The galley lockers were empty when Ralph found them. All the food gone—how many years ago? And one of the crew, dying before the others.
Cannibalism.
Shuddering, Ralph rocketed outside into the clear darkness of space. That was a paradox, he thought. It was clear, all right, but it was dark. You could see a great way. You could see a million million miles but it was darker than anything on Earth. It was almost an extra-dimensional effect. It made the third dimension on earth, the dimension of depth, seem hopelessly flat.
"Ralph!"
"Go ahead, kid," he said. It was their first radio contact in almost half an hour.
"Oh, Ralph. It's a Gormann. An eighty-five. I think. Right in front of me. Ralph, if its scopes are good—oh, Ralph."
"I'm coming," he said. "Go ahead inside. I'll pick up your beam and be along." He could feel his heart thumping wildly. Five hours now. They did not have much time. This ship—this Gormann eighty-five which Diane had found—might be their last chance. Because it would certainly take him all of three hours to transfer the radarscope, using the rockets from one of their spacesuits, to their own ship.
He rocketed along now, following her directional beam, and listened as she said: "I'm cutting through the porthole now, Ralph. I—"
Her voice stopped suddenly. It did not drift off gradually. It merely ceased, without warning, without reason. "Diane!" he called. "Diane, can you hear me?"
* * * *
He tracked the beam in desperate silence. Wrecks flashed by, tumbling slowly in their web of mutual gravitation. Some were molten silver if the wan sunlight caught them. Some were black, but every rivet, every seam was distinct. The impossible clarity of blackest space....
"Ralph?" Her voice came suddenly.
"Yes, Diane. Yes. What is it?"
"What a curious thing. I stopped blasting at the port hole. I'm not going in that way. The airlock, Ralph."
"What about the airlock?"
"It opened up on me. It swung out into space, all of a sudden. I'm going in, Ralph."
Fear, unexpected, inexplicable, gripped him. "Don't," he said. "Wait for me."
"That's silly, Ralph. We barely have time. I'm going in now, Ralph. There. I'm closing the outer door. I wonder if the pressure will build up for me. If it doesn't, I'll blast the outer door with my rockets and get out of here.... Ralph! The light's blinking. The pressures building. The inner door is beginning to open, Ralph. I'm going inside now."
He was still tracking the beam. He thought he was close now, a hundred miles perhaps. A hundred miles by suit rocket was merely a few seconds but somehow the fear was still with him. It was that skeleton, he thought. That skeleton had unnerved him.
"Ralph. It's here, Ralph. A radarscope just like ours. Oh, Ralph, it's in perfect shape."
"I'm coming," he said. A big old Bartson Cruiser tumbled by end over end, a thousand tonner, the largest ship he had seen in here so far. At some of the portholes as he flashed by he could see faces, dead faces staring into space forever.
Then Diane's voice suddenly: "Is that you, Ralph?"
"I'm still about fifty miles out," he said automatically, and then cold fear, real fear, gripped him. Is that you, Ralph?
"Ralph, is that—oh, Ralph. Ralph—" she screamed, and was silent.
"Diane! Diane, answer me."
Silence. She had seen someone—something. Alive? It hardly seemed possible. He tried to notch his rocket controls further toward full power, but they were straining already—
The dead ships flashed by, scores of them, hundreds, with dead men and dead dreams inside, waiting through eternity, in no hurry to give up their corpses and corpses of dreams.
He heard Diane again then, a single agonized scream. Then there was silence, absolute silence.
Time seemed frozen, frozen like the faces of the dead men inside the ships, suspended, unmoving, not dropping into the well of the past. The ships crawled by now, crawled. And from a long way off he saw the Gormann eighty-five. He knew it was the right ship because the outer airlock door had swung open again. It hung there in space, the lock gaping—
But it was a long way off.
He hardly seemed to be approaching it at all. Every few seconds he called Diane's name, but there was no answer. No answer. Time crawled with the fear icy now, as cold as death, in the pit of his stomach, with the fear making his heart pound rapidly, with the fear making it impossible for him to think. Fear—for Diane. I love you, Di, he thought. I love you. I never stopped loving you. We were wrong. We were crazy wrong. It was like a sargasso, inside of us, an emptiness which needed filling—but we were wrong. Diane—
* * * *
He reached the Gormann and plunged inside the airlock, swinging the outer door shut behind him. He waited. Would the pressure build up again, as it had built up for Diane? He did not know. He could only wait—
A red light blinked over his head, on and off, on and off as pressure was built. Then it stopped.
Fifteen pounds of pressure in the airlock, which meant that the inner door should open. He ran forward, rammed his shoulder against it, tumbled through. He entered a narrow companionway and clomped awkwardly toward the front of the ship, where the radarscope would be located.
He passed a skeleton in the companionway, like the one he had seen in another ship. For the same reason, he thought. He had time to think that. And then he saw them.
Diane. On the floor, her spacesuit off her now, a great bruise, blue-ugly bruise across her temple. Unconscious.
And the thing which hovered over her.
At first he did not know what it was, but he leaped at it. It turned, snarling. There was air in the ship and he wondered about that. He did not have time to wonder. The thing was like some monstrous, misshapen creature, a man—yes, but a man to give you nightmares. Bent and misshapen, gnarled, twisted like the roots of an ancient tree, with a wild growth of beard, white beard, heavy across the chest, with bent limbs powerfully muscled and a gaunt face, like a death's head. And the eyes—the eyes were wild, staring vacantly, almost glazed as in death. The eyes stared at him and through him and then he closed with this thing which had felled Diane.
It had incredible strength. The strength of the insane. It drove Ralph back across the cabin and Ralph, encumbered by his spacesuit, could only fight awkwardly. It drove him back and it found something on the floor, the metal leg of what once had been a chair, and slammed it down across the faceplate of Ralph's spacesuit.
Ralph staggered, fell to his knees. He had absorbed the blow on the crown of his skull through the helmet of the suit, and it dazed him. The thing struck again, and Ralph felt himself falling....
Somehow, he climbed to his feet again. The thing was back over Diane's still form again, looking at her, its eyes staring and vacant. Spittle drooled from the lips—
Then Ralph was wrestling with it again. The thing was almost protean. It all but seemed to change its shape and writhe from Ralph's grasp as they struggled across the cabin, but this time there was no weapon for it to grab and use with stunning force.
Half-crazed himself now, Ralph got his fingers gauntleted in rubberized metal, about the sinewy throat under the tattered beard. His fingers closed there and the wild eyes went big and he held it that way a long time, then finally thrust it away from him.
The thing fell but sprang to its feet. It looked at Ralph and the mouth opened and closed, but he heard no sound. The teeth were yellow and black, broken, like fangs.
Then the thing turned and ran.
Ralph followed it as far as the airlock. The inner door was slammed between them. A light blinked over the door.
Ralph ran to a port hole and watched.
The thing which once had been a man floated out into space, turning, spinning slowly. The gnarled twisted body expanded outward, became fat and swollen, balloon-like. It came quite close to the porthole, thudding against the ship's hull, the face—dead now—like a melon.
Then, after he was sick for
a moment there beside the airlock, he went back for Diane.
* * * *
They were back aboard the Gormann '87 now, their own ship. Ralph had revived Diane and brought her back—along with the other Gormann's radarscope—to their battered tub. The bruise on her temple was badly discolored and she was still weak, but she would be all right.
"But what was it?" Diane asked. She had hardly seen her attacker.
"A man," Ralph said. "God knows how long that ship was in here. Years, maybe. Years, alone in space, here in the sargasso, with dead men and dead ships for company. He used up all the food. His shipmates died. Maybe he killed them. He needed more food—"
"Oh, no. You don't mean—"
Ralph nodded. "He became a cannibal. Maybe he had a spacesuit and raided some of the other ships too. It doesn't matter. He's dead now."
"He must have been insane like that for years, waiting here, never seeing another living thing...."
"Don't talk about it," Ralph said, then smiled. "Ship's ready to go, Diane."
"Yes," she said.
He looked at her. "Mars?"
She didn't say anything.
"I learned something in there," Ralph said. "We were like that poor insane creature in a way. We were too wrapped up in the asteroid and the mine. We forgot to live from day to day, to scrape up a few bucks every now and then maybe and take in a show on Ceres or have a weekend on Vesta. What the hell, Di, everybody needs it."
"Yes," she said.
"Di?"
"Yes, Ralph?"
"I—I want to give it another try, if you do."
"The mine?"
"The mine eventually. The mine isn't important. Us, I mean." He paused, his hands still over the controls. "Will it be Mars?"
"No," she said, and sat up and kissed him. "A weekend on Vesta sounds very nice. Very, very nice, darling."
Ralph smiled and punched the controls. Minutes later they had left the sargasso—both sargassos—behind them.
SUMMER SNOW STORM
Originally published in Amazing Stories, Oct. 1956
Snow in summer is of course impossible. Any weather expert will tell you so. Weather Bureau Chief Botts was certain no such absurdity could occur. And he would have been right except for one thing. It snowed that summer.
It was, as the expression goes, raining cats and dogs. Since the Weather Bureau had predicted fair and warmer, the Weather Bureau was not particularly happy about the meteorological state of affairs. No one, however was shocked.
Until it started to snow.
This was on the twenty-fifth of July in the U.S.A....
Half an hour before the fantastic meteorological turn of events, Bureau Chief Botts dangled the forecast sheet before Johnny Sloman's bloodshot eyes and barked, "It's all over the country by now, you dunderhead!" Then, as an afterthought: "Did you write this?"
"Yes," said Sloman miserably.
Slowly, Botts said, "Temperature, eighty degrees. Precipitation expected: snow. Snow, Sloman. Well, that's what it says."
"It was a mistake, Chief. Just—heh-heh—a mistake."
"The prediction should have been for fair and warmer!" Botts screamed.
"But it's raining," Sloman pointed out.
"We make mistakes," said Botts in a suddenly velvety voice. Then, as if that had been a mistake, bellowed: "But not this kind of mistake, Sloman! Snow in July! We have a reputation to maintain! If not for accuracy, at least for credulity."
"Yes, sir," said Johnny Sloman. One of the troubles was, he had a hangover. Although, actually, that was a consequence of the real trouble. The real trouble was his fiancee. Make that his ex-fiancee. Because last night Jo-Anne had left him. "You—you're just going no place at all, Johnny Sloman," she had said. "You're on a treadmill and—not even running very fast." She had given him back the quarter-carat ring tearfully, but Johnny hadn't argued. Jo-Anne had a stubborn streak and he knew when Jo-Anne's mind was made up. So Johnny had gone and gotten drunk for the first time since the night after college graduation, not too many years ago, and the result was a nationally-distributed forecast of snow.
Chief Botts' first flush of anger had now been replaced by self-pity. His red, loose-jowled face was sagging and his eyes became watery as he said, "At least you could have double-checked it. As a member of this Bureau you only have to fill out the forecast once every ten days. Is that so hard? Is there any reason why you should predict snow for July 25th?" His voice became silky soft as he added, "You realize, of course, Sloman, that if this was anything but a civil service job you'd be out on your ear for a stunt like this! Well, there are other ways. I can pass over you for promotion. I intend to pass over you until the crack of doom. You'll be a GS-5 the rest of your working life. Are you satisfied, Sloman? Snow in July ..." Chief Botts' voice trailed off, the Chief following it.
Johnny sat with his head in his hands until Harry Bettis, the GS-5 weatherman who shared his small office with him, came in. Naturally, hangover or no, Johnny had reported for work first. Johnny was always first in the office, but it didn't seem to do any good. Now, Harry Bettis could come in an hour late and read the funnies half the day and flirt with the secretarial staff the other half and still be Chief Botts' odds-on favorite for the promotion that was opening next month. Harry Bettis was like that.
He came in and gave Johnny the full treatment. First the slow spreading smile. Then the chuckle. Then the loud, roaring belly-laugh. "Gals outside told me!" he shouted, loud enough so the girls outside would know he knew they had told him. "Snow! Snow in July! Sloman, you kill me! You really do!"
"Do you have to shout?" Johnny said.
"Do I? We all ought to shout this. To the rooftops! Sloman, my foot. You have a new name, sonny. Snowman! Johnny Snowman."
Johnny groaned. Instinctively, he knew the name would stick.
"Hear you had a little trouble with the gal-friend this past p.m.," Harry Bettis clucked in a voice which managed to be both derisive and sympathetic.
"How did you find out?" Johnny asked, but knew the answer at once. Jo-Anne was a roommate of one of the Bureau Secretaries. It was how Johnny had met her.
"You know how I found out, Snowman. Well, that's tough luck, kiddo. But tell me, does that mean the field is wide open? I always thought your gal-friend—your ex-gal-friend—had the cutest pair of—"
"I have nothing to do with whether the field is open or not open, I'm afraid."
"Well, don't be. Afraid, I mean," Harry Bettis advised jovially. "If the gal could make you pull a boner like that, you're better off without her. But I forgot to ask Maxine: can I have little Jo-Anne's phone number? Huh, boy?"
Before Johnny could answer, the three-girl staff of secretaries entered the small office. Entered—and stared.
"That's all right, girls," Harry Bettis said. "You didn't have to follow me in here. I'd have been right out."
But they weren't staring at Harry Bettis. They were staring at Johnny. Their mouths had flapped open, their eyes were big and round. Johnny didn't, but Harry Bettis knew that look on a girl's face. Without any trouble at all, Johnny could have made any of those girls, right there, right then, without even trying.
They gawked and gawked. One of them pointed at the window. The others tried to, but their hands were trembling.
The one who was pointing squawked: "Look!"
The second one said, "Out the window!"
The third one said, "Will you!"
Outside the window on the twenty-fifth of July it was snowing.
* * * *
It was an hour later. Telephones were ringing. Long-distance calls from all over the country now that the ticker had gone out with the incredible fact that it was snowing in the Northeast in July. Most of the calls, though, were from Washington. Chief Botts disconnected the PBX and walked in a dazed, staggering fashion to Johnny, smiling weakly and saying:
"Sloman, I misjudged you. Genius, right here, right now, in this office, and we never knew it. Sloman, I have to admit I was wrong
about you. But how did you know? How did you ever know?"
"Hell's bells," Harry Bettis said before Johnny could say it was all a mistake. "That's easy, Chief. Anyone knows that all rain starts out as snow. It's got to. You see, the droplets of moisture in the cold upper regions of a cloud condense around dust particles because the air up there is too cold to hold them as vapor. Since it's below freezing, snow is formed—snow which warms up as it passes through hotter air en route to the ground, and—"
"That will be quite enough, Bettis," Chief Botts said. "I am a weatherman too, you know. You don't have to tell me the most elementary of—"
"In this case, Chief," Bettis persisted, "the biggest inversion layer you ever saw kept the surface air down and brought the cold upper air very close to the surface. Result: the snowflakes didn't have a chance to melt, not even to freezing rain. Result: snow!"
"The chances of that happening," said Chief Botts coldly, "are about one in a billion. Aren't they, Sloman, dear fellow?"
"One in two billion," Johnny said.
"He is modest," Chief Botts told the staff. "He seems so unconcerned."
Just then Maxine came into the little office. The look of awe on her face had been replaced by one of sheer amazement. "Well, I checked it, Chief," she said. "Wait until I tell Jo-Anne!"
"Won't you please tell us first?" Chief Botts asked.
"Yes, sir," said Maxine, and read from the memo pad in her hand. "Since coming to work for the Bureau, Johnny Sloman has once every ten days made our official forecast. I have checked back on his forecast, Chief, as you directed. Johnny has made fifty-five forecasts. While only one of them—startlingly—has called for snow in July—every single one of them has been right."
There was a shocked silence. "But—but the Weather Bureau average is only eighty-eight percent!" Harry Bettis gasped.
"You mean," Chief Botts corrected him, "eighty-eight percent is the figure we try to foist on the unsuspecting public. Actually, the Weather Bureau averages a bare seventy-five percent, and you know it."
"But Sloman's got a hundred percent accuracy—up to and including snow in July," Harry Bettis said in a shocked voice.
The 8th Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK ™: Milton Lesser Page 7
