The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Surely, he thought, there must be a better way to change gear-ratios than the traditional one, which involved dismantling almost the entire gearbox. Why couldn’t a number of gears of different sizes be carried on the same shaft, not necessarily all in action at once, but awaiting use simply by shoving the axle back and forth longitudinally in its sockets? It would still be clumsy, but it could be worked on orders from the bridge and would not involve shutting down the entire machine—and throwing the new pilot into a blue-green funk.

  Shar came lunging up through the trap and swam himself to a stop.

  “All set,” he said. “The big reduction gears aren’t taking the strain too well, though.”

  “Splintering?”

  “Yes. I’d go it slow at first.”

  Lavon nodded mutely. Without allowing himself to stop, even for a moment, to consider the consequences of his words, he called: “Half power.”

  The ship hunched itself down again and began to move, very slowly indeed, but more smoothly than before. Overhead, the sky thinned to complete transparency. The great light came blasting in. Behind Lavon there was an uneasy stir. The whiteness grew at the front ports.

  Again the ship slowed, straining against the blinding barrier. Lavon swallowed and called for more power. The ship groaned like something about to die. It was now almost at a standstill.

  “More power,” Lavon ground out.

  Once more, with infinite slowness, the ship began to move. Gently, it tilted upward.

  Then it lunged forward and every board and beam in it began to squall.

  “Lavon! Lavon!”

  Lavon started sharply at the shout. The voice was coming at him from one of the megaphones, the one marked for the port at the rear of the ship.

  “Lavon!”

  “What is it? Stop your damn yelling.”

  “I can see the top of the sky! From the other side, from the top side! It’s like a big flat sheet of metal. We’re going away from it. We’re above the sky, Lavon, we’re above the sky!”

  Another violent start swung Lavon around toward the forward port. On the outside of the mica, the water was evaporating with shocking swiftness, taking with it strange distortions and patterns made of rainbows.

  Lavon saw space.

  —

  It was at first like a deserted and cruelly dry version of the Bottom. There were enormous boulders, great cliffs, tumbled, split, riven, jagged rocks going up and away in all directions, as if scattered at random by some giant.

  But it had a sky of its own—a deep blue dome so far away that he could not believe in, let alone estimate, what its distance might be. And in this dome was a ball of reddish-white fire that seared his eyeballs.

  The wilderness of rock was still a long way away from the ship, which now seemed to be resting upon a level, glistening plain. Beneath the surface-shine, the plain seemed to be made of sand, nothing but familiar sand, the same substance which had heaped up to form a bar in Lavon’s universe, the bar along which the ship had climbed. But the glassy, colorful skin over it—

  Suddenly Lavon became conscious of another shout from the megaphone banks. He shook his head savagely and said, “What is it now?”

  “Lavon, this is Tol. What have you gotten us into? The belts are locked. The diatoms can’t move them. They aren’t faking, either; we’ve rapped them hard enough to make them think we were trying to break their shells, but they still can’t give us more power.”

  “Leave them alone,” Lavon snapped. “They can’t fake; they haven’t enough intelligence. If they say they can’t give you more power, they can’t.”

  “Well, then, you get us out of it.”

  Shar came forward to Lavon’s elbow. “We’re on a space-water interface, where the surface tension is very high,” he said softly. “If you order the wheels pulled up now, I think we’ll make better progress for a while on the belly tread.”

  “Good enough,” Lavon said with relief. “Hello below—haul up the wheels.”

  —

  “For a long while,” Shar said, “I couldn’t understand the reference of the history plate to ‘retractable landing gear,’ but it finally occurred to me that the tension along a space-mud interface would hold any large object pretty tightly. That’s why I insisted on our building the ship so that we could lift the wheels.”

  “Evidently the ancients knew their business after all, Shar.”

  Quite a few minutes later—for shifting power to the belly treads involved another setting of the gearbox—the ship was crawling along the shore toward the tumbled rock. Anxiously, Lavon scanned the jagged, threatening wall for a break. There was a sort of rivulet off toward the left which might offer a route, though a dubious one, to the next world. After some thought, Lavon ordered his ship turned toward it.

  “Do you suppose that thing in the sky is a ‘star’?” he asked. “But there were supposed to be lots of them. Only one is up there and one’s plenty for my taste.”

  “I don’t know,” Shar admitted. “But I’m beginning to get a picture of the way the universe is made, I think. Evidently, our world is a sort of cup in the Bottom of this huge one. This one has a sky of its own; perhaps it, too, is only a cup in the Bottom of a still huger world, and so on and on without end. It’s a hard concept to grasp, I’ll admit. Maybe it would be more sensible to assume that all the worlds are cups in this one common surface, and that the great light shines on them all impartially.”

  “Then what makes it go out every night, and dim even in the day during winter?” Lavon demanded.

  “Perhaps it travels in circles, over first one world, then another. How could I know yet?”

  “Well, if you’re right, it means that all we have to do is crawl along here for a while, until we hit the top of the sky of another world,” Lavon said. “Then we dive in. Somehow it seems too simple, after all our preparations.”

  Shar chuckled, but the sound did not suggest that he had discovered anything funny. “Simple? Have you noticed the temperature yet?”

  Lavon had noticed it, just beneath the surface of awareness, but at Shar’s remark he realized that he was gradually being stifled. The oxygen content of the water, luckily, had not dropped, but the temperature suggested the shallows in the last and worst part of autumn. It was like trying to breathe soup.

  “Than, give us more action from the Vortae,” Lavon said. “This is going to be unbearable unless we get more circulation.”

  There was a reply from Than, but it came to Lavon’s ears only as a mumble. It was all he could do now to keep his attention on the business of steering the ship.

  The cut or defile in the scattered razor-edged rocks was a little closer, but there still seemed to be many miles of rough desert to cross. After a while, the ship settled into a steady, painfully slow crawling, with less pitching and jerking than before, but also with less progress. Under it, there was now a sliding, grinding sound, rasping against the hull of the ship itself, as if it were treadmilling over some coarse lubricant the particles of which were each as big as a man’s head.

  Finally Shar said, “Lavon, we’ll have to stop again. The sand this far up is dry, and we’re wasting energy using the tread.”

  “Are you sure we can take it?” Lavon asked, gasping for breath. “At least we are moving. If we stop to lower the wheels and change gears again, we’ll boil.”

  “We’ll boil if we don’t,” Shar said calmly. “Some of our algae are dead already and the rest are withering. That’s a pretty good sign that we can’t take much more. I don’t think we’ll make it into the shadows, unless we do change over and put on some speed.”

  There was a gulping sound from one of the mechanics. “We ought to turn back,” he said raggedly. “We were never meant to be out here in the first place. We were made for the water, not for this hell.”

  “We’ll stop,” Lavon said, “but we’re not turning back. That’s final.”

  The words made a brave sound, but the man had upset Lavon more th
an he dared to admit, even to himself. “Shar,” he said, “make it fast, will you?”

  The scientist nodded and dived below.

  The minutes stretched out. The great red-gold globe in the sky blazed and blazed. It had moved down the sky, far down, so that the light was pouring into the ship directly in Lavon’s face, illuminating every floating particle, its rays like long milky streamers. The currents of water passing Lavon’s cheek were almost hot.

  How could they dare go directly forward into that inferno? The land directly under the “star” must be even hotter than it was here.

  “Lavon! Look at Para!”

  Lavon forced himself to turn and look at his Proto ally. The great slipper had settled to the deck, where it was lying with only a feeble pulsation of its cilia. Inside, its vacuoles were beginning to swell, to become bloated, pear-shaped bubbles, crowding the granulated cytoplasm, pressing upon the dark nuclei.

  “Is…is he dying?”

  “This cell is dying,” Para said, as coldly as always. “But go on—go on. There is much to learn, and you may live, even though we do not. Go on.”

  “You’re for us now?” Lavon whispered.

  “We have always been for you. Push your folly to the uttermost. We will benefit in the end, and so will man.”

  The whisper died away. Lavon called the creature again, but it did not respond. There was a wooden clashing from below, and then Shar’s voice came tinnily from one of the megaphones. “Lavon, go ahead! The diatoms are dying, too, and then we’ll be without power. Make it as quickly and directly as you can.”

  Grimly, Lavon leaned forward. “The ‘star’ is directly over the land we’re approaching.”

  “It is? It may go lower still and the shadows will get longer. That may be our only hope.”

  Lavon had not thought of that. He rasped into the banked megaphones. Once more, the ship began to move, a little faster now, but seemingly still at a crawl. The thirty-two wheels rumbled.

  It got hotter.

  Steadily, with a perceptible motion, the “star” sank in Lavon’s face. Suddenly a new terror struck him. Suppose it should continue to go down until it was gone entirely? Blasting though it was now, it was the only source of heat. Would not space become bitter cold on the instant and the ship an expanding, bursting block of ice?

  The shadows lengthened menacingly, stretching across the desert toward the forward-rolling vessel. There was no talking in the cabin, just the sound of ragged breathing and the creaking of the machinery.

  Then the jagged horizon seemed to rush upon them. Stony teeth cut into the lower rim of the ball of fire, devoured it swiftly. It was gone.

  They were in the lee of the cliffs. Lavon ordered the ship turned to parallel the rock-line; it responded heavily, sluggishly. Far above, the sky deepened steadily, from blue to indigo.

  Shar came silently up through the trap and stood beside Lavon, studying that deepening color and the lengthening of the shadows down the beach toward their own world. He said nothing, but Lavon was sure that the same chilling thought was in his mind.

  “Lavon.”

  Lavon jumped. Shar’s voice had iron in it. “Yes?”

  “We’ll have to keep moving. We must make the next world, wherever it is, very shortly.”

  “How can we dare move when we can’t see where we’re going? Why not sleep it over—if the cold will let us?”

  “It will let us,” Shar said. “It can’t get dangerously cold up here. If it did, the sky—or what we used to think of as the sky—would have frozen over every night, even in summer. But what I’m thinking about is the water. The plants will go to sleep now. In our world that wouldn’t matter; the supply of oxygen there is enough to last through the night. But in this confined space, with so many creatures in it and no supply of fresh water, we will probably smother.”

  Shar seemed hardly to be involved at all, but spoke rather with the voice of implacable physical laws.

  “Furthermore,” he said, staring unseeingly out at the raw landscape, “the diatoms are plants, too. In other words, we must stay on the move for as long as we have oxygen and power—and pray that we make it.”

  “Shar, we had quite a few Protos on board this ship once. And Para there isn’t quite dead yet. If he were, the cabin would be intolerable. The ship is nearly sterile of bacteria, because all the Protos have been eating them as a matter of course and there’s no outside supply of them, either. But still and all there would have been some decay.”

  Shar bent and tested the pellicle of the motionless Para with a probing finger. “You’re right, he’s still alive. What does that prove?”

  “The Vortae are also alive; I can feel the water circulating. Which proves that it wasn’t the heat that hurt Para. It was the light. Remember how badly my skin was affected after I climbed beyond the sky? Undiluted starlight is deadly. We should add that to the information from the plate.”

  “I still don’t get the point.”

  “It’s this: We’ve got three or four Noc down below. They were shielded from the light, and so must be still alive. If we concentrate them in the diatom galleys, the dumb diatoms will think it’s still daylight and will go on working. Or we can concentrate them up along the spine of the ship, and keep the algae putting out oxygen. So the question is: Which do we need more, oxygen or power? Or can we split the difference?”

  Shar actually grinned. “A brilliant piece of thinking. We may make a Shar out of you someday, Lavon. No, I’d say that we can’t split the difference. Noc’s light isn’t intense enough to keep the plants making oxygen; I tried it once, and the oxygen production was too tiny to matter. Evidently the plants use the light for energy. So we’ll have to settle for the diatoms for motive power.”

  “All right. Set it up that way, Shar.”

  Lavon brought the vessel away from the rocky lee of the cliff, out onto the smoother sand. All trace of direct light was now gone, although there was still a soft, general glow in the sky.

  “Now then,” Shar said thoughtfully, “I would guess that there’s water over there in the canyon, if we can reach it. I’ll go below again and arrange—“

  Lavon gasped.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Silently, Lavon pointed, his heart pounding.

  The entire dome of indigo above them was spangled with tiny, incredibly brilliant lights. There were hundreds of them, and more and more were becoming visible as the darkness deepened. And far away, over the ultimate edge of the rocks, was a dim red globe, crescented with ghostly silver. Near the zenith was another such body, much smaller, and silvered all over….

  Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the two-inch wooden spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the slope toward a drying little rivulet.

  The ship rested on the Bottom of the canyon for the rest of the night. The great square doors were unsealed and thrown open to admit the raw, irradiated, life-giving water from outside—and the wriggling bacteria which were fresh food.

  No other creatures approached them, either out of curiosity or for hunting, while they slept, although Lavon had posted guards at the doors just in case. Evidently, even up here on the very floor of space, highly organized creatures were quiescent at night.

  But when the first flush of light filtered through the water, trouble threatened.

  First of all, there was the bug-eyed monster. The thing was green and had two snapping claws, either one of which could have broken the ship in two like a spirogyra strand. Its eyes were black and globular, on the ends of short columns, and its long feelers were thicker through than a plant bole. It passed in a kicking fury of motion, however, never noticing the ship at all.

  “Is that—a sample of the kind of life they have here?” Lavon whispered. “Does it all run as big as that?” Nobody answered, for the very good reason that nobody knew.

  After a while, Lavon risked moving the ship forward against the current, which was slow but heavy. Enormous writhing worms
whipped past them. One struck the hull a heavy blow, then thrashed on obliviously.

  “They don’t notice us,” Shar said. “We’re too small. Lavon, the ancients warned us of the immensity of space, but even when you see it, it’s impossible to grasp. And all those stars—can they mean what I think they mean? It’s beyond thought, beyond belief!”

  “The Bottom’s sloping,” Lavon said, looking ahead intently. “The walls of the canyon are retreating, and the water’s becoming rather silty. Let the stars wait, Shar; we’re coming toward the entrance of our new world.”

  Shar subsided moodily. His vision of space apparently had disturbed him, perhaps seriously. He took little notice of the great thing that was happening, but instead huddled worriedly over his own expanding speculations. Lavon felt the old gap between their minds widening once more.

  Now the Bottom was tilting upward again. Lavon had no experience with delta formation, for no rivulets left his own world, and the phenomenon worried him. But his worries were swept away in wonder as the ship topped the rise and nosed over.

  Ahead, the Bottom sloped away again, indefinitely, into glimmering depths. A proper sky was over them once more, and Lavon could see small rafts of plankton floating placidly beneath it. Almost at once, too, he saw several of the smaller kinds of Protos, a few of which were already approaching the ship—

  Then the girl came darting out of the depths, her features blurred and distorted with distance and terror. At first she did not seem to see the ship at all. She came twisting and turning lithely through the water, obviously hoping only to throw herself over the mound of the delta and into the savage streamlet beyond.

  Lavon was stunned. Not that there were men here—he had hoped for that, had even known somehow that men were everywhere in the universe—but at the girl’s single-minded flight toward suicide.

  “What—“

  Then a dim buzzing began to grow in his ears, and he understood.

  “Shar! Than! Stravol!” he bawled. “Break out crossbows and spears! Knock out all the windows!” He lifted a foot and kicked through the port in front of him. Someone thrust a crossbow into his hand.