Treasury of Science Fiction (Berkley Medallion)

by Groff Conklin (ed)

  The maneuver took three days, but at the end of that time the ship was limping along a course parallel to the beam that had once come from Earth. They were heading out into emptiness, the blazing sphere that had been the sun dwindling slowly behind them. By the standards of interstellar flight, they were almost stationary.

  For hours Rugon strained over his instruments, driving his detector beams far ahead into space. There were certainly no planets within many light-years; there was no doubt of that. From time to time Alveron came to see him and always he had to give the same reply: “Nothing to report.” About a fifth of the time Rugon’s intuition let him down badly; he began to wonder if this was such an occasion.

  Not until a week later did the needles of the mass-detectors quiver feebly at the ends of their scales. But Rugon said nothing, not even to his captain. He waited until he was sure, and he went on waiting until even the short-range scanners began to react, and to build up the first faint pictures on the vision screen. Still he waited patiently until he could interpret the images. Then, when he knew that his wildest fancy was even less than the truth, he called his colleagues into the control room.

  The picture on the vision screen was the familiar one of endless star fields, sun beyond sun to the very limits of the Universe. Near the center of the screen a distant nebula made a patch of haze that was difficult for the eye to grasp.

  Rugon increased the magnification. The stars flowed out of the field; the little nebula expanded until it filled the screen and then—it was a nebula no longer. A simultaneous gasp of amazement came from all the company at the sight that lay before them.

  Lying across league after league of space, ranged in a vast three-dimensional array of rows and columns with the precision of a marching army, were thousands of tiny pencils of light. They were moving swiftly; the whole immense lattice holding its shape as a single unit. Even as Alveron and his comrades watched, the formation began to drift off the screen and Rugon had to recenter the controls.

  After a long pause, Rugon started to speak.

  “This is the race,” he said softly, “that has known radio for only two centuries—the race that we believed had crept to die in the heart of its planet. I have examined those images under the highest possible magnification.

  “That is the greatest fleet of which there has ever been a record. Each of those points of light represents a ship larger than our own. Of course, they are very primitive—what you see on the screen are the jets of their rockets. Yes, they dared to use rockets to bridge interstellar space! You realize what that means. It would take them centuries to reach the nearest star. The whole race must have embarked on this journey in the hope that its descendants would complete it, generations later.

  “To measure the extent of their accomplishment, think of the ages it took us to conquer space, and the longer ages still before we attempted to reach the stars. Even if we were threatened with annihilation, could we have done so much in so short a time? Remember, this is the youngest civilization in the Universe. Four hundred thousand years ago it did not even exist. What will it be a million years from now?”

  An hour later, Orostron left the crippled mother ship to make contact with the great fleet ahead. As the little torpedo disappeared among the stars, Alveron turned to his friend and made a remark that Rugon was often to remember in the years ahead.

  “I wonder what they’ll be like?” he mused. “Will they be nothing but wonderful engineers, with no art or philosophy? They’re going to have such a surprise when Orostron reaches them—I expect it will be rather a blow to their pride. It’s funny how all isolated races think they’re the only people in the Universe. But they should be grateful to us; we’re going to save them a good many hundred years of travel.”

  Alveron glanced at the Milky Way, lying like a veil of silver mist across the vision screen. He waved toward it with a sweep of a tentacle that embraced the whole circle of the galaxy, from the Central Planets to the lonely suns of the Rim.

  “You know,” he said to Rugon, “I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don’t like our little Federation?” He waved once more toward the star-clouds that lay massed across the screen, glowing with the light of their countless suns.

  “Something tells me they’ll be very determined people,” he added. “We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.”

  Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke.

  Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.

  Juggernaut

  A. E. van Vogt

  —

  From nowhere at all the little bar of metal came—a special, very, very super steel. Made wonderful weapons. But there was, they realized much too late, a catch to it. It spread—and it was too good!

  The man—his name was Pete Creighton, though that doesn’t matter—saw the movement out of the corner of his eye, as he sat reading his evening paper.

  A hand reached out of the nothingness of the thin air about two feet above the rug. It seemed to grope, then drew back into nothingness. Almost instantly it reappeared, this time holding a small, dully glinting metal bar. The fingers let go of the bar, and drew out of sight, even as the metal thing started to fall towards the floor.

  THUD! The sound was vibrant.

  It shook the room.

  Creighton sat jerkily up in his chair, and lowered his paper. Then he remembered what he had seen. Automatically, his mind rejected the memory. But the fantastic idea of it brought him mentally further into the room.

  He found himself staring at an ingot of iron about a foot long and two indies square. That was all. It lay there on the rug, defying his reason.

  “Cripes!” said Creighton.

  His wife, a sad-faced woman, came out of the kitchen. She stared at him gloomily. “What’s the matter now?” she intoned.

  “That iron bar!” Her husband, half-choked, pointed. “Who threw that in here?”

  “Bar?” The woman looked at the ingot in surprise. Her face cleared. “Johnny must have brought it in from the outside.”

  She paused, frowned again; then added: “Why all the fuss about a piece of scrap iron?”

  “It fell,” Creighton babbled. “I saw it out of the corner of my eye. A hand dropped it right out of the—”

  He stopped. Realization came of what he was saying. He swallowed hard. His eyes widened. He bent sideways in his chair, and grabbed convulsively for the metal bar.

  It came up in his strong fingers. It was quite heavy. Its weight and its drab appearance dimmed his desire to examine it thoroughly. It was a solid ingot of iron, nothing more, nor less. His wife’s tired voice came again:

  “Johnny must have stood it up on one end, and it fell over.”

  “Huh-uh!” said her husband.

  He found himself anxious to accept the explanation. The curious sense of alien things faded before the normalness of it. He must have been daydreaming. He must have been crazy.

  He put the bar down on the floor. “Give it to the next scrap drive!” he said gruffly.

  Hour after hour, the Vulcan Steel & Iron Works roared and yammered at the undefended skies. The din was an unceasing dirge, lustily and horrendously sounding the doom of the Axis. It was a world of bedlam; and not even an accident could stop that over-all bellowing of metal being smashed and tormented into new shapes.

  The accident added a minor clamor to the dominating theme of stupendous sound. There was a screech from a cold roller machine, than a thumping and a sound of metal tearing.

  One of the men operating the machine emitted some fanciful verbal sounds, and frantically manipulated the controls. The thumping and the tearing ceased. An assistant foreman came over.

  “What’s wrong, Bill?”

  “That bar!” muttered Bill. “I was just starting to round it, and it bent one of the rollers.”

  “That bar!” echoed the assistant foreman incredulously.

  He stared at the little thin
g. It was a big bar to be going through a roller. But compared to the sizable steel extrusions and moldings turned out by the Vulcan works, it was tiny.

  It was six feet long, and it had originally been two inches square. About half of its length had been rolled once. At the point where the strength of the rollers had been bested, the metal of the bar looked exactly the same as that which had gone before. Except that it had refused to round.

  The assistant foreman spluttered, and then fell back on a technicality. “I thought it was understood,” he said, “that in the Vulcan plants nothing over an inch and a half is rounded by rollers.”

  “I have had dozens of ’em,” said Bill. He added doggedly; “When they come, I do ’em.”

  There was nothing to do but accept the reality. Other firms, the assistant foreman knew, made a common practise of rolling two inchers. He said:

  “O.K., take your helper and report to Mr. Johnson. I’ll have a new roller put in here. The bent one and that bar go to the scrap heap.”

  He could not refrain front adding: “Hereafter send two-inch bars to the hammers.”

  The bar obediently went through the furnace again. A dozen things could have happened to it. It could have formed part of a large molding. It could have, along with other metal, endured an attempt to hammer it into sheer steel.

  It would have been discovered then, its basic shape and hardness exposed.

  But the wheels of chance spun—and up went a mechanical hammer, and down onto the long, narrow, extruded shape of which the original ingot was a part.

  The hammer was set for one and one quarter inches, and it clanged with a curiously solid sound. It was a sound not unfamiliar to the attendant, but one which oughtn’t to be coming from the pummeling of white-hot metal.

  It was his helper, however, who saw the dents in the base of the hammer. He uttered a cry, and pulled out the clutch. The older man jerked the bar clear, and stared at the havoc it had wrought.

  “Yumpin’ yimminy!” he said. “Hey, Mr. Yenkins, come over here, and look at this.”

  Jenkins was a big, chubby man who bad contributed fourteen ideas for labor-saving devices before and since he was made foreman. The significance of what he saw now was not lost on him.

  “Ernie’s sick today,” he said. “Take over his drill for a couple of hours, you two, while I look into this.”

  He phoned the engineering department; and after ten minutes Boothby came down, and examined the hammer.

  He was a lean-built, precise young man of thirty-five. On duty he wore horned-rimmed glasses, behind which gleamed a pair of bright-blue eyes. He was a craftsman, a regular hound for precision work.

  He measured the dents. They were a solid two inches wide: and the hammer and its base shared the depth equally.

  In both, the two-inch wide, one-foot long gouge was exactly three eighths of an inch deep, a total for the two of three quarters of an inch.

  “Hm-m-m,” said Boothby, “what have we got here . . . a super-super hard alloy, accidentally achieved?”

  “My mind jumped that way,” said Mr. Jenkins modestly. “My name is Jenkins. Wilfred Jenkins.” Boothby grinned inwardly. He recognized that he was being told very quietly to whom the credit belonged for any possible discovery. He couldn’t help his reaction. He said:

  “Who was on this machine?” Jenkins’ heavy face looked unhappy. He hesitated.

  “Some Swede,” he said reluctantly. “I forget his name.”

  “Find it out,” said Boothby. “His prompt action in calling you is very important. Now, let’s see if we can trace this bar back to its source.” He saw that Jenkins was happy again. “I’ve already done that,” the foreman said. “It came out of a pot, all the metal of which was derived from shop scrap. Beyond that, of course, it’s untraceable.” Boothby found himself appreciating Jenkins a little more. It always made him feel good to see a man on his mental toes.

  He had formed a habit of giving praise when it was deserved. He gave it now, briefly, then finished: “Find out if any other department has recently run up against a very hard metal. No, wait, I’ll do that. You have this bar sent right up to the metallurgical lab.”

  “Sent up hot?” asked Jenkins. “Now!” said Boothby, “whatever its condition. “I’ll ring up Nadderly . . . er, Mr. Nadderly, and tell him to expect it”

  He was about to add: “And see that your men don’t make a mistake, and ship the wrong one.”

  He didn’t add it. There was a look on Jenkins’ face, an unmistakable look. It was the look of a man who strongly suspected that he was about to win his fifteenth bonus in two and a half years.

  There would be no mistake.

  A steel bar 2″x2″x12″—tossed out of hyper-space into the living room of one, Pete Creighton, who didn’t matter—

  None of the individuals mattered. They were but pawns reacting according to a pattern, from which they could vary only if some impossible change took place in their characters. Impossible because they would have had to become either more or less than human.

  When a machine in a factory breaks down, its operator naturally has to call attention to the fact. All the rest followed automatically out of the very nature of things. An alert foreman, and alert engineer, a skillful metallurgist; these were normal Americans, normal Englishmen, normal—Germans!

  No, the individuals mattered not. There was only the steel ingot, forming now a part of a long, narrow bar.

  On the thirtieth day, Boothby addressed the monthly meeting of the Vulcan’s board of directors. He was first on the agenda, so he had had to hustle. But he was in a high good humor as he began:

  “As you all know, obtaining information from a metallurgist”—he paused and grinned inoffensively at Nadderly, whom he had invited down—“is like obtaining blood from a turnip. Mr. Nadderly embodies in his character and hip science all the caution of a Scotchman who realizes that it’s time he set up the drinks for everybody, but who is waiting for some of the gang to depart.

  “I might as well warn you, gentlemen, that he is fully aware that any statement he has made on this metal might be used against him. One of his objections is that thirty days is a very brief period in the life of an alloy. There is an aluminum alloy, for instance, that requires forty days to age harden.

  “Mr. Nadderly wishes that stressed because the original hard alloy, which seems to have been a bar of about two inches square by a foot long, has in fifteen days imparted its hardness to the rest of the bar, of which it is a part.

  “Gentlemen”—he looked earnestly over the faces—“the hardness of this metal cannot be stated or estimated. It is not just so many times harder than chromium or molybdenum steel. It is hard beyond all calculation.

  “Once hardened, it cannot be machined, not even by tools made of itself. It won’t grind. Diamonds do not even scratch it. Cannon shells neither dent it nor scratch it. Chemicals have no effect. No heat we have been able to inflict on it has any softening effect.

  “Two pieces welded together—other metal attaches to it readily—impart the hardness to the welding. Apparently, any metal once hardened by contact with the hard metal, will impart the hardness to any metal with which it in turn comes into contact.

  “The process is cumulative and endless, though, as I have said, it seems to require fifteen days. It is during this fortnight that the metal can be worked.

  “Mr. Nadderly thinks that the hardness derives from atomic, not molecular processes, and that the impulse of hardness is imparted much as radium will affect metals with which it is placed in contact. It seems to be harmless, unlike radium, but—”

  Boothby paused. He ran his gaze along the line of intent faces, down one side of the board table and up the other.

  “The problem is this: Can we after only thirty days, long before we can be sure we know all its reactions, throw this metal into the balance against the Axis?”

  Boothby sat down. No one seemed to have expected such an abrupt ending, and it was nearly a minute before
the chairman of the board cleared his throat and said:

  “I have a telegram here from the Del-Air Corporation, which puzzled me when I received it last night, but which seems more understandable in the light of what Mr. Boothby has told us. The telegram is from the president of Del-Air. I will read it, if you please.”

  He read:

  “ ‘We have received from the United States Air Command, European Theater, an enthusiastic account of some new engines which we dispatched overseas some thirteen days ago by air. Though repeatedly struck by cannon shells, the cylinder blocks of these engines sustained no damage, and continued in operation. These cylinders were bored from steel blocks sent from your plant twenty days ago. Please continue to send us this marvelous steel, which you have developed, and congratulations.’ ”

  The chairman looked up. “Well?” he said.

  “But it’s not probable,” Boothby protested. “None of the alloy has been sent out. It’s up in the metallurgical lab right now.”

  He stopped, his eyes widening. “Gentlemen,” he breathed, “is it possible that any metal, which has been in contact with the super-hard steel for however brief a period, goes through the process of age-hardening? I am thinking of the fact that the original ingot has twice at least been through an arc furnace, and that it has touched various other machines.”

  He stopped again, went on shakily: “If that is so, then our problem answers itself. We have been sending out super-steel.”

  He finished quietly, but jubilantly: “We can, therefore, only accept the miracle, and try to see to it that no super-tanks or super-machines fall into the hands of our enemies.”

  After thirty days, the metal impulse was flowing like a streak. In thirty more days it had crossed the continent and the oceans myriad times.

  What happens when every tool in a factory is turning out two hundred and ten thousand different parts, every tool is sharing with its product the gentle impulse of an atomically generated force? And when a thousand, ten thousand factories are affected.