No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Then the Messerschmitt hatch was in sight and Douglas opened with his guns. A short burst … four seconds, no more, but enough to fill the cockpit and gunnery position with screaming steel.

  The Messerschmitt wobbled and skipped, heeled over, side-slipped and fell. It was always like that, Douglas thought. Take no chances, hold the guns until the correct moment, then put the bullets where they counted.

  But someday. Perhaps, someday …

  He shivered as he hauled the Hurricane around, sent it zooming into the blue. There were no more Messerschmitts in sight. The Hurricanes and Blenheims were reforming.

  It had, Douglas told himself, been another typical Nazi hit-and-run affair, with the Jerries diving, hoping to gain by the element of surprise, and then streaking away before the British fighters could get in their licks.

  He tilted the ship and looked over the side and as he did his heart skipped a beat. Far below a Hurricane was gliding down to earth, engine apparently dead, for Douglas could not see the slow swirl of the prop gleaming in the sun.

  No parachute. That meant the pilot was taking a chance on riding the crippled ship to earth. Faster that way … if you lived. More time to get into hiding before a Nazi patrol swooped down.

  A new sound came … the sound of a diving ship. Douglas stared upward, saw the Messerschmitt storming down the sky … straight at the gliding Hurricane. A vulture swooping on a wounded helpless victim.

  With a curse of rage, Douglas slid his ship around on its wing, started a plunge that would intercept the diving M.E.

  He half expected the Nazi to veer off and try to make a getaway, but the ship came on.

  Once again his brain was clicking … like well-oiled wheels functioning mechanically. Figuring out the angle of attack, trying to anticipate what the Messerschmitt pilot would do, keeping the Hurricane aimed at that hypothetical sector of space where it would intercept the Jerry.

  Like avenging meteors, the two machines bellowed down the sky, overhauling the gliding Hurricane.

  Once the Jerry sees I’m going to block his play, the brain was clicking, he’ll pull out and try to get me from above. So the thing to do is to anticipate him.

  Douglas sucked in his breath, watched with narrowed eyes, measuring the distance, hand clutching the stick.

  The Messerschmitt suddenly snapped upward and as it did, Douglas shoved the throttle to the last notch. With mere yards to spare, he sent the Hurricane hurtling under the belly of the Messerschmitt, jerked back the stick, drove his machine into a sharp climb. The Merlin screamed in rage, swishing the ship around in a tight loop. For a sickening second, the plane hung upside down and in that instant, the upward roaring Jerry climbed into the ring sight. Douglas squeezed the button and ahead of him the Messerschmitt shuddered and stalled, swung over and headed for earth with smoke streaming from the motor.

  With throttle full out, Douglas slanted his ship after the gliding Hurricane.

  A voice was shouting in his earphones, a voice he recognized.

  “Douglas, you damn fool, go back. Thanks for what you did, but you can’t do any more.”

  “Grant, there’s a field down there,” Douglas yelled. “Mush her in. I’ll be right behind you. Then we’re getting out of here.”

  “You’re mad,” Grant protested. “It can’t be done. Get back, I tell you. It’ll only mean the two of us instead of one. Go back. That’s an order.”

  “To hell with orders. I’m coming after you. You’re going home with me. Lashed to a wing …” He laughed. “Not dignified. But what the hell. We can’t lose a man like you.”

  Grant was raging now. “I’ll have you up for insubordination.”

  Douglas chuckled savagely. “Insubordination for what? For stopping you from making another grandstand play? Like the time you did before. Coming home in a boat.”

  Deliberately he reached out and jerked out the earphone plug.

  Grant’s ship just cleared the trees at the edge of the field, was pancaking toward the meadow. It struck and bounced, bounced again, threatening to nose over, then rolled to a stop.

  Douglas brought his Hurricane down in a smooth landing, taxied swiftly toward the other ship.

  Quickly he reached up and hauled back the hatch, leaped nimbly to the wing and hopped to the ground.

  “Stay where you are!” snapped a voice and as he wheeled he saw Grant standing at the end of the wing, a Webley in his hand.

  “One move,” said the flight lieutenant, “and I will let you have it.”

  Douglas stared, wide-eyed, not understanding.

  “You’re crazy,” he gasped. “Put that damn thing up. You’re going back with me.”

  Grant laughed … a vicious laugh.

  “That’s where you’re mistaken, Douglas. I’m not going back and neither are you.”

  “You aren’t serious, Grant.”

  “Never more serious in my life, my British friend.”

  Silence hung between them … an awkward silence.

  “So,” Douglas said finally, “that is how it is.”

  Grant nodded, tight-lipped. “Clever wasn’t it. And you English pigs never once suspected.”

  “Clever,” said Douglas bitterly. “Yes, terribly clever. How many of your Nazi friends have you shot down? Over fifty, isn’t it?”

  “If I hadn’t, someone else would have,” Grant declared. “And, after all, what are a few lives more or less? Those I shot down would have gone gladly to their death had they but known.”

  He chuckled. “There’s something else … something for you to think about behind the barbed wire of your prison camp. When my mission here is over, I shall go back again. As I did before. And I shall be a great English hero …”

  “You’ll go back to do it all over again?” asked Douglas calmly.

  “That’s right,” replied Grant. “Over and over and the English will never know. For do I not shoot down the Nazis right and left?”

  “That,” declared Douglas, “is about the lowest form of treachery I can think of.”

  “Not treachery,” said Grant. “I am serving the fuehrer.”

  The flight lieutenant motioned with the muzzle of his pistol.

  “And now let us get going.”

  In answer, Douglas stooped and hurled himself under the wing of the plane. Grant shouted and the Webley cracked, the bullet whining viciously as it ricocheted off the ship’s metal skin.

  Rolling to get full protection of the wing, Douglas scrambled to his knees, hauling his Webley from the pocket of his flying togs. Another shot rang out and a bullet chugged into the ground not more than three feet from where he knelt.

  Silence then … a long, terrifying silence. He could see nothing of Grant, not even his legs moving about. The man, he knew, must be stalking him. The short hairs rose at the nape of his neck, bristling with an atavistic fear.

  If only he could see something … if only he could stand up and shoot it out! Anything but the sense of being trapped … of knowing that out there somewhere in the field a man was deliberately maneuvering himself into position to send a bullet through him.

  Carefully he inched himself closer to the body of the plane, straining his eyes, listening intently. A mumbling roar came to his ears … the beating of a far-off motor.

  So there he was, he told himself, hunkered beneath the plane, waiting for Grant to get into position … waiting until the one-time flight lieutenant could send a bullet through his brain. There wasn’t much, he admitted, that he could do about it. The meadow was flat as the top of a table. If he showed himself, Grant would see him and start shooting. For a moment he considered a swift break, an attempt to get back into the cockpit of the Hurricane and be off, but he rejected it almost as soon as he thought of it. He preferred waiting here, waiting for the break that might never come. His fist tightened on the Webley. If he could jus
t locate Grant!

  It had been foolish to have gotten himself into such a mess. It was not, he admitted to himself, all through a desire to save Grant from falling into German hands.

  That, of course, had been the first impulse … to save a fellow flier from capture. Funny that such a thought should have come to him unquestioningly when he knew … and Grant knew … that he hated the flight lieutenant. Hated with good cause.

  But even at that, in the face of Grant’s orders to turn back, he might have pulled off and continued on to England, had not the ludicrousness of bringing Grant home, lashed to the Hurricane’s wing, occurred to him. The idea of spiking another possible hero-stunt like crossing the channel in a stolen boat had been too much to resist.

  Such a thing, he knew, was possible, although rather tough on the wing rider. But that would have been giving Grant something that would be good for him … something to deflate the ego of a career-fighter.

  The mumbling roar he had heard was growing louder now … louder and closer … until he knew it was a plane, the deep-voiced thrumming of a Messerschmitt. And it was coming toward the field.

  He waited, crouched, wondering. Now it was above the trees at the edge of the field … coming in at possibly no more than a hundred feet above the ground.

  Suddenly guns snickered and their first burst was followed by a scream of terror.

  Leaping from under the wing, Douglas stood in astonishment. Grant was racing for the trees on the other side of the field, yelling, waving his arms, while all about him little puffs of white dust were dancing in the sunlight. With a blast of thunder the plane roared over, not more than fifty feet above the Hurricane, guns bellowing.

  Frozen in his tracks, Douglas watched the tableau out there in the field. For a moment it seemed as if time stood still while the scene was etched upon his brain … the running man, the puffs of dust as the bullets from the Messerschmitt sprayed the ground, the tall trees looking on, the short yellow grass baking in the sun.

  Then time took up again and Grant was stumbling. Stumbling while the jets of dust still flickered all around. He struck the ground, rose to his knees and crawled, then fell again and did not rise.

  The Messerschmitt, with what seemed a scream of triumph, climbed over the edge of trees and howled into the sky. Circling, it swung back and roared toward the field again. Douglas quickly ducked out of sight as it skimmed over, riding on one wing, so the pilot could survey the squatting Hurricanes.

  Probably, Douglas told himself, the Nazi was looking for him, for the other British pilot. For that was what Grant must have seemed … no more than a stranded Britisher … an enemy who was fair game. The man in the Messerschmitt could not possibly have known who Grant was. And after all, it added up to a sort of grim retribution. Grant, who had killed scores of his countrymen in the skies of England and along the coast, had been the quarry of his compatriot.

  Douglas waited until the drone of the Messerschmitt had faded away, then ran across the field.

  Grant, he saw, was dead, face downward, hands clutching at the yellow grass. Swiftly his hands felt through the pockets, found a small notebook and a sheaf of papers.

  Squatting there, he leafed hurriedly through his find. The book, he saw, was filled with notes … closely written notes. What had seemed to a sheaf of papers was a map.

  He whistled softly as he unfolded it. A map of the British Isles, showing hundreds of R.A.F. stations, a plain sign guide for an attempt to knock out the British air arm.

  Studying it, he shuddered as he realized what such a map, in German hands, would mean. With that map, the Luftwaffe could deal a terrible blow to the R.A.F. That far-flung system of small bases, decentralizing the nation’s aerial forces, was it best insurance against a death smash by the Nazi fleet. Without the map it would take Goering’s tribe half a hundred years to hunt out and destroy, one by one, all those bases.

  But with the map …

  Douglas jerked his head up sharply. The Messerschmitt was coming back again!

  The mutter rose into a hum and the hum became a roar. Stuffing the map into his pocket, Douglas sprinted for the Hurricane. Let that Messerschmitt catch him in the open and there’d be two dead men lying in the field.

  Breath whistling in his throat, heart pounding furiously, he made the plane, scrambled into the cockpit and slammed the throttle up the rack. The idling prop swelled into a swirl of noise and power. The ship leaped forward and Douglas hauled back viciously on the stick.

  The M.E.’s motors were a yell of hate behind him even as he cleared the treetops. He hunched his shoulders, expecting a hail of steel, almost feeling the breath of the Jerry’s guns upon him.

  The guns whipped out … too late. He felt the thud of bullets smack into his ship, but he was in a steep climb now, moving out of range. Grimly he held the Hurricane’s nose almost straight up, watching the altimeter climb. Below him, he knew, the Messerschmitt must be climbing to get him. He snapped one quick look over the side, saw the Nazi ship off to his right. Giving the Hurricane the last notch on the rack, he looped and dived. With a wild yell of exultation, he snapped the ship straight at the Messerschmitt.

  His finger touched the firing button and the Brownings yapped. Metal flew in showers from one of the M.E.’s wings. Trees were rushing up at him and he yanked the stick. The Hurricane groaned and whipped around just above the branches.

  A storm of tracers slapped into the fuselage and he laughed wildly as he looped again and came down upon the Jerry.

  There was no miss this time … no futile chewing of wings. He saw splintered glass flying as the Brownings raked the cockpit of the ship below him.

  It wasn’t until he was far above the field and headed west that he realized his brain had failed to tick. There had been no calculation, no aversion to taking chances, no grimness. It was like the old days when he and Bob and Grant had battled at Dunkerque. He had fought by pure instinct alone, had downed his plane almost in the treetops.

  He touched his pockets, heard the crinkling of the map when his fingers touched it.

  Intelligence would be glad to see that map and hear his story. Intelligence undoubtedly would do something about it … for Grant could not have been the only one, there must have been others. Probably those had been the ones Grant had been sneaking off to London to see. Maybe the girl the boys had kidded him about back in the mess might be one of them.

  But Intelligence was close-mouthed and the squadron would never know. And that was best, for Grant was a hero … and right now Britain needed all the heroes it could get … alive or dead.

  His own report? That wasn’t hard to figure out. He could see it now:

  “Flight Lieutenant Richard Grant met his death heroically, attempting to ride a crippled ship to earth.”

  THE END

  The Space-Beasts

  After being rejected by Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories in 1939, Astonishing Science Fiction paid Clifford Simak $42.50 for “The Flame in Space” and published it in April 1940. Cliff’s journal shows that the sale was made after he sent it to Frederik Pohl, but it’s not clear whether Pohl was the editor of Astonishing or was acting as an agent—that issue of Astonishing did not list an editor’s name.

  This is one of a number of Simak stories that features music in space; but its spiritual element makes it seem like more than a mere space opera.

  —dww

  Chapter One

  The Flame in Space

  It wasn’t possible … but there it was! A thing that hung in space on shimmering wings of supernal light. Wings that had about them that same elusive suggestion of life and motion as one sees in the slow crawl of a mighty river. Wings that were veined with red markings and flashed greenly in the rays of the distant Sun.

  The body of the thing seemed to writhe with light and for a fleeting moment Captain Johnny Lodge caught sight of the
incredible head … a head that was like nothing he had ever seen before. Ahead that had about it the look of unadulterated evil and primal cruelty.

  He heard Karen Franklin, standing beside him, draw in her breath and hold it in her wonder.

  “It’s a Space Beast,” said George Foster, assistant pilot. “It can’t be anything else.”

  That was true. It couldn’t be anything else. But it violated all rules of life and science. It was something that shouldn’t have happened, a thing that was ruled out by the yardstick of science. Yet, there it was, straight ahead of them, pacing the Karen, one of the solar system’s finest rocket-ships, with seeming ease.

  “It just seemed to come out of nowhere,” said George. “I think it must have passed the ship. Flew over us and then dipped down. I can’t imagine what those wings are for, because it travels on a rocket principle. See, there it blasts again.”

  A wisp of whitish gas floated in space behind the winged beast and swiftly dissipated. The beast shot rapidly ahead, green wings glinting in the weak sunlight.

  Karen Franklin moved closer to Captain Johnny Lodge. She looked up at him and there was something like fear in her deep blue eyes.

  “That means,” she said, “that those stories about the Belt are true. The stories the meteor miners tell.”

  Johnny nodded gravely. “They must be true,” he said. “At least part of them.”

  He turned back to the vision port and watched the thing. A Space Beast! He had heard tales of Space Beasts, but had set them down as just one of those wild yarns which come from the far corners of the Solar System.

  The Asteroid Belt was one of those far corners. Practically a No-Man’s Land. Dangerous to traverse, unfriendly to life, impossible to predict. Little was known about it, for space ships shunned it for good cause. The only ones who really did know it were the asteroid miners and they were a tribe almost apart from the rest of the men who ventured through the void.

  The Space Beast was real. There was no denying that. Johnny rubbed his eyes and looked again. It was still there, dead ahead.