The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

  I was to be pilot of our ship on this one-way trip.

  Then there was Pat Rourke, the Plastic Man. He’d cracked up a scout on one of the unnamed asteroids He came out of it alive—but the medicos gave him a face, a right arm. a right leg, and a large part of his back muscles of plastic. Sure, he can use the plastic parts, after a fashion. They do marvelous things with the new bioplastics—but it isn’t flesh, and that says a lot.

  The Plastic Man was our engineer, he was now training to operate the new DC-3 Converter—a top military secret.

  After Pat, there was Jimmy Sidel. The medicos had saved his life, too, but not much else. From the moment Jimmy came off the operating bench, he was known as Bottle Bottom—Bottle for short. That’s what Jimmy was—a living bottle, just like a regular Coca Cola bottle, except for size. Bottle was man-size, and transparent—not made of glass. That would be too fragile. He was transparent plastic, and you could see the amazing innards working inside of him. Up at the top, where you’d expect a crinkly-edged cap to be, Bottle just rounded off in a frosted plastic dome. Under that dome lay Bottle’s brain—all that was left of Space Pilot Jimmy Sidel after the heater in his spacesuit went out of whack and he went into quick-freeze in the hard vacuum of space.

  Bottle had electronic eyes, but no hands, no legs. He could see. He could talk. And hook him up to the right kind of machinery, he could operate it like it was his own body. Machinery like that was being developed for us to take along on our trip. Bottle was transparent to make it easy to study him—that’s what the docs had been doing. But now, nobody studied Bottle any more. He had been the best navigator who ever look a ship into the sky—and he got to be one of my boys. I had use for him. And priority counts.

  The last of our group, Henry Jones, was the only one of us who still looked remotely human. All Henry’s changes were inside and you couldn’t tell it, unless you saw him in the shower. Then you saw the up and down and side to side scars the surgeon’s knife had left in his breast and belly.

  Hank was Gutsy to us—he hadn’t a vital organ left inside him. The medicos had cured him of cancer, but they left him with insides that were a dream of Rube Goldberg mechanics—a nightmare, that is. But Gutsy was still alive, and he still had plenty of what it takes to be my copilot on this last, lone flight we were about to take together.

  Purple Top, of course, was our jetman. To judge from his record, he had been a good one. Thai’s why I had chosen him.

  If collecting bric-a-brac had been my aim, I could have had a thousand monsters. But I just went after the best. One by one, I had tracked them down, found where they hid out, and I dragged them back into the service. Bottle had been easiest to find. He couldn’t have gone anywhere had he tried. Purple Top had been the toughest, and he was the last. I had them all now.

  And I didn’t tell any of them why I had brought them together. Mainly, because I didn’t know myself. One last trip—that’s all any of us knew. I didn’t even know when we would blast off. That had to be decided by the brass. All we could do was wait.

  Oh, we lived like kings during that waiting. Our quarters were the best in the service. Each of us had a private suite of his own. If there’s one thing a monster can’t stand, it’s looking at four other monsters twenty-four hours out of every day.

  That’s why, I told them, the ship was designed the way it was—each man at a separate station in a different part of the ship. Each man had private quarters at his station. There was an intercom hook-up to keep us in touch.

  None of us had seen the ship yet, of course, though the Plastic Man and Bottle were undergoing daily training in their specialties; but that’s the way it was designed, so I told them.

  I had seen the plans of our ship-to-be, and in a lot of ways it wasn’t like any ordinary ship. Once I had seen a mock-up of it, and it looked even more unusual. The colonel showed it to me in his office one day, when I had “one over to attend a meeting” of high brass. I was supposed to be not only pilot but commander of the expedition. I went to the meetings so I’d know what it was all about. All I heard was a lot of gum-beating, and nothing ever came out of it that made sense to me. I figured that was the way they wanted it, so it was O.K. I’d find out soon enough, anyway.

  * * * *

  All summer the five of us lived the life of Riley, except for the time we had to spend in class on ship operations. We got together when we felt like it in our communal recreation room. When we didn’t, we retired to our private quarters.

  We could read, watch TV, pursue hobbies—anything we wanted to do. But we couldn’t leave our quarters unless to go to school or when summoned by higher authority. Not only were we not allowed off the base, we couldn’t even wander around on it. That suited us—we didn’t like people staring at us.

  They fed us on the fat of the land—real “condemned man ate a hearty meal” stuff. The food was sent over from the commissary cafeteria, three times a day without a miss, and it. was the best to be had anywhere. Each of us was served separately in his quarters—except Bottle.

  Bottle never ate. They had “fed” him when they made him, on a tiny speck of radioactive material that kept his artificial innards going. That bottle-shaped body of his would live on a thousand years after his brain died and dissolved into gray slime.

  We lifted ship in the cheerless dawn of a chill, drizzly October day. I still hadn’t told my boys anything, though I had finally been briefed the night before. Only the Plastic Man knew. He had to know. It was a part of the training he had put in on the DC-3 Converter. Not even I knew what that was at the time.

  The colonel had discussed the advisability of briefing the crew as a unit when he told me when we were going, and what we were going to do when we got there. I advised against it. The men, I told him, had been having a lot of fun guessing. Each had built an elaborate thesis in defense of his own guesswork. None of us were anywhere near with our guesses, of course—the engineers who had made this last flight of ours possible were farther ahead in the field of spatial science than we could have known.

  So we blasted out into space and no one but I and the Plastic Man knew where we were going or how we intended to get there.

  We had transferred Bottle to the ship in a covered van and had wheeled him on a dolly to his station. A pair of metal straps held Bottle rigid between two stanchions. He’d stay there until we got to where we were going.

  After he was securely in place, a couple of engineer-medicos came in to fix him up. They worked for hours. When they left. Bottle was equipped with a special plug-in switchboard with outlets for all the instruments he would use on the voyage, plus a few more for the different machines we carried in the hold, and others that would let him take advantage of our recorded entertainment facilities.

  We drove straight out into space after cutting orbit, straight out and away from the sun. There wasn’t any moon to flag us on as we went by—it was on the other side of old Earth. There weren’t any planets in this direction, either. I knew my boys were burning with curiosity. They had to know. I’d better tell them.

  * * * *

  I flipped the toggle on the Attention All Stations buzzer. The boys reported in—“Gutsy!” “Bottle!” “Plastic!” “Purple Top!”

  “O.K.,” I said. “So nobody got left behind. This is Iron Head. Everybody comfy?”

  There was a moment of silence, as if each waited for another to speak first.

  Bottle said, “I’m laughing.”

  That was a standard phrase with Bottle. He couldn’t laugh, of course. That mechanical yakker of his didn’t know what it was to laugh. Whenever Bottle felt amusement, ironic, sardonic, perhaps bitter—one never knew what it was with Bottle—Bottle said, “I’m laughing.”

  Gutsy spoke up. “I’m not laughing. I’m sad, and I’m up in the air. All of us are, including Bottle. Give us the scoop, Iron Head.”r />
  “You’ve been waiting,” I said. “You deserve it. Here it is. You all guessed—I did, too—that we were going somewhere among the outer planets. We aren’t.”

  Again that moment of silence. Purple Top groaned:

  “Why keep us in suspense?”

  I laughed, but there was no humor in it. It hurt to tear my thoughts away from Earth—the world we were leaving forever.

  “I said, “You fellows know this is a one-way trip. I’ve been able to tell you that much. Now I can tell you why.” I paused. My mouth felt suddenly dry. I went on, “Maybe all of you know what the astronomy professors have been doing the past few years with their big telescopes. Maybe you don’t. But the fact is, they’ve been locating more planets. Not in the neighborhood of Sol, but out in space, circling our nearest neighbors among the stars.”

  “We are going to the stars,” Bottle said flatly. “I really guessed that, but I hadn’t guts enough to say it. That’s a joke. I’m laughing.”

  Nobody else laughed.

  “Correct,” I said.

  “Which one?” Purple Top wanted to know.

  They took it calmly, those boys.

  I said, “Alpha Centauri. That’s a binary, and there are planets circling both those stars. Maybe, among the half dozen the astronomers have located, there is one we can land on.”

  “If there isn’t?” That was Plastic, who knew all about where we were going.

  “We’ve had it,” I said succinctly, drew in my breath. “On the other hand, the chance is equally good that there is. The probability is that there are even more planets there than the professors have been able to discover. Isn’t anyone even interested in how we’re going to get there?”

  “I figure that’s been taken care of,” said my co-pilot.

  “O.K., Gutsy, it has,” I replied.

  “Not on jets,” Purple Top averred. “We wouldn’t get there in a million years!”

  “It’s the new engine,” Bottle put in. “A sub-spatial energy warp.”

  “You’ve been talking to Plastic,” I accused.

  “The hell I have.” That was Bottle again, toneless, flat. “What have I got to do but think. I haven’t any fingers to twiddle. I figure it has to be something like that. I can just figure it, vaguely.”

  “How about that, Plastic?” I asked. The Plastic Man’s nasal tones took over.

  “Bottle’s got it—backwards. It’s a space warp on the sub-energy level.” He launched into a discussion of the DC-3 Converter. I heard his words, if you get what I mean, but I didn’t know what he was saying. He wound up, “The source of power for our converter is a very special alloy, you might call it, of radioactive materials. Our converter contains just one charge—enough to get us where we’re going. That is why we can’t count on coming back.”

  Gutsy exploded. “Why couldn’t we carry an extra charge to come back on?”

  I could visualize the Plastic Man’s stiff, unsmiling face.

  “Our journey will last for twelve years—and so will the charge that is in the machine. The charge lasts twelve years, whether it is inside or outside the machine. We could carry an extra charge, but it would exhaust itself in the course of the trip. And we’d all be dead in three weeks from radiation disease.”

  “Twelve year!” yelped Purple Top. “I’ll be dead in less than that!”

  “It’s up to you to stay alive,” I snapped at him. “We got plenty of shots aboard for you. You can die after we get there.”

  “Thanks,” Purple Top acknowledged.

  I went on brusquely. “So we’ll spend twelve years in space. What’s the difference, how long it takes? That’s only part of it. As soon as we land, we’re going to set up a radio beacon that will contact Earth. We’ll use it to report on the conditions we find. It will take four years for our carrier wave to reach Earth. That will add up to sixteen years. Four years later—twenty years from now—we’ll hear the first broadcast sent back to us from Earth. Meantime, we’ll have plenty to do, mapping the planet and getting a space cleared out and built up for future settlers. A lot of that Bottle can handle by himself with the special machines he’s been training on—”

  I went on, told them a lot of things. I reminded them of the acutely critical population congestion on Earth. The governments knew that something had to be done about it within the next century. Mars had turned out to be a lousy place to colonize, and Venus was even worse. What had been tried there, on both planets, wasn’t going over so well.

  The plan was, if our converter did not fail and we safely made a planet-fall, other expeditions would be sent out, to other stars. Somewhere, habitable planets must be found to relieve Earth’s growing congestion.

  “It’s a toss-up whether we get there,” I told them flatly, “or, having got there, whether we’ll find a planet fit to land on. Hadn’t you wondered why a bunch of monsters like us were assembled to make this trip? Who else could stand twelve years in this can without going off his rocker? The fact that we are still sane, after what happened to us, shows we can take it—take it better than all the thousands of A-l, physically fit young bucks who would have gladly volunteered for this job. Are you beginning to get it? I’ll repeat it—frankly, the chances of our ever getting a radio message back to Earth are remotely small. And who would miss us if we failed? And who else would be as glad to get away from Earth?”

  I told them a lot more to whip up their morale—in case it needed whipping up. I wound up speaking directly to Bottle.

  “It’s yours from here on. You plot the course for me and Gutsy to steer her by. When you’ve got it. Plastic will give her the gun. Check it out.”

  * * * *

  Twelve years is a long time to live with four other monsters. In less than a twelfth of that time, you don’t think of them as monsters any more. You don’t hate to look at them. You even crave their company. Underneath, these so-called monsters are like people you’ve known all your life—like you think you are yourself. It gets so you look at them and you don’t see monsters—you see people... friends... buddies. That’s how it was with us.

  We got together in our rec room more and more often for games, for bull sessions, for any purpose at all to avoid being alone. You got so you felt the vastness and emptiness of space right down to the middle of your guts, and the loneliness of being alone scared hell out of you.

  How do you keep your sanity throughout twelve years in a metal vacuum bottle? Bottle, maybe, can answer that better than I can. He’s been in a bottle even longer.

  We had plenty to do, just running the ship. There was the hydroponics garden that had to have regular care—it furnished part of our food and kept our air oxygenated. No kind of machinery will run for twelve years without a breakdown, either—except the DC-3 Converter, and it functioned beautifully. But the other stuff kept going to pieces, especially after a few years. If we weren’t tinkering with the refrigerator, it was the air purifier, or the laundry machines. Or maybe the tape projector would take on a case of electronic gastritis. Twelve years is a long time, but it goes fast when you’ve adopted it as a way of life.

  We celebrated all the holidays, like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. We even made a holiday of our own and called it D.D.—Date of Departure.

  We didn’t miss the things you might think we missed. We didn’t miss crowds, or the neon lights of Earth. What we did miss was new things to see and new things to hear about. I would have given my silver skull to know what was going on, back on Earth.

  After about eight years in space, Purple Top began to change. He had to take his shots regularly, of course, to stay alive. But he got so that he’d miss a shot for a long time, he felt so good. And that purple knot of his seemed to be shriveling and turning a pale lavender.

  Within two years, Purple Top wasn’t Purpl
e Top any more. And he deliberately smashed his hypo on the deck. He wouldn’t be needing it. He was cured of the Venusian fungus disease. Incredible, isn’t it? He was cured of an incurable disease.

  We discussed the phenomenon with .great interest among ourselves. Was it the steady storm of cosmic rays hurtling through our ship that had effected the cure? Or was it some other unguessable radiation that abounded in the deeps of space? We couldn’t tell, and I wished to hell there was a radiation that would change a silver skull back into flesh and bone. What wouldn’t I give to be able to weep decent tears again!

  It was a bitter thing to contemplate—bitter for the slowly dying victims of the Venusian fungus disease back on Earth. They were kicked out of the space service for it—given a lingering death-sentence on Earth, when a few years in space might cure them completely. Well, you live, you know—and while you live, you learn things.

  Anyway, we couldn’t rightly call him Purple Top any more, so we called him George. And for a while, George was the same as the old Purple Top we had known.

  The change in George was subtle at first, but one thing about being a monster, it makes you sensitive to people’s reactions. We all sensed the change in George from the beginning. He took to shunning us, like we made him sick, or something. We saw less and less of George. He got moody.

  I knew what was going on inside George’s mind. Wouldn’t any of us know? He was beginning to miss those things I said monsters couldn’t miss. He knew that if he were back on Earth right now, he’d have opportunities again—opportunities to work for a living among other human beings, to marry and have kids. That’s what was eating the heart out of George.

  But nothing could be done about it now.

  He had to take the situation or go over the line. He didn’t go over, but I think he came very close to it.

  What saved us all about then was the fact that we were nearing the end of our journey. That was the one focus strong enough to bring us together and outweigh any psychological factors of hurt feelings or under-the-surface frictions.