Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology] Read online

  He found a space-suit and climbed into it, checking its air supply. Then he set the hatch to manual, and crawled through.

  It was worse than it had been below. Apparently the whole great outer seam of the Station had sprung open. The corpses here were bloated things, puffed out by the air pressure within them as they died.

  But after the living death below, this didn’t hit him as it might have done before. He made his way through the shambles that had been man’s finest achievement. His half-memory of bombs was nagging at him, together with the things his brain had guessed at.

  He located the big bomb bay, which was never to have been used, but to have prevented war by its mere existence. Here, five hundred H-bombs rested, their tubes ready to drive them on controlled courses to Earth. And here, probably, had been the place where the ones he was ferrying from the supply ship had been brought. How many? He had no idea. But now there were only a score of them, while the hand of one of the corpses was still tightly locked on the release lever of one of those.

  Below him, the giant ball that was Earth lay cradled in space, blue-green on the lighted half towards which the Station was moving. He wondered whether the exact two-hour rotation of the Station had been disturbed. Probably not enough to show. And even completely wrecked, it could still sail on its orbit here forever, with nothing to slow it, and no way to fall at its present speed.

  Then his eyes focused on a tiny spot of light on the dark side of the Earth—tiny here, but still larger and brighter than anything he could remember. It was as if the whole of a city had burst into flames.

  He stood there, unwilling to believe what alone could explain it all. Somehow, the impossible had happened. War that had threatened so long had finally broken out. Men had turned against men—when all of space lay waiting for their conquest! Nation with atomic bombs had been pitted against nation with bacteriological weapons. The threat of the bombs from the Station had become reality, and Earth had somehow reached up a long finger of wrath to strike back.

  There had even been treason here. The man with the machine gun—-Peter Olin, master mechanic, ten years with the Station, Fenton suddenly remembered—had betrayed them. It must have been in his mind for years, since there was no other reason for a smuggled gun here. He’d gotten control over the officers so quickly that no word had spread, and then had begun working backwards, killing as he went, not caring about the noise here where so many sounds passed down the echoing metal walls. And the great guided missile—perhaps from his own nation—had struck him down along with those he had wanted to betray. Only the two in the infirmary had been spared.

  “Why?” he shouted. “Why?”

  * * * *

  He was sobbing wildly, and his cries rang in his ears when he found himself back in the control room. The incipient insanity in his own voice snapped him back, slowly this time, through his childhood horror of violence, his bravado as a youth setting out to help save the world, and finally the present where his whole hope and faith had been tied up in this great hulk of metal around him.

  It had failed. He faced it now—and he knew that even without all its slowly returning memories, his mind was back to the thirty-five-year level. There were twisted, bitter thoughts still, but he faced the fact which he couldn’t have accepted once. The Station had failed, and his fellow men had blown out the spark of divinity in them and gone back to the jungles, with all the power of the science that could have made them star-men.

  He was still crying, and he made no effort to stop it. But he was in control of himself.

  Slowly, with a sick fear of what he must see, he moved to the screen that was set to show the scene on Earth toward which the telescope pointed. He flipped it on, adjusting the levers that controlled the instrument by a process of trial and error. For a moment he stopped then, and looked up toward the Moon that rode in space so far above him.

  Men had been about to reach that. He’d even hoped that he might go along. Now it was lost.

  Then he looked down, seeing the vision of what had been a city through the thin veil of clouds. Atmospheric disturbance blurred some of the outlines, but enough showed through. It was a slag heap, burned out of all resemblance to a scene of Earth. And for fifty miles beyond it, desolation spread out—a land where no life could live.

  He shifted the telescope from time to time as the Station moved across the Earth, jumping from city to city, and finally seeking out the lesser ones. Some of those had obviously been hit only by the old-style A-bombs—but damage was complete enough.

  He dropped the controls and let the scene below slide by as the Station cruised on. For a few minutes, a welcome numbness hit him. Then he stood up slowly. There would be poison in the dispensary.

  He reached for the screen switch, and froze. In the scene, dots moved slowly. He dropped back to the webbing seat, staring down, trying to increase the magnification. The Station was over Africa now—and that meant that he was watching some of the larger animals, probably. But. ..

  Something else moved, a mere dot in the screen, but still having a vague shape. Its speed told the real story though. It was an airplane. And now that he looked closer, he saw that the dots below were traveling too straight for beasts. They must be cars on a road!

  Life still went on.

  Fenton shook himself, and his trembling fingers reached for the switch of the ultra-frequency radio. He knew too little about it to do much more than turn it on and move the tuning dial across the band. For a minute there was silence. Then a faint sputter sounded, and he detected Morse code. He tuned in more carefully, until it was faint but clear, and reached for the microphone.

  But the transmitter refused to go on, and the signal was in a language which he couldn’t understand. Men, he thought for the thousandth time, should have a common speech to reflect their common origin. But it really didn’t matter. He yanked open the housing of the transmitter, and jiggled with the tubes inside, knowing it was foolish, but in an automatic hope.

  One of the tubes was dark. He fumbled for the locker under the table, and began pawing through spare parts, hoping that the shock of the H-bomb that had probably exploded outside the Station had left one good tube of that type. He was in luck. The meter on the transmitter flashed on as soon as he made the change.

  But now the Morse had vanished, since the Station had probably gone over the horizon. Even that didn’t matter. Where some survived, there would be others. The cities and the sciences would be gone, but the race would continue. And down there now, he’d be needed, as every man who had any of the old skills would be needed.

  Maybe men with some engineering training couldn’t build more space-ships this generation. But they could help rebuild a world that might again look to the stars. And after the bitter lesson of this nearly fatal holocaust, there would surely be no more wars to hold them back.

  It was sheer reaction to his depression, Fenton knew. But it made sense, too.

  And he could return. There was the little emergency ship, with fuel enough to reach Earth easily. He could stock it with all the supplies available—there was no telling what might be short on Earth now. The oxygen tanks were gone with the wreckage of the outer half. But he could put in plants from the hydroponic section; in some ways, they’d be even better. With them to replace the oxygen in the air, there was no theoretical limit to how long a man could live in the closed world of a space-ship.

  He got up from the radio desk and went out and toward the loading tube, where the little ship lay waiting.

  * * * *

  Some measure of reality returned to cancel his false optimism, while he loaded the ship to the limit. The fact that men still lived didn’t make their acts in this final war any less horrible, nor did it bring the conquest of space any nearer. Little by little, his sickness and his horror returned. But there was at least some hope, and without life there was none. Even the dumbest animals learned in time; and this time, man had been given a lesson that could never be overlooked, while the grea
t ruins of his cities still stood there to remind him.

  It would be a bitter and a horrible life in such a world. But someday, in the far future, Fenton’s descendants would stand on the Lunar Apennines and look up at Earth with pride on their faces.

  Fenton finished his work and came back up through the ruined Station. Minute by minute the air seemed to be growing more foul with the smell of death. He came to the corpse of the traitor, Peter Olin, and his eyes dropped. Sometime, he’d have to face the fact that his race had produced men such as that; but not now—not now ...

  For a final time, his mind reeled and tried to run back to its childhood. But he held it firm, and walked past the corpse. That was the past. And from now on men would have to live for the future.

  He came to the control room with his muscles knotted in his sudden need to hear human voices. The station had circled the Earth and a little more. They were over America now, and it would be no foreign tongue. He wiped the sweat from his hands, and picked up the microphone.

  “Calling Earth. Calling Earth. This is Space Station, calling Earth. I’m green at this, so keep answering until I can find you. Space Station calling Earth.” His own voice was hoarse in his throat.

  But in a few seconds he located the signal that was coming back at him “. . . wondered. Damn it, some of those bombs went wild! We lost ninety-five percent, and things are pretty bad down here. But we got most of the other bastards before they could take us. Better land near me—I’ll tell you where. Some places they blame you guys for starting it all. And before you leave, if you’ve got a bomb left on your racks, give them hell over there, Space Station. Give them the ...”

  Fenton spun the dial, and got a series of screams in his ears. Out of the hysteric nonsense, he gathered that the operator was suggesting that he bring down every culture in the biological experimental laboratory, before the enemies they feared could strike. “Only one bug! You’ve got a lot of un-classifieds,” the voice was urging frantically. “Bring the whole lot, and we’ll find any that we can use. We’ve got to strike first! We need ...”

  Fenton’s fingers fumbled on the dials of the radio, and he swayed over the desk. But there was no escape. Another turn of the tuning dial brought it into place with a click that locked it. It could only be the official frequency.

  “. . . Temporary HQ to Space Station. Come in.” It was a flat, hard voice—the voice of a man who has been on duty for days without relief. “Come in.”

  “I’m getting you, HQ,” Fenton acknowledged, and some of the life came back into him at the realization that there was an organization still functioning down there.

  The voice answered almost at once. “Good. We’ve been signaling you for days. Thought you were all taken out by that damned enemy missile that got through. Can you still control . . . no, cancel that. I’ve just got an order for you. By our figures, you have nineteen bombs left, unless one or two missed our spotters. Here are your targets—and for God’s sake, don’t slip up the way you did before! First one goes to—get these, because I won’t repeat—first to ...”

  Fenton cut off the radio and stood up slowly. He walked out of the corpse-littered control room, past the bodies of those shot by Olin’s bullets, and past the corpse of Olin himself. He moved through the area where the explosion had snuffed out the lives of others. The dead no longer bothered him. They were nothing compared to what must exist on Earth.

  He picked his way, surely out of already-acquired habit, until he found a space-suit and mounted up through the hatch to the outer section. The bombs still stood there, and there were twenty instead of nineteen. Beside them lay the bodies of men who had come up here to lead mankind to the stars, and who had died because of hatreds that should never have left Earth.

  There were no longer nations down there—only enemies. They had learned nothing, and they had biological warfare left to complete what they had been unable to do with their bombs.

  He found the body of a gentle old scientist he had known —a man who had been trying to find a cure out here for cancer, and had been near success. He touched his fingers to the clot of blood beside the corpse, and then to one of the bombs. One by one, he christened all twenty. And one by one, he pulled back the firing levers, watching them take off for Earth. Somewhere down there, they would land. It didn’t matter where. Men had sent their messengers of death out into space. Now they were going home. And if they helped to send men further back toward savagery, it didn’t matter—with enough time, they might return. They might even unite now, believing that the Station had started the war, and bonding nation to nation to get up here faster to seek vengeance.

  Paul Fenton didn’t give a damn.

  He went down to the infirmary to do what he had to do for what was left of Martha Graves. For a moment, he stood over her with a needle, and then shrugged, and picked her up. Maybe she wasn’t human any more, but who was? And she could still get pleasure, if only from the taste of food and the comfort of sleep.

  Outside, the little space-ship was waiting, and it could carry them far enough, and land. With the plants and provisions, they could go on living in it as long as he chose, probably.

  No man had ever seen the other side of the Earth’s satellite. That had to be corrected. No race should go on forever without leaving some monument to show that it has gone beyond its own narrow world, even if it could send only a single ship one way. The men who had dreamed and built the Station deserved that much, at least.

  Paul Fenton paused inside the space-ship while the locks sealed shut, and he spat slowly at the floor under his feet.

  “Idealist!” he swore at himself bitterly.

  But his eyes were rising to stare at the Moon as he hit the controls and blasted off. The Earth began dropping further behind. He did not look back.

  <>

  * * * *

  FRITZ LEIBER

  Most writers hide behind their typewriters and perhaps it is better so; there are few matinee idols in the field. But, while Fritz Leiber continues to tell his marvelous tales, it cannot be said that there are none at all. In Hollywood (where he made a specialty of playing the husband of the leading lady, usually coming to no good end), and on the stage (with the Shakespearean troupe of the elder Fritz Leiber, his father), Leiber made feminine hearts yearn. He now devotes full time to writing such splendid science fiction as his novel Gather, Darkness! (Pellegrini & Cudahy) and this nobly funny travesty called...

  The Night He Cried

  I glanced down my neck secretly at the two snowy hillocks, ruby peaked, that were pushing out my blouse tautly without the aid of a brassiere. I decided they’d more than do. So I turned away scornfully as his vast top-down convertible cruised past my street lamp. I struck my hip and a big match against the fluted column, and lit a cigarette. I was Lili Marlene to a T—or rather to a V-neckline. (I must tell you that my command of earth-idiom and allusion is remarkable, but if you’d had mytraining you wouldn’t wonder.)

  The convertible slowed down and backed up. I smiled. I’d been certain that my magnificently formed milk glands would turn the trick. I puffed on my cigarette languorously.

  “Hi, Babe!”

  Right from the first I’d known it was the man I was supposed to contact. Handsome hatchet face. Six or seven feet tall. Quite a creature. Male, as they say.

  I hopped into his car, vaulting over the low door before he opened it. We zoomed off through New York’s purple, smelly twilight.

  “What’s your name, Big Male?” I asked him.

  Scorning to answer, he stripped me with his eyes. But I had confidence in my milk glands. Lord knows, I’d been hours perfecting them.

  “Slickie Millane, isn’t it?” I prompted recklessly.

  “That’s possible,” he conceded, poker-faced.

  “Well then, what are we waiting for?” I asked him, nudging him with the leftermost of my beautifully conical milk glands.

  “Look here, Babe,” he told me, just a bit coldly, “I’m the one
who dispenses sex and justice in this area.”

  I snuggled submissively under his encircling right arm, still nudging him now and again with my left milk gland. The convertible sped. The skyscrapers shrank, exfoliated, became countryside. The convertible stopped.

  As the hand of his encircling arm began to explore my prize possessions, I drew away a bit, not frustratingly, and informed him, “Slickie dear, I am from Galaxy Center ...”

  “What’s that—a magazine publisher?” he demanded hotly, being somewhat inflamed by my cool milk glands.

  “. . . and we are interested in how sex and justice are dispensed in all areas,” I went on, disregarding his interruption and his somewhat juvenile fondlings. “To be bold, we suspect that you may be somewhat misled about this business of sex.”