant. He slumped forward in the bucket seat, his head striking the controls in front of him--and, for him, the sounds of the muted radio died out completely.

  The burning heat seared into the metal hull of the MR4. Its outer hull was almost at the boiling point. Inside, it was a burning, suffocating hell. Perhaps it was the heat that aroused Hal Burnett once again. Somehow he managed to stumble to the Tele-screen. With the last vestige of a waning strength, he managed to switch it on and hold himself erect.

  The stupendous white blast of the Sun struck across his staring eyes, but he did not flinch. Unconscious, his hands clutched at the control knobs as his sagging legs let him drift weightlessly toward the floor. He was like a drowning swimmer, out of control and helplessly floating under water.

  He seemed to become aware for a moment as a last flicker of consciousness crossed his mind. He mouthed something unintelligible--a last, forgotten word.

  Anchored only by his grip on the control knobs, his weightless body floated aimlessly in the almost steaming cabin as the awful stillness re-echoed throughout the hollow vault of the ship.

  Down below, with ever-growing closeness, the Sun waited patiently, like a bright and hovering vulture.

  The MR4 swung and pivoted gently like a ship at sea straining at its anchor in the first, fresh breezes of a gathering storm. For a moment it seemed to hesitate like a coy maiden on the verge of some unknown threshold. Then, abruptly, she climaxed her voyage and plunged directly toward the waiting Sun some twenty million miles below, carrying with her only her dead cargo; her pilot--

  * * * * *

  The radio crackled noisily after Hal Burnett's last incoherent transmission. It crackled aimlessly for a few moments--and then was still.

  "Something's wrong," said Williams, a thin thread of moisture shining down his face. "Something's gone wrong up there!"

  "It sure has," said Donnelly, quietly. "And I know who I'm going to ask about it."

  The little doctor said nothing. His face was an embittered parchment mask. "It's happened. God help me. It's happened. He's gone," he muttered, almost inaudibly.

  Donnelly sighed heavily, a look almost of defeat sweeping momentarily across his features. "See here, Doc," he said exhaustedly. "Don't be so heartless about people. You've got a son of your own in space, so you ought to understand how other people feel. What kind of a father would do a thing like this to another man's son anyway?"

  "Look, Donnelly," said the little man with bitter weariness. "Do me a favor will you? You fill out the reports tonight. Somehow or other I just don't feel up to it."

  "Maybe it's your conscience," said Donnelly, sarcastically. "But I'll be damned if I'll do it for you. You don't like to do your own dirty work, do you, Doc? I thought you just loved to fill out Government reports."

  "Donnelly, Donnelly," cried the doctor in sudden anguish. "Can't you understand yet. Even an undertaker's job is unpleasant but somebody's got to do it. Don't you see yet? It has to be done!"

  With a muffled groan of disgust, Donnelly sprang to the radio once again, pushing Williams roughly aside. Futilely, and in desperation he strained at the controls for a moment and then, with a roar of fury, he turned back to the doctor.

  "Now see here, Doc--" he thundered, and then stopped in amazement.

  The door to the dim and ill-lighted outer hallway of the lab was standing open. And at the far end, the outer door was quietly closing behind the disappearing figure of the bent-shouldered little man.

  Donnelly started to spring after him, and then abruptly stopped. His huge figure slumped in sudden despairing futility as he recognized the tragic hopelessness of the situation.

  "Let him go," rasped Williams. "There's nothing we can do now anyway, Joe."

  "Yeah, yeah. Let's write the report up ourselves. That's real important, you know. The Government needs it."

  He sat down at the typewriter, his heavy features twisted in hopeless bitterness and anger. He started typing, and then stopped for a moment.

  "What was this kid pilot's full name, Williams?"

  Williams checked the Government order sheet.
"Hell," he said. "Strangely, it's the same as the doctor's, Dr. Alfred Burnett. Only the kid's name is Harold Burnett."

  Donnelly sat, suddenly transfixed, staring at his typewriter. A peculiar look flashed across his face. Then he shook his massive head in an unbelieving gesture of agonized understanding.

  "Hell, no," he muttered to himself. "It couldn't be. It just couldn't be. It just isn't possible. Burnett! Burnett!"

  Swiftly he was on his feet and moving through the door after the vanished figure of the little doctor, his face a mask of grim remorse.

  "It was merciful," he muttered. "Yes, it was merciful. It was the only thing Doc Burnett could have done."

  Williams stared after Donnelly's disappearing figure in frank and open-mouthed amazement.

  "Hey, Joe," he yelled. "Where the hell are you going?"

  The outer door slammed shut on the departing echo of his words. "Well, I'll be hung for an ugly son!" he muttered to himself. "Nobody makes sense around this place, any more."

  He shrugged half to himself and then began to type out the rest of the report.

  "I don't get it," he mumbled to himself. "I just don't get it at all. There's no logic in it."

  * * *

  Contents

  THY NAME IS WOMAN

  By Kenneth O'Hara

  Women of earth had finally attained their objective: a new world all their own and--without men! But was it?

  After the Doctor gave him the hypo and left the ship, Bowren lay in absolute darkness wondering when the change would start. There would be pain, the Doctor had said. "Then you won't be aware of anything--anything at all."

  That was a devil of a thing, Bowren thought, not to be aware of the greatest adventure any man ever had. He, Eddie Bowren, the first to escape the Earth into space, the first man to Mars!

  He was on his back in a small square steel cubicle, a secretly constructed room in the wall of the cargo bin of the big spaceship cradled at the New Chicago Port. He was not without fear. But before the ship blasted he wouldn't care--he would be changed by then. He would start turning any minute now, becoming something else; he didn't know exactly what, but that wouldn't matter. After it was over, he wouldn't remember because the higher brain centers, the cortex, the analytical mind, would be completely cut off, short-circuited, during the alteration.

  The cubicle was close, hot, sound-proofed, like a tomb. "You will probably make loud unpleasant noises," the Doctor had said, "but no one will hear you. Don't worry about anything until you get to Mars."

  That was right, Bowren thought. My only problem is to observe, compute, and get back into this dungeon without being observed, and back to Earth.

  The idea was to keep it from the women. The women wouldn't go for this at all. They would object. The women would be able to bring into effect several laws dealing with spaceflight, among them the one against stowaways, and especially that particular one about aberrated males sneaking into space and committing suicide.

  A lot of men had tried it, in the beginning. Some of them had managed it, but they had all died. For a long time, the men's egos hadn't been able to admit that the male organism was incapable of standing the rigors of acceleration. Women had had laws passed, and if the women caught him doing this, the punishment would be extreme for him, personally, and a lot more extreme for Earth civilization in general. If you could call it a civilization. You could call it anything, Bowren groaned--but it didn't make sense. A world without women. A birthrate reduced to zero.

  A trickle of sweat slid past Bowren's eyes, loosening a nervous flush along his back that prickled painfully. His throat was tense and his heart pounded loud in the hot dark.

  A sharp pain ran up his body and exploded in his head. He tried to swallow, but something gagged in his throat. He was afraid of retching. He lay with his mouth open, spittle dribbling over his lips. The pain returned, hammered at his entrails. He fought the pain numbly, like a man grappling in the dark.

  The wave subsided and he lay there gasping, his fists clenched.

  "The pain will come in increasingly powerful waves," the Doctor had said. "At a certain point, it will be so great, the analytical mind will completely short-circuit. It will stay that way enroute to Mars, and meanwhile your body will rapidly change into that of a beast. Don't worry about it. A catalytic agent will return you to normal before you reach the planet. If you live, you'll be human again."

  * * * * *

  A male human couldn't stand the acceleration. But a woman could. Animals could. They had experimented on human males and animals in the giant centrifuges, and learned what to do. Animals could stand 25 "G" consistently, or centrifugal forces as high as 120 revolutions a minute. About 10 "G" was the limit of female endurance. Less for men.

  It had never been thoroughly determined why women had been able to stand higher acceleration. But human females had the same physical advantages over men as female rats, rabbits, and cats over males of the same species. A woman's cellular structure was different; her center of gravity was different, the brain waves given off during acceleration were different. It was suspected that the autonomic nervous system in women could function more freely to protect the body during emergency situations. The only certainty about it was that no man had ever been able to get into space and live.

  But animals could so they had worked on it and finally they decided to change a man into an animal, at least temporarily. Geneticists and biochemists and other specialists had been able to do a lot with hormones and hard radiation treatment. Especially with hormones. You could shoot a man full of some fluid or another, and do almost anything to his organism. You could induce atavism, regression to some lower form of animal life--a highly speeded up regression. When you did that, naturally the analytical mind, the higher thought centers of a more recent evolutionary development, blanked out and the primal mind took over. The body changed too, considerably.

  Bowren was changing. Then the pain came and he couldn't think. He felt his mind cringing--giving way before the onslaught of the pain. Dimly he could feel the agony in his limbs, the throbbing of his heart, the fading power of reason.

  He retched, languished through flaccid minutes. There were recurring spasms of shivering as he rolled his thickened tongue in the arid cavity of his mouth. And then, somewhere, a spark exploded, and drowned him in a pool of streaming flame.

  * * * * *

  Consciousness returned slowly--much as it had gone--in waves of pain. It took a long time. Elements of reason and unreason fusing through distorted nightmares until he was lying there able to remember, able to wonder, able to think.

  Inside the tiny compartment were supplies. A hypo, glucose, a durolene suit neatly folded which he put on. He gave himself a needle, swallowed the tablets, and waited until energy and a sense of well-being gave him some degree of confidence.

  It was very still. The ship would be cradled on Mars now. He lay there, relaxing, preparing for the real challenge. He thought of how well the Earth Investigation Committee had planned the whole thing.

  The last desperate attempt of man to get into space--to Mars--a woman's world. At least it was supposed to be. Whatever it was, it wasn't a man's world.

  The women didn't want Earth anymore. They had something better. But what? There were other questions, and Bowren's job was to find the answers, remain unobserved and get back aboard this ship. He would then hypo himself again, and when the ship blasted off to Earth, he would go through the same transition all over again.

  He put on the soft-soled shoes as well as the durolene suit and crawled through the small panel into the big cargo bin. It was empty. Only a dim yellow light shone on the big cargo vices along the curved walls.

  He climbed the ladders slowly, cautiously, through a gnawing silence of suspense, over the mesh grid flooring along the tubular corridors. He wondered what he would find.

  Could the women have been influenced by some alien life form on Mars?

  That could explain the fact that women had d
ivorced themselves completely from all men, from the Earth. Something had to explain it.

  There was one other possibility. That the women had found human life on Mars. That was a very remote possibility based on the idea that perhaps the Solar system had been settled by human beings from outer space, and had landed on two worlds at least.

  Bowren remembered how his wife, Lora, had told him he was an idiot and a bore, and had walked out on him five years before; taken her three months course in astrogation, and left Earth. He hadn't heard of her or from her since. It was the same with every other man, married or not. The male ego had taken a beating for so long that the results had been psychologically devastating.

  The ship seemed to be empty of any human being but Bowren. He reached the outer lock door. It was ajar. Thin cold air came through and sent a chill down his arms, tingling in his fingers. He looked out. It was night on Mars, a strange red-tinted night, the double moons throwing streaming color over the land.

  Across the field, he saw the glowing Luciferin-like light of a small city. Soaring spherical lines. Nothing masculine about its architecture. Bowren shivered.

  He climbed down the ladder, the air biting into his lungs. The silence down there on the ground under the ship was intense.

  He stood there a minute. The first man on Mars. Man's oldest dream realized.

  But the great thrill he had anticipated was dulled somewhat by fear. A fear of what the women had become, and of what might have influenced their becoming.

  He took out a small neurogun and walked. He reached what seemed to be a huge park that seemed to surround the city. It grew warmer and a soft wind whispered through the strange wide-spreading trees and bushes and exotic blossoms. The scent of blossoms drifted on the wind and the sound of running water, of murmuring voices.

  The park thickened as Bowren edged into its dark, languid depth. It seemed as though the city radiated heat. He dodged suddenly behind a tree, knelt down. For an instant he was embarrassed seeing the two shadowy figures in each others arms on a bench in the moonlight. This emotion gave way to shock, anger, fear.