Star Science Fiction 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  The thing avoided it by millimeters. It staggered back and slumped to the ground. For a second, it fought to stand again, and then gave up with an almost human shrug. Its eyes opened fully on Larry, and it seemed to be waiting.

  He lifted the spear and centered it. The creature made no move. Then he dropped the spear back to his side slowly. He couldn’t do it. He’d made a bow and arrow once, and gone hunting. He’d stunned a squirrel, too—and then lacked the heart to kill it. Now he was seeing another dream of his ability to be a man go up in smoke.

  He swung on his heel and started for the transmitter. He still half expected it to be booby-trapped, but he had to take the chance. He picked it up and moved back. The eyes of the thing followed him, and a sharp tongue of purple hue ran weakly over its lips.

  Larry stopped. There was still concentrated food in the shelter—and sugar should be food for almost any protoplasmic thing. He started on again, however. He couldn’t afford to risk it. It was the old rhyme about the devil turning saint when he was sick.

  Thunder struck from the sky. It struck again, roaring out savagely in a bull bellow. He jerked his eyes up. Coming straight down toward him was a flat-ended cylinder two hundred feet or more tall and more than half as wide. There were no fins or signs of rocket exhaust, but the air shook around it as the booming sounded.

  At a height of fifty feet, it skipped nimbly sidewise and began settling on a cleared space on the higher plateau. He felt the ground shake, and then it was quiet. A door began to open, and a ramp shot out.

  Larry’s legs finally responded. He leaped back of the rocks to which the alien had headed. He started to dive through them, then stopped. There was a hollow there, and a flat rock that could nearly cover it. It was poor shelter, but better than none, and he still had his spear.

  He grinned sickly at that. But he hung onto it as he twisted the rock frantically over the hollow and eased into it. He could still see the shelter at the top of the slide, and part of the cleared section where the alien lay now with its eyes closed.

  Creatures erupted from the ship and began spreading out. One suddenly pointed, and the others came swarming down the slide in great leaps. They were beside their comrade in seconds, pouring something out of balloon-like things down its throat. In a second, the alien sat up and began helping itself to an incredible quantity of whatever it was.

  Its recuperative powers were fantastic. Larry expected it to point him out, but in that it seemed he was wrong. It gave a series of what seemed to be orders. Others broke away and began heading toward the ship, while the alien Larry knew moved more slowly after them, carrying the transmitter.

  Minutes later, a group came out of the ship and headed toward the shelter, carrying bundles. Over the distance, a series of screams in Al’s voice sounded, and then died down. Larry could see a group of them carrying him out on something like a stretcher, while one of them seemed to be examining his thorax with some kind of instrument.

  They were quick, at least. It had taken Larry days to guess that Al must be suffering from internal injuries. Working on a new form of life, they’d guessed it at once. Specimen, Larry thought. Maybe they’d even try to save Al’s life. He’d make a nice trophy! At least, the alien doing the examining was suddenly motioning for speed as they headed toward the ship.

  Others had been doing something inside the shelter. Now they came out empty-handed and headed up the slide, except for one who was still carrying the transmitter, doing something to it as they moved along. That one bounded toward Larry’s hideout, dropped the transmitter where it had been before, and headed after the others.

  Larry frowned. They couldn’t leave him behind to tell about them, of course. But did they really think he was so simple that he’d try their death traps? Use the transmitter and blow up; go back to the shelter and do the same.

  Then he realised he’d have to do something like that. The only hope of survival he had was through the transmitter or the food and water in the shelter. With them, he might live for a few days; without them, it would take less time. The aliens couldn’t lose!

  He shoved out of the hollow and headed toward the transmitter, wondering if he could somehow find what they’d done to it. Then his foot slipped on a damp spot on the rock. He caught himself, and looked down to see liquid oozing from one of the balloons they had brought the alien.

  Doubtfully, he sniffed it. There was one partly full, and he lifted it to his lips, tasting it carefully, and then gulping it down. It was water. The alien had been dying of thirst, not of hunger. And yet, it had brought back the container to Simmonds. . . .

  Empathy! Somehow, it had realized that Simmonds was sick and suffering. And it had taken a chance on its own rescue. Just as Larry had done, he realized; he’d hated Simmonds, but he’d let the other have most of the water. He couldn’t help it. And the alien had been forced to rob itself to prevent the suffering of another.

  Suddenly Larry grabbed the transmitter and flung its cover open. The batteries were missing, but something had replaced them. He was sure now that it would work again—any mistakes the alien had made in reassembling it had been corrected in the big ship. In another half hour, the airplane would fly over on its regular course. He could signal for help. The alien hadn’t meant him to die.

  In two days, he could be home.

  His eyes swung up to the ship, where the ramp was now being drawn in. They’d be going back to the stars while he’d be going home—taking with them Al Simmonds, who must be too sick to wait for human rescue. And except for Simmonds and himself, they were probably glad to be going.

  He kicked the transmitter with his foot, smashing it beyond repair. He let out a yell at the top of his voice, and went running across the plateau, waving his arms madly. There was nothing here for him—not even the sloop now. The only man who’d ever done him a favor without any selfish motive and against self-interest was up there in the ship—a green and ugly man with iron muscles and a heart as soft as Larry had hated his own for being.

  Besides, he couldn’t let a race that traveled among the stars and might be coming back some day get their ideas of mankind from a man like Al Simmonds.

  He reached the top of the slide, still yelling. The ramp had begun to run out again. He reached it, grabbing the outstretched arm of the alien who was waiting for him there.

  Twenty minutes later, he was the first man to see the other side of the moon.

  <>

  * * * *

  PHILIP K. DICK

  It’s a bare three years since Philip Dick’s first story appeared in print—but they have been busy years for the man who has become one of the newest of the “old pros.” Science-fiction magazines differ among themselves as the night from the day; but almost all of them have one feature in common, and that is the appearance, with frightening regularity, of the name “Philip K. Dick” on their contents pages. A writer is not born with such popularity; he must earn it, and a good way to earn it is by producing stories as deft and as revealing as—

  Foster, You’re Dead

  School was agony, as always. Only today it was worse. Mike Foster finished weaving his two watertight baskets and sat rigid, while all around him the other children worked. Outside the concrete-and-steel building the late-afternoon sun shone cool. The hills sparkled green and brown in the crisp autumn air. In the overhead sky a few NATS circled lazily above the town.

  The vast, ominous shape of Mrs. Cummings, the teacher, silently approached his desk. “Foster, are you finished?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he answered eagerly. He pushed the baskets up. “Can I leave now?”

  Mrs. Cummings examined the baskets critically. “What about your trap-making?” she demanded.

  He fumbled in his desk and brought out his intricate small-animal trap. “All finished, Mrs. Cummings. And my knife, it’s done, too.” He showed her the razor-edged blade of his knife, glittering metal he had shaped from a discarded gasoline drum. She picked up the knife and ran her expert
finger doubtfully along the blade.

  “Not strong enough,” she stated. “You’ve oversharpened it. It’ll lose its edge the first time you use it. Go down to the main weapons-lab and examine the knives they’ve got there. Then hone it back some and get a thicker blade.”

  “Mrs. Cummings,” Mike Foster pleaded, “could I fix it tomorrow? Could I not fix it right now, please?”

  Everybody in the classroom was watching with interest. Mike Foster flushed; he hated to be singled out and made conspicuous, but he had to get away. He couldn’t stay in school one minute more.

  Inexorable, Mrs. Cummings rumbled, “Tomorrow is digging day. You won’t have time to work on your knife.”

  “I will,” he assured her quickly. “After the digging.”

  “No, you’re not too good at digging.” The old woman was measuring the boy’s spindly arms and legs. “I think you better get your knife finished today. And spend all day tomorrow down at the field.”

  “What’s the use of digging?” Mike Foster demanded, in despair.

  “Everybody has to know how to dig,” Mrs. Cummings answered patiently. Children were snickering on all sides; she shushed them with a hostile glare. “You all know the importance of digging. When the war begins the whole surface will be littered with debris and rubble. If we hope to survive we’ll have to dig down, won’t we? Have any of you ever watched a gopher digging around the roots of plants? The gopher knows he’ll find something valuable down there under the surface of the ground. We’re all going to be little brown gophers. We’ll all have to learn to dig down in the rubble and find the good things, because that’s where they’ll be.”

  Mike Foster sat miserably plucking his knife, as Mrs. Cummings moved away from his desk and up the aisle. A few children grinned contemptuously at him, but nothing penetrated his haze of wretchedness. Digging wouldn’t do him any good. When the bombs came he’d be killed instantly. All the vaccination shots up and down his arms, on his thighs and buttocks, would be of no use. He had wasted his allowance money: Mike Foster wouldn’t be alive to catch any of the bacterial plagues. Not unless—

  He sprang up and followed Mrs. Cummings to her desk. In an agony of desperation he blurted, “Please, I have to leave. I have to do something.”

  Mrs. Cummings’ tired lips twisted angrily. But the boy’s fearful eyes stopped her. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “Don’t you feel well?”

  The boy stood frozen, unable to answer her. Pleased by the tableau, the class murmured and giggled until Mrs. Cummings rapped angrily on her desk with a writer. “Be quiet,” she snapped. Her voice softened a shade, “Michael, if you’re not functioning properly, go downstairs to the psych clinic. There’s no point trying to work when your reactions are conflicted. Miss Groves will be glad to optimum you.”

  “No,” Foster said.

  “Then what is it?”

  The class stirred. Voices answered for Foster; his tongue was stuck with misery and humiliation. “His father’s an anti-P,” the voices explained. “They don’t have a shelter and he isn’t registered in the Civic Defense. His father hasn’t even contributed to the NATS. They haven’t done anything.”

  Mrs. Cummings gazed up in amazement at the mute boy. “You don’t have a shelter?”

  He shook his head.

  A strange feeling filled the woman. “But—“ She had started to say, but you’ll die up here. She changed it to, “But where’ll you go?”

  “Nowhere,” the mild voices answered for him. “Everybody else’ll be down in their shelters and he’ll be up here. He even doesn’t have a permit to the school shelter.”

  Mrs. Cummings was shocked. In her dull, scholastic way she had assumed every child in the school had a permit to the elaborate subsurface chambers under the building. But of course not. Only children whose parents were part of CD, who contributed to arming the community. And if Foster’s father was an anti-P...

  “He’s afraid to sit here,” the voices chimed calmly. “He’s afraid it’ll come while he’s sitting here, and everybody else will be safe down in the shelter.”

  He wandered slowly along, hands deep in his pockets, kicking at dark stones on the sidewalk. The sun was setting. Snub-nosed commute rockets were unloading tired people, glad to be home from the factory strip a hundred miles to the west. On the distant hills something flashed: a radar tower revolving silently in the evening gloom. The circling NATS had increased in number. The twilight hours were the most dangerous; visual observers couldn’t spot highspeed missiles coming in close to the ground. Assuming the missiles came.

  A mechanical newsmachine shouted at him excitedly as he passed. War, death, amazing new weapons developed at home and abroad. He hunched his shoulders and continued on, past the little concrete shells that served as houses, each exactly alike, sturdy reinforced pillboxes. Ahead of him bright neon signs glowed in the settling gloom: the business district, alive with traffic and milling people.

  Half a block from the bright cluster of neons he halted. To his right was a public shelter, a dark tunnel-like entrance with a mechanical turnstile glowing dully. Fifty cents admission. If he was here, on the street, and he had fifty cents, he’d be all right. He had pushed down into public shelters many times, during the practice raids. But other times, hideous, nightmare times that never left his mind, he hadn’t had the fifty cents. He had stood mute and terrified, while people pushed excitedly past him; and the shrill shrieks of the sirens thundered everywhere.

  He continued slowly, until he came to the brightest blotch of light, the great, gleaming showrooms of General Electronics, two blocks long, illuminated on all sides, a vast square of pure color and radiation. He halted and examined for the millionth time the fascinating shapes, the display that always drew him to a hypnotized stop whenever he passed.

  In the center of the vast room was a single object. An elaborate, pulsing blob of machinery and support struts, beams and walls and sealed locks. All spotlights were turned on it; huge signs announced its hundred-and-one advantages—as if there could be any doubt.

  THE NEW 1972 BOMB-PROOF RADIATION-SEALED SUBSURFACE SHELTER IS HERE! Check these star-studded features:

  * automatic descent-lift—jambproof, self-powered, e-z locking

  * triple-layer hull guaranteed to withstand 5g pressure without

  buckling

  * A-powered heating and refrigeration system —self-servicing air-purification network

  * three decontamination stages for food and water

  * four hygienic stages for pre-burn exposure

  * complete anti-biotic processing

  * e-z payment plan

  He gazed at the shelter a long time. It was mostly a big tank, with a neck at one end that was the descent tube, and an emergency escape-hatch at the other. It was completely self-contained; a miniature world that supplied its own light, heat, air, water, medicines, and almost inexhaustible food. When fully stocked there were visual and audio tapes, entertainment, beds, chairs, vidscreen, everything that made up the above-surface home. It was, actually, a home below the ground.. Nothing was missing that might be needed or enjoyed. A family would be safe, even comfortable, during the most severe H-bomb and bacterial-spray attack.

  It cost twenty thousand dollars.

  While he was gazing silently at the massive display, one of the salesmen stepped out onto the dark sidewalk, on his way to the cafeteria. “Hi, sonny,” he said automatically, as he passed Mike Foster. “Not bad, is it?”

  “Can I go inside?” Foster asked quickly. “Can I go down in it?”

  The salesman stopped, as he recognized the boy. “You’re that kid,” he said slowly, “that damn kid who’s always pestering us.”

  “I’d like to go down in it. Just for a couple minutes. I won’t bust anything—I promise. I won’t even touch anything.”

  The salesman was young and blond, a good-looking man in his early twenties. He hesitated, his reactions divided. The kid was a pest. But he had a family, and that meant a re
asonable prospect. Business was bad; it was late September and the seasonal slump was still on. There was no profit in telling the boy to go peddle his newstapes; but on the other hand it was bad business encouraging small fry to crawl around the merchandise. They wasted time; they broke things; they pilfered small stuff when nobody was looking.

  “No dice,” the salesman said. “Look, send your old man down here. Has he seen what we’ve got?”

  “Yes,” Mike Foster said tightly.

  “What’s holding him back?” The salesman waved expansively up at the great gleaming display. “We’ll give him a good trade-in on his old one, allowing for depreciation and obsolescence. What model has he got?”

  “We don’t have any,” Mike Foster said.

  The salesman blinked. “Come again?”