(2/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume II: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  Shuddering, he turned away. He had some two and a half hours of grace, before the sun should set again and darkness release the colossus from its torpor. There was only one thing he could do: place the diameter of the sphere between the thing and himself, and try to exist through another night of terror.

  His hands went to his belt to adjust the gravity regulator strapped about his waist. By reducing his weight to an ounce or two, he could make the long journey possible for his fatigue-numbed muscles--

  His hands clenched into fists, and his breath whistled between his set teeth as a wild hope came to him. The touch of the regulator had brought inspiration. A way to defeat the gigantic creature stretched on the ground beside him! A way to banish it forever from the surface of this lovely little world where all was perfect but the monstrous thing with which it was cursed!

  * * * * *

  Trembling with the reaction wrought in him by the faint glow of hope, he began to race toward the lake and his wrecked Blinco Dart. It wasn't hard to find the way; the rock giant had left a trail as broad as a road; trees broken off like celery stalks, bushes smashed flat, tracks that looked like shallow wells sunk into the firm ground. Fifty yards to a step, he leaped along this path, praying that one object, just one bit of machinery in the Dart had escaped the general wreckage.

  Arrived at the little shell at last, he was forced to pause a moment and compose himself before he could step into the battered interior. Everything hinged on this one final chance!

  Drawing a long breath, he entered the cabin and made his way to the stern repellor. A groan escaped his lips. It was ruined. Evidently the thing had reached in the man-hole opening with one of its three mighty tentacles, and, with sure instinct, had fastened its stone claws on the repellor housing. At any rate, it was ground to bits. But--there was the bow repellor.

  He went to that, and the flame of hope came back to his eyes. It was untouched! He threw back the housing to make sure. Yes, the inter-sliding series of plates, that reversed or neutralized gravitational attraction at a touch, were in alignment.

  He bent to the task of disconnecting it from the heavy bed-plate to which it was bolted, his fingers flying frenziedly. Then back to the torpid colossus he hurried, clutching the precious repellor tight in his arms lest he should drop it, walking carefully lest he should fall with it.

  There he was faced by a new difficulty that at first seemed insurmountable. How could he fasten the repellor to that great, impenetrable, opalescent bulk?

  A second time he bounded back toward the Dart, to return with the heavy bow and stern bed-plates from its hull.

  * * * * *

  Once more the orange ball of the sun was sinking low. The terrible brevity of those three-hour days! He had less than ten minutes, Earth time, in which to work.

  One of the thing's arms, or tentacles, was pointing out away from the parent mass. It was twice the diameter of his body, and was ponderously heavy; but by rigging a fulcrum and lever device, with a stone as the fulcrum and a tough log as the lever, he managed to raise it high enough to thrust one of the bed-plates under it. The other massive metal sheet he laid across the top.

  The lower rim of the sun touched the horizon. A tremor ran through the colossus. In frantic haste, racing against the flying seconds, Harley clamped the two plates tight against the columnar tentacle with four long hull-bolts from the Dart. He set the repellor in position on the top bed-plate, and began to fasten it down.

  He felt another tremor run through the stone column on which he was squatting. With a rasping sound, one of the half-moon rock-curtains the thing had for eyelids blinked open and shut. He shot the last bolt into place and tightened it.

  The stone claws, just behind which he had fastened the repellor, ground savagely shut. The great tentacle began to lift, and carried him with it--toward the chasm of a mouth. That chasm opened wide....

  Harley straightened up and jumped for the ground. As he jumped, he kicked the repellor control bar hard over.

  There was a shrieking of wind as though all the hurricanes in the universe were battling each other. He felt himself turned over and over, buffeted, torn at, in a mad aerial whirlpool. The whirlpool calmed as the abruptly created vacuum, caused by the monster's rapid drive upward, passed after it into space. Far overhead there was one fleeting glimpse of a pinpoint of dull opalescence reflecting the rays of the dying sun. Then the pinpoint disappeared in fathomless space. With his gravity regulator adjusted to the point where it almost neutralized his weight, he fell slowly back toward the ground....

  * * * * *

  Almost immediately after he had landed in the darkness that blanketed the surface of the planetoid, a big space yacht settled down near him. A searchlight bored a hole in the blackness, to bathe him in cold light. Down the beam came a band of men from Earth, pushing atomic cannon and gazing apprehensively about them. In the lead was an elderly man with the six-bar dollar-mark insignia of a business executive on his purple tunic.

  He hastened to Harley's side. Harley only dimly heard what he said. Something to the effect that the man had been worried after selling the fatal asteroid. Had got in touch with the Radivision Corporation and learned that this call number was dead. Had come with men and big guns to rescue him, if it wasn't too late, and take him back to Earth. Had cruised for half an hour before locating him. "I've been calling myself a murderer ever since I let you have Z-40, Mr. 2Q14N20," he concluded. "I was sure we'd get here only to find you'd been killed. But I see you've managed to escape from the creature so far--though by the look of you, it must have been a narrow shave."

  At this Harley shook off some of the gathering dizziness that hazed his mind. He threw back his shoulders. "Managed to escape? I did better than that. I got rid of the thing forever! Yes, I'll return to Earth with you, but only because I need a new Blinco Dart. I'm coming back to Z-40 at once. Perfect little paradise, now that I've got rid of that--animated--rock pile--"

  The belated rescuers caught him as he collapsed.

  [Footnote 1: This implement, invented by Blansco 9X247A in 2052, is not so much a "drill" as a compressor. It is somewhat superficially defined in the Universal Dictionary, 2061 edition, as "a portable mechanism which, by alternating gaseous blasts of extreme heat and cold, breaks down the atoms of inorganic matter, causing them to collapse together in dense compression." Thus a cubic yard of earth can be reduced in size, in a few moments, to a pebble no larger than a pea; which pebble would weigh, on Earth, close to a ton.]

  * * *

  Contents

  THE JUPITER WEAPON

  By CHARLES L. FONTENAY

  He was a living weapon of destruction--immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human?

  Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs.

  Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted.

  A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself.

  Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm.

  Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her.

  There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at th
e pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion.

  His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him.

  "Help me!" she cried. "Please help me!"

  He began to back away from her.

  "I can't," he muttered in a deep voice. "I can't help you. I can't do anything."

  * * * * *

  The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted:

  "Kregg!"

  The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face.

  Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer.

  Exactly what happened, Trella wasn't sure. She had the impression that Kregg's fist connected squarely with the short man's chin before he dodged to one side in a movement so fast it was a blur. But that couldn't have been, because the short man wasn't moved by that blow that would have felled a steer, and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing his injured fist.

  "The bar!" yelled Kregg. "I hit the damn bar!"

  At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door.

  Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly.

  "Get out!" rumbled the bartender. "I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!"

  Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side.

  "That means you, too, lady," said the bartender beside her. "You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place."

  "May I help you, Miss?" asked a deep, resonant voice behind her.

  She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face.

  She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward.

  "I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't," he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. "But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you."

  "A lot of protection you'd be if they did!" she snapped. "But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me."

  * * * * *

  The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw.

  The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky.

  "I'm Quest Mansard, Miss," said her companion. "I'm just in from Jupiter."

  "I'm Trella Nuspar," she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. "You mean Io, don't you--or Moon Five?"

  "No," he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. "I meant Jupiter."

  "You're lying," she said flatly. "No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again."

  "My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it," he said soberly. "I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?"

  "I certainly have," she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. "He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost."

  "It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully," said Quest. "He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet."

  She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down.

  "If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?" she demanded.

  "Because," said Quest, "his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was."

  "Jupiter strength," she murmured, looking him over coolly. "You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs."

  He flushed.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "That's something I couldn't help."

  "Why not?"

  "I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone."

  Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was.

  * * * * *

  They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on.

  Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop.

  "I landed here only a week ago," he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. "I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship."

  "We'll be traveling companions, then," she said. "I'm going back on that ship, too."

  For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth.

  * * * * *

  Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest.

  As a matter of fact, she found herself enjoying his companionship more than she intended to. She found herself falling in love with him.

  Now this did not suit her at all. Trella had always liked her men tall and dark. She had determined that when she married it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.

  She was not at all happy about being so strongly attracted to a man several inches shorter than she. She was particularly unhappy about feeling drawn to a man who was a coward.

  The ship that they boarded on Moon Nine was one of the newer ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second velocity and take a hyperbolic path to Earth, but it would still require fifty-four days to make the trip. So Trella was delighted to find that the ship was the Cometfire and its skipper was her old friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired Jakdane Gille.

  "Jakdane," she said, flirting with him with her eyes as in days gone by, "I need a chaperon this trip, and you're ideal for the job."

  "I never thought of myself in quite that light, but maybe I'm getting old," he answered, laughing. "What's your trouble, Trella?"

  "I'm in love with that huge chunk of man who came aboard with me, and I'm not sure I ought to be," she confessed. "I may need protection against myself till we get to Earth."

  "If it's to keep you out
of another fellow's clutches, I'm your man," agreed Jakdane heartily. "I always had a mind to save you for myself. I'll guarantee you won't have a moment alone with him the whole trip."

  "You don't have to be that thorough about it," she protested hastily. "I want to get a little enjoyment out of being in love. But if I feel myself weakening too much, I'll holler for help."

  The Cometfire swung around great Jupiter in an opening arc and plummeted ever more swiftly toward the tight circles of the inner planets. There were four crew members and three passengers aboard the ship's tiny personnel sphere, and Trella was thrown with Quest almost constantly. She enjoyed every minute of it.

  She told him only that she was a messenger, sent out to Ganymede to pick up some important papers and take them back to Earth. She was tempted to tell him what the papers were. Her employer had impressed upon her that her mission was confidential, but surely Dom Blessing could not object to Dr. Mansard's son knowing about it.

  All these things had happened before she was born, and she did not know what Dom Blessing's relation to Dr. Mansard had been, but it must have been very close. She knew that Dr. Mansard had invented the surgiscope.

  This was an instrument with a three-dimensional screen as its heart. The screen was a cubical frame in which an apparently solid image was built up of an object under an electron microscope.

  * * * * *

  The actual cutting instrument of the surgiscope was an ion stream. By operating a tool in the three-dimensional screen, corresponding movements were made by the ion stream on the object under the microscope. The principle was the same as that used in operation of remote control "hands" in atomic laboratories to handle hot material, and with the surgiscope very delicate operations could be performed at the cellular level.

  Dr. Mansard and his wife had disappeared into the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter just after his invention of the surgiscope, and it had been developed by Dom Blessing. Its success had built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated, which Blessing headed.