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

by Lake, Jay

  Even Bottle was excited. He kept saving he was. You couldn’t tell it from the sound of his voice.

  * * * *

  We decelerated on the Alpha Centauri system, looking for a likely planetfall. It didn’t take us more than a week to find it, and it was good—too good, almost, to be true.

  We checked the planet out with our instruments, and she was Earth-type, within the tolerance allowed. That dazed us all—made us quiet and filled us with renewed purpose. Really, we hadn’t expected it.

  So the planet checked out good. We couldn’t set our ship down fast enough.

  The blue air looked good around us, and the fleecy clouds when we got down low enough to pass through them. We could see the map of the new world spread out below us, all green and wrinkled up with mountains, and flat stretches that could only be plains, and seas and rivers.

  Except for the shape of the continents, it was as much like Earth as any planet we could ever hope to see again. And it was ours—all ours.

  We landed on a plateau that ended in a vertical precipice falling off into the sea. The sky was blue. Twin suns swam overhead in it, and it was spring in that hemisphere. White birds fluttered over the cliff and the singing sea, and there were trees and shrubs growing right up to the edge of the cliff. Our observations had shown us no signs of civilized life whatever.

  We set our ship down in a clearing a half mile from the sea, where a small stream burbled through a field of grass—the ideal spot for our Earth-ranging radio beacon.

  Suddenly a warning whistle cut across the tense bustle of our landing.

  “What the hell—?” I said.

  We had never thought we’d use our radio apparatus—ship’s radio, that is—except for local contact with our own exploring parties. Now it was sounding the warning that it had picked up a carrier wave. The light on the control panel blinked the code signal for the carrier’s kilocycle range.

  Dread froze my hand for an instant, then I moved and tuned the set.

  A voice filled our ship with sound—was carried by intercom to every station on our ship.

  I can’t remember what the voice said. Docs it matter now? More important, I think, is the effect the voice had on us. It wasn’t the fact that the voice spoke English that stunned us, nor the knowledge that a spaceship from Earth rode the sky a mile above us.

  What killed our souls, was the knowledge that we had been beaten—we had failed.

  Of course, it wasn’t our fault. Twelve years is a long time. Science can advance a lot in twelve years—when it has a good start like the DC-3 Converter. You see what I mean? Our whole spaceship—crew included—had been obsolete from the moment we left Earth. New techniques had created a better machine—and better men were available to man it.

  We learned about it from Commander Halloran as we gathered that evening around the first campfire that had ever been lit on this new world—and we named it then and there New Earth, in memory of the old Earth.

  The other vessel had landed a short distance away, and Commander Halloran came over with a few of his officers. He had a crew of five hundred men on that ship of his.

  We were all at the campfire, save Bottle. We hadn’t had time to unship him yet. And Commander Halloran knew how we felt. He was very delicate about the situation. But I only half heard his words, I was so taken up with my own thoughts. But I noticed George. He was changed from the surly, uncommunicative fellow he had become on the latter part of the voyage. He was leaning with interest on the commander’s words, and his eyes shone in the light of the campfire.

  “... Made the trip in less than thirty days,” the commander was saying. “We can go anywhere in the galaxy in less than a year. We calculated to get here just before you arrived—we wanted you boys to be first to make a planetfall here. It was your right. You had it coming to you. We waited and picked you up with our detectors as you came in on the system. We followed you in to your landing.” He smiled. “I understand how you feel. You feel like we’ve taken your triumph and your glory away from you. We can’t help that—even though it isn’t so. What you did was plenty more than what we had to go through. Your names will go down in history as the first Earthmen to set foot on New Earth.

  It was small consolation to me.

  George said, excitement tingeing his voice, “Less than thirty days!” He looked at me. “In a month, I could be back on Earth, if I went back with them. Couldn’t I, Iron Head?”

  My thoughts focused again. I thought of George, his restored manhood—the hope that was offered him after years of hopelessness.

  Why was I griping?

  “I think it would be a great thing for you to go back with us,” Commander Halloran said, taking the words out of my mouth. “Think what a sensation you’ll make among sufferers of the Venusian fungus disease!”

  I knew that wasn’t what George was thinking. He was picturing to himself the sensation he’d make among the girls of Earth.

  There isn’t much of my face left to show feelings, but what little there is must have shown something. Plastic, of course, was expressionless all the time, and Gutsy kept his thoughts to himself.

  * * * *

  Later, after the commander and his group had gone back to their ship, we went back inside our own. But not until I had stopped a moment and searched the star-blazing sky for old Sol. I saw my native sun—a pale flicker of yellow light, and abruptly followed the others inside.

  The others had gone to their quarters, and as I came in, I ran into George coming out of his. He had a packed duffle bag on his shoulder.

  “Thought I’d take my stuff over to the other ship—”

  “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead, George, and say—”

  He turned at the air lock door.

  “... Good luck,” I finished.

  I heard his hard shoe soles ring on the air lock floor, then the sound fell away to a chink, chink, chink as he descended the landing ramp.

  Gutsy came out into the alleyway.

  “George gone? ”

  I nodded.

  “Guess he couldn’t stand us monsters any more.”

  There was bitterness in his tone.

  “No... you’re wrong, Gutsy. George couldn’t stand himself any more.”

  The Plastic Man ducked out of Bottle’s quarters.

  “So what if he’s gone?”

  “I wonder if that’s the best thing?” I returned.

  Bottle’s mechanical voice floated eerily out of his little chamber.

  “You wouldn’t stop him, would you. Iron Head?”

  I went in to get closer to Bottle. The others crowded after.

  I said, “The matter with George is he thinks he’s useless. He thinks we all are. I saw it in his face out there by the campfire, when Halloran was spouting about the wonderful new ship they’ve developed. He figures none of us is needed any more, so he’s going back to Earth, because he’ll be needed there. Well, all right—let him go. But there’s plenty of work to be done here. We may be a bunch of monsters, but humanity still needs us. We’ve got to get this place ready to receive people when they start arriving. We’ve got to clear land, put up houses—”

  I heard the chink, chink, chink on the ramp, but somehow it didn’t penetrate. I kept on talking.

  “We’ve got the equipment and the guts to do the job. That’s why I think it’s a mistake to let George go back. He just thinks he’s needed back on Earth—”

  The ring of hard shoe soles had sounded the length of the alleyway and stopped outside the door. I felt the tension in the air. I babbled aimlessly a moment more, then turned with a sick grin. George stood in the doorway.

  “Go on, Iron Head,” he said softly, face pale. “Say the rest of it.”

  “Look, George—” I protested.

  �
�If you don’t, I will,” he went on, just as quietly. “I thought I could find a place where I was needed back on Earth. We’ll start from there. I admit it. That’s what I thought. I thought about the guys with the purple heads and I thought I was the hope they were looking for. But it came to me, all of a sudden, when I was about halfway to the other ship. They don’t need me either. Just knowing they can be cured will be enough for them.

  “You know what I’m thinking,” he went on after a moment. “We were all monsters, until we lived together long enough none of us was a monster any more. And we had a job to do. That made life worth living and looking forward to. But suppose I did go back? Everybody would come for miles to look at me. Newsmen would chase me around with cameras. I could be turning video offers down left and right. Why all the excitement? Because the world needed me?” He grinned suddenly, wryly. “Hell, no! Because I was a monster—which just means somebody different.”

  He stepped completely into Bottle’s little room.

  George said, “I’ve come back, fellows, to help you do the job that I suddenly realize needs to be done.” He stopped and then went on doubtfully, peering at each of us in turn, “If you’ll have me back.”

  Nobody said anything. I took George’s hand and shook it. The Plastic Man grabbed him around the waist and hugged. Gutsy hammered him on the back.

  We had been like a sick organism, with one of its members out of function. Now we were whole again and feeling it. We were ready to whip this world—any world—into shape.

  WHEN YOU GIFFLE..., by L.J. Stecher

  Originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963.

  I was a little bit worried when I saw Captain Hannah again. I thought he might have decided he wanted his elephants back, and I’d grown sort of attached to them. Although I couldn’t break the baby of the habit of nibbling on Gasha leaves, in spite of the fact that they’re not good for him.

  A few months earlier, Captain Hannah had conned me into taking the elephants off his hands and out of his tramp spaceship. He had suffered from intellectual terrestrial zoological insufficiency—or in other words, he hadn’t known whales are mammals, and had delivered the multi-ton Beulah instead, to the Prinkip of Penguin, as an adult sample of Earth’s largest mammal.

  The Prinkip had quite properly refused delivery, and Hannah had stuck me with her and her incipient progeny.

  I needn’t have worried. Captain Hannah didn’t want her back. He just wanted to relax and talk to someone. I bought him a drink, but I refused one myself, remembering what had happened to me the times before, when I had listened to Captain Hannah with a glass in my hand.

  * * * *

  Captain Hannah ran a leathery hand over his leathery face. He looked haggard. “I came here because I’ve got to talk to somebody,” he said, “and you make a good listener.

  “Do you remember after I completed my contract with you for the delivery of the gasha root, and after you had talked me into leaving Beulah with you for the sake of the little one, how we had a few drinks together to celebrate our mutual success, before I headed out?”

  Well, my memory about who had talked whom into what about Beulah didn’t agree with his, but I told him I remembered our last get-together, and he went on.

  “Anyone who tries to set up an interstellar Jump with a hangover should be permanently barred from the spaceways,” he said with some feeling. “I guess that the only reason they aren’t, is that the ones who make a mistake are never heard from again.” He paused and sipped. “Except me.”

  “When I left you that last time, and pushed Delta Crucis up into parking orbit, I was full of rhial and a grim determination to deliver a whale to the Prinkip. I must have made some mistake or other in setting up the Jump coordinates, because when I popped out of Limbo, alarm bells went off in all directions. The main computer told me it didn’t have the faintest idea where we had arrived, and the auxiliary computer agreed noisily. I turned off the alarms and uncovered the viewports to check for myself, without much hope.

  “The view from the ones on the starboard side didn’t show me anything I recognized, so I pushed myself across the room and slid off the covers on the port side.

  “The stars there were unfamiliar, too, but I’m afraid that I didn’t notice for awhile. The foreground was taking up all of my attention. There were two towheaded kids—about eight or nine years old, I should judge—floating in empty space, with their noses flattened against the viewport glass. They were as brown as berries, and as naked as jaybirds, and as cute as chipmunks, and as alike as two peas, and as improbable as virtue.

  “The one on the left—my left, that is—backed off enough so that his nose straightened out, smiled angelically and asked politely whether he and his twin brother might come in. That is, his lips moved and I heard the words, and they made sense. Only they didn’t. Nothing made sense when somebody talking in a vacuum could be heard as if he were right beside you. Anyway, I nodded that they could come in.

  “The two boys swam forward, using a sort of self-taught kind of a breast stroke, right through the solid glass of the viewport, until they were in the ship beside me, and then they stood up. That’s no small feat in itself, standing up in a spaceship in the absence of gravity or spin.”

  Captain Hannah beckoned the waiter for a refill, and then asked me if I wouldn’t change my mind and drink with him. The way this story of his was going, I figured I might as well, and he didn’t start in talking again until we had both had a sip.

  “They were skinny, and they looked explosively energetic, the way kids that age usually do. But they just stood quietly facing me side by side, giving out with cheerful gaptoothed small-boy smiles. Somehow or other it was reassuring to notice that they both had belly buttons. It was an indication to me—whether it made sense or not—that they were just human beings; that they had been born of women in the usual way—and that there must be some rational explanation for what looked like miracles.

  “‘Is there anything I can do for you two kids?’ I asked, as politely as I knew how.

  “‘Well, sir,’ said the one who had spoken before, ‘please excuse us for barging in on you like this, with no clothes on and all....’

  “The other boy picked up the conversation without a break, ‘but you have materialized your spaceship right in the middle of our swimming hole…’

  “‘…and it’s muddying everything up something fierce,’ finished boy number one.

  “I glanced out through the view ports at the illimitable and untrammeled reaches of space, and then back at the boys.

  “‘We’re afraid you’ll just have to take our word for it, sir. This is our swimming hole,’ said boy number one earnestly. ‘There aren’t many…’

  “‘…spots like this in space,’ number two picked up. ‘It has something to do with gravity balances and radiation zones and thought-energy sumps and a lot of other…’

  “‘…things like that that we don’t understand either because we haven’t had it in school yet. But we do know that it’s the best place we can reach for space swimming, only…’

  “‘…it’s too far for us to get to and pull along our clothes too. Besides which, what boy would want to go swimming with his clothes on anyway?’ They both came to a full stop.

  “‘The only thing wrong with it,’ the speaker had shifted again, ‘is, it’s even too far to bring along any sandwiches and cookies and stuff.’

  “I stopped swinging my head back and forth from one to the other as the speaker shifted, and shook myself awake. ‘How about some chocolate cake and a bulb or two of milk? I’ve got plenty of both,’ I told them.”

  * * * *

  “Oh, come now,” I said to Captain Hannah, glancing at the row of rhial beakers in front of him. In spite of his space tan, I could see him blush.

  “Well, I like chocolate cak
e,” he said defensively. “And drinking milk when I’m in space gets my stomach back in shape for going ashore again with the likes of you. What’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?”

  I signified “Nothing at all,” with an elaborate gesture, and he went back to his story after dipping his nose.

  “Well, I gave each of them some cake and milk, and they sat down politely at my table to eat it…and the plates stayed on the table and the cake stayed on the plates even though there wasn’t any gravity and I didn’t have any spin on the ship.

  “‘Now what’s all this about my muddying up your swimming hole?’ I asked, when they had finished eating all my cake and drinking three bulbs of milk each.

  “‘That’s all there is to it, sir,’ said the first boy. ‘You have changed the gravity balance and the radiation pattern and everything else…’

  “‘…and that’s taken all the fun out of swimming. And when you have taken all the chances we have in playing hooky just because this is such a good place to swim…’

  “‘…it’s a shame to have it all spoiled. So would you please leave, sir?’

  “‘Oh, I’d be glad to Jump out of here, boys,’ I told them. ‘But you see, I’ve got a little problem. I’m lost. I don’t have the faintest idea where in the Universe I am, so how can I set the right coordinates to Jump somewhere else?’

  “‘Oh!’ said the two boys together. ‘We didn’t realize....’ They stopped, and looked at each other. They acted as if they were carrying on an argument although their lips didn’t move and I couldn’t hear anything. At any rate, they soon reached some sort of agreement.

  “‘We’ll have to get help,’ said the first boy at last. ‘We’d call Dad, except he’d warm both of us real good if he knew we were out here swimming when we’re supposed to be in school. But....’