Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology] Read online

  “They’ll come with a truck for the generators this afternoon. I stalled them. My stocks kept going up. And now— all I wanted was enough in reserve to keep working. “I’ve got to have money.”

  “No,” said Born. “After all, it’s not my fault.”

  Loring’s ugly face was close to his. “Isn’t it?” he snarled. And he spread out the paper on the desk.

  Born read the headline—again—of the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975: securities crash in global crisis: banks close; clients storm brokerages! But this time he was not too rushed to read on: “A world-wide slump in securities has wiped out billions of paper dollars since it started shortly before closing yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange. No end to the catastrophic flood of sell orders is yet in sight. Veteran New York observers agreed that dumping of securities on the New York market late yesterday by W. J. Born of W. J. Born Associates pulled the plug out of the big boom which must now be consigned to memory. Banks have been hard-hit by the—”

  “Isn’t it?” Loring snarled. “Isn’t it?” His eyes were crazy as he reached for Born’s thin neck.

  Dominoes, W. J. Born thought vaguely through the pain, and managed to hit a button on his desk. Miss Illig came in and screamed and went out again and came back with a couple of husky customers’ men, but it was too late.

  <>

  * * * *

  LESTER DEL RAY

  Many men have made a life work of editing a magazine; Lester del Rey, very nearly single-handedly, edited five—at least one of them, Space Science Fiction, close to the top of its field. Since this occupied fewer than 60 of the 168 hours in a week, he filled his idle time with a writing production schedule which has been known to top 50,000 words over a weekend. (In spite of the fact that, it has reliably been reported, he is unable to so much as type his name on a page until he has taken apart, oiled and reassembled the typewriter—of which he owns seven.) What is more, the words are very good words indeed. For instance, see . . .

  Idealist

  Waking was filled with fear. He tried to cling to the absolute unconsciousness his sleep had once been, but it was impossible. His mind jumped and quivered. There was pain there, but the vague memory of pain was stronger than the reality. He felt himself holding his breath, and let it out slowly, waiting for the sounds of violence.

  Everything was silent, except for the ticking near him that was too slow to be a clock. There were no sounds of the Station...

  The Station! He chased the thought down, and drew a complete blank. This was no railroad station. This was some neverland where even weight was missing. He seemed to be floating in emptiness, with only a faint draft of air across part of his face, and a weak pressure of something warm on the rest of him.

  Then he smelled the faint odor in the air and knew it must be a hospital room. The warmth of the cloth around his head became bandages. The weightless feeling must be the aftereffect of drugs. Even the deepness of his sleep and the fear of some dreadful vagueness could be products of the drug. In that case, his expectation of violence was a hangover from the accident that. ..

  Memory failed, just as something touched it. It was as if it came to a stone wall and bounced back. The dreadful word amnesia struck at him, but was followed at once by reassurance. He was Paul Fenton, who would finish his engineering work at Caltech some day and have a chance to work on the rockets that would give men wings to the planets. He was in the Air Force now, first in his group, anxious to rid the world of the menace that lay over it and get back to his studies. He’d just been assigned ...

  Again there was a slipping of his memory, but it didn’t matter. He knew he was sane, hungry, and burning with thirst. The pain still bothered him, but it was going away.

  He tried to sit up, but something held him back. Tardily, his eyes opened, to see a webbing sack apparently surrounding his body. Four thin elastic cords led from it to the walls— metal walls in a tiny room, with everything apparently fastened down. There was a chair on the ceiling, machines on two walls, and a bottle bobbing about in the air currents from a small ventilator, unsupported in mid-air!

  Space! It wasn’t speculation, but certainty. He was in free fall, in a space-ship. His first wild idea of an alien race vanished before it was full-blown. The things he could see were clearly of human make—and he’d known somehow that it had to be human.

  Attached to his arm was a tube that led up to a clicking machine, where a meter registered zero. The drug must have been continuously dripped from there, until it was exhausted.

  “Nurse!” His voice echoed hollowly against the metal walls. He waited, without answer, and shouted again. “Nurse! Doctor! Somebody!”

  The ship was silent, except for the ticking of the machine and the faint drone of a fan. Fenton jerked the needle from under the bandage and began pulling himself out of the cocoon. His body moved well enough, now. On one wall was a plastic bag with a strange, green uniform in it, and he found that the clothes fitted him. He zipped the jacket closed, and automatically located and lit a cigarette. The smoke relieved some of the tension, until he noticed the P.F. engraved over an elaborate seal on the lighter. It showed a stylized space-ship leaving Earth, heading to what might have been a space station.

  He sucked harder, considering why his initials should be there, and why the uniform seemed tailored for him. Then it dawned on him that he had no memory of learning to smoke.

  When he finally found a flat surface on one machine that could serve as a mirror, another shock hit him. It was his own face, under the bandage that was wound around the top of his skull—but an older, grimmer face, with bitter crow’s-feet around the eyes. His body had filled out, and what little hair he could see had touches of gray mixed with the brown. He might have been thirty-five, instead of the eighteen he remembered.

  The lost years hit him where nothing else had touched. He screamed and threw himself to the door of the tiny room. It wrenched open in his hand, showing a long tube.

  “Nurse! Hey! Help!”

  But the only answer was the echo of his own voice bouncing off the tube walls. The ship, or whatever it was, was a dead thing. He called until his lungs ached, and nothing happened.

  Slow, steady! He thought the words, but his heart went on racing, and a clammy sweat broke out, itching under the bandages. With a desperate lunge, he went sailing up the tube, braking his landing against the further door with his hands. He stopped there, feeling a faint weight He knew automatically that weight picked up as he went further from the center of the spinning Station, but he had no time to consider the odd knowledge.

  He ripped open the door, and dropped through it, into a room filled with green plants in tanks. Again he shouted, driving himself to a frenzy of sound that rebounded savagely from the metal walls.

  But it was useless. The Station was as silent as the growing plants that replenished its air supplies. There was no sound of humanity to reach his ears.

  Instinct sent his legs pumping, driving him toward the door of the room. He was reaching for it when he tripped over something and fell to his hands and knees, skidding forward in the light pseudo-gravity.

  * * * *

  It was a corpse. The lieutenant bore the stylized symbol of Hydroponics on his shoulder, but there was only part of a head above it. Fenton jerked back from contact with the gore, and then saw that the corner of one of the tanks was spattered. The man’s head had crashed there violently, and the tank had stood the shock better than his skull.

  There were other marks of violence. Some of the tanks had spilled, leaving the floor damp in places, even though the water had been drained away. Others had broken under some shock. The plants had stood it, in some places. In others, they were matted down as if a hand had squashed them.

  Fenton got up, the sickness stronger in him, and opened the door with some effort. It had warped, and stuck. But beyond it, there was worse than what lay behind.

  Part of a girl lay smashed against a wall, and here
the smell showed that she had been lying there for more than a single day. The sick, cloying odor of human death was heavy in the room where the plants had not covered it. Fenton saw a man’s body, with a lever projecting from it, and then he was out of there.

  The next room held nothing, beyond some wrecked machinery. But the one beyond that had been a bunkroom! He dashed through it, and through others beyond. Something had hit the space-station—he knew it was a station now—and the violence of that had been enough to kill and maim anything or anyone not specifically protected. He’d been lucky. The elastic webbing suspension must have soaked up enough of the blow to save him. And, apparently, the center of the Station hadn’t been touched as heavily as the outer edges.

  That could only mean an explosion of some kind. Raw space wouldn’t carry an explosive force for any distance. He was aware of a lot of such details now, without having any real memory of how he came to the place. But the back of his head was taking it for granted that sometime during his memory blackout he’d been sent here. A lot could happen in fifteen years or so.

  Then he glanced at his own shoulders, and the device had sudden meaning for him. He took it for granted now that this was his own uniform—and the symbol showed that he had been a lieutenant, serving as a pilot on the little ferries that worked between the supply ships and the Station.

  Somehow, that was too much for his mind, yet. Everything ebbed out of it, and he stood motionless, trying to think where he was, and why his mother had left him there. But it passed quickly. He jerked his hand off a section of the wall where blood had spattered, and the rebound of his senses brought wisps of memory with it.

  He’d been assigned from the Air Force to study the piloting of rockets. There were scraps of memory which indicated that he had spent several years piloting ships up, while the Station was built, until it was assembled and he was berthed here permanently by his own desires. The great Station had become his life. Why not? It would forever end the threat of war. With it, men could take their struggles out against space, instead of against themselves. It was the opening achievement of man’s final triumph, the great ideal to which his generation had striven.

  “Idealism!” he said, suddenly, and spat on the floor. He shook himself, then. It was as senseless a gesture as any human could make. Without idealism, what was there for the race but the mud from which they had pulled themselves?

  Section by section, he went through the silent Station, but it was pretty much the same. In the other half, he found the great control room closed and locked. He back-tracked, no longer sick at the sight of death.

  Now he was afraid of being alone, and driven to a frenzy of speed by the need to keep his mind from wondering what had caused this. He couldn’t think of that.

  He came to the section of the Station farthest from that in which he had first emerged. Here the shock had been much weaker—softened enough by distance from whatever the source was to leave few signs of it. Hope quickened in him, then. There might still be people here.

  He found a man, finally. The section had been practically deserted. It was a quadrant of the ship devoted to scientific exploration, and to the study of space itself. Something seemed to have drawn the men away from here, before the blow came.

  But the man was as dead as the others. A bullet had gone through his right temple and had come to rest six inches beyond, against the metal wall. It wasn’t suicide—there was no gun there.

  Further on, before he came to the section where the signs of shock grew stronger again, he found a dead man seated in a strap affair and a woman floating in a tank of some liquid. There were holes caused by bullets to show the cause of death, in both cases.

  Then he was at the other entrance to the control room. He jerked it open. “Captain Allistair! Lieutenant Morgan!”

  They sat there in their webbing control seats, but they could never answer him. Bullets had found them, apparently while they were working their controls. The other men who had filled the room were also dead. But these had not died quietly. They were in positions which indicated that they had tried to reach the door where Fenton now stood—and had failed. There were spots of lead along the walls, as if someone had opened up with a machine gun, spraying the whole of the room. Even the shock that had hit the Station could hide none of the attempt the men inside had made, but here there had been nothing but corpses before that shock came.

  Fenton realized that his mind was slipping again, but this time he let it go. The bandage on his head hurt suddenly, and he reached for it, sobbing softly. “Sue. Sue! Suzy, don’t let them...”

  But Susan wasn’t there. It was her day off, and the neighborhood kids were throwing rocks at him. They were bad kids...

  He came back sharply this time, to find that he was clawing at a door, with the bandages held in one hand. He stopped sharply, and studied his head in the polished metal of the door. There was only a small, shaven section, with signs of stitches and healing around it. The concussion he’d gotten when he miscalculated the approach speed on his last desperate race back with more bombs from the supply ship must have cracked his skull. It must not have been too bad, though, even if he could remember screaming in pain until they gave him the first of the continuous drugging. The bombs had ...

  He almost had it when a scream echoed down the corridor, faint, yet with all the hell of agony carried with it.

  Fenton yelled back, and was rushing toward the sound, around the huge circle of the Station. It wasn’t repeated, and he stopped to yell from time to time, and to listen. His heart was pounding again, and a sudden fear washed through him as he remembered the man with the machine gun.

  Then he stumbled into the man—but he was a corpse, like the others. The machine gun was still clutched tightly, but a section of shelving had cut him half in two, and he hung there, an expression of utter bewilderment on his face. Fenton must have missed him the first time, or paid no attention to one body among the rest; the gunman had been before the first corpse with the bullet wound. Probably he’d been on his way to kill more when the shock hit him.

  Fenton recoiled mentally from the picture of a man who could proceed on a mission of murder deliberately. But then the sound of a human voice reached him faintly, and he dashed on.

  It was coming from the tube that led to the center of the Station, a weak moaning. Now it was less human, as if an animal had been wounded and left to die there.

  He slid down the tube. The door to the room in which he had come to was still open, but there was another one beside it. He ripped it open, and one beyond that. There were only four rooms here in the tiny infirmary, and the last one had to be right. As if to prove it, another moan came.

  He opened the door cautiously this time, but there was nothing to fear. In a cocoon like the one in which he had awakened, and with a similar drug tube in the arm, a girl’s body lay. It was contorted in agony now, and the tied-down hands were threshing slightly. The face was twisted, and a steady moan came from the opened mouth.

  “Martha!” Fenton leaped forward, and then stopped. It had been Martha Graves, once. But now the body there was only human by definition. Too much work in the radiation laboratory had caught up with her, starting a vicious and almost impossibly rapid brain tumor. The doctor had been forced to operate here, and most of the brain that had once held the genuine genius of the physicist had gone with the tumor, leaving only the animal functions behind. She had been supposed to leave on the next ship up.

  Fenton couldn’t understand the pain, though. They had meant to take her off the drugs the same day he had been hurt. Then a twinge from his own stomach supplied the answer. He dashed out toward the nearest galley, grabbing whatever unspoiled food was available and a plastic bulb of water. He swallowed rapidly on his way back.

  The mouth of the unhappy creature drooled at the smell of the food. She sucked down the water, making a mess of it, and began swallowing some of the food. Her moans cut off, and a few minutes later she was asleep.

 
He pulled the needle out of her arm quietly, and stood debating with himself. Then he grimaced. The eighteen-year-old section of his mind had been uppermost, obviously. Nothing he could do now would worry what had been Martha Graves. He located a bottle of alcohol in the pharmacy, poured it into a bulb, and took it back to the gravity-free center, where he sponged her off gently. She awoke when he pulled her from the cocoon, and again when he put her back, but she fell asleep almost at once in both cases.

  Then he went out and was sick. The idea had finally hit him. He was alone here with something that was still female, but no longer human. And as far as he knew, there might be no other human beings in the whole universe. The supply ships should have been here before the length of time that had obviously passed.

  He was surprised at that, amazed at the fact that his brain had speculated on the end of the Earth, and had almost accepted it, below the level of his consciousness, while he had tended to the needs of the girl.

  With a leap, he spun to the nearest hatch leading to the outer edge of the Station. He’d never even thought to investigate it, before. Then he saw the red signal over the lock, indicating that the half of the doughnut-tube farthest from the center was without air. Whatever had hit the Station must have opened the outer edge to space, and the inner section had been saved only by the automatic seals that had immediately shut down.