Complete Short Fiction, page 10
Allen Kirk turned, swung the pack to his shoulder, and walked away from the spaceship. He was acutely aware, as he went, of the two pairs of yellow eyes gazing after him; but he didn’t dare to look back.
THE END.
Avenue of Escape
The sergeant swaggered into the dugout, carefully indifferent to the stares of Corporal Snodgrass, Buck Private Kendall, and the captain’s orderly. He dropped into a seat at the packing-case table, and the orderly automatically began to deal.
“F’r gosh sakes, sarge, how did you make it?” asked the corporal, picking up his hand. “We thought we’d have to get a new fourth. Ken said you were in a shell hole up front, with a Jap machine gun pecking at you every time you poked your head out. We figgered you’d last till dark, and then they’d crawl out and drop a grenade on you.”
The sergeant glared at his cards and then at the orderly. “I have told you children time and again that a clever man—a man, say, intelligent enough to reach the rank of mess sergeant, where all his work is done for him—can find a way out of anything,” he remarked, discarding four cards. “If Ken, instead of merely reporting the presence of that machine gun, had gone to the trouble to drop a grenade on it with that trench mortar I developed, I would have been spared the effort of thinking my own way out of trouble; but he was always a thoughtless youngster.”
Several hands were played in silence, the men knowing better than to ask questions. As they expected, the sergeant finally unbent.
“It is also like you young squirts to refuse to profit by the ingenuity of yer betters. I suppose it’s my duty to explain my methods, in the event of your ever occupying a similar position. As you said, I was in that shell hole, which was the only cover in the neighborhood. My support, consisting of you, had departed rearward under the wing of a handy smoke pot, not leaving room for your superior officer in the cloud. As you know, I have always been opposed to the use of machine guns, and the specimen covering my shelter did nothing to change my opinion. Maybe I can persuade the army to my way of thinking, after this.
“There was only one of the guns in the nest, which was two hundred yards away. Knowing that you were retreating along their line of fire, I thoughtfully refrained from attracting their attention until I was sure you were safe—that was why I didn’t follow you just then. When the smoke cleared away so that I could walk without trippin’ on things, I came back.”
“Huh? Did you have a tank with you?” asked the corporal.
“I did not, son. I have told you many a time machine guns are useless weapons. Consider, please. That gun fired about fifteen h’indred shots a minute, with a muzzle velocity of about four thousand feet per second. A little arithmetic, of which even you should be capable, shows that there is a space of one hundred and sixty feet between bullets—enough for any normal man. I walked back.”
1943
Attitude
Their copters had a very curious system, a very curious motivation. The captives were allowed to—even encouraged to—build devices to bring about their escape. Only at the last moment, mysteriously, the captors always stopped them—
Dr. Little woke up abruptly, with a distinct sensation of having just stepped over a precipice. His eyes flew open and were greeted by the sight of a copper-colored metal ceiling a few feet above; it took him several seconds to realize that it was keeping its distance, and that he was not falling either toward or away from it. When he did, a grimace of disgust flickered across his face; he had lived and slept through enough days and nights in interstellar space to be accustomed to weightlessness. He had no business waking up like a cadet on his first flight, grasping for the nearest support—he had no business waking up at all, in these surroundings! He shook his head; his mind seemed to be working on slow time, and his pulse, as he suddenly realized as the pounding in his temples forced itself on his awareness, must be well over a hundred.
This was not his room. The metal of the walls was different, the light was different—an orange glow streaming from slender tubes running along the junction of wall and ceiling. He turned his head to take in the rest of the place, and an agonizing barrage of pins and needles shot the length of his body. An attempt to move his arms and legs met with the same result; but he managed to bend his neck enough to discover that he was enveloped to the shoulders in a sacklike affair bearing all the earmarks of a regulation sleeping bag. The number stenciled on the canvas was not his own, however.
In a few minutes he found himself able to turn his head freely and proceeded to take advantage of the fact by examining his surroundings. He found himself in a small chamber, walled completely with the coppery alloy. It was six-sided, like the cells in a beehive; the only opening was a circular hatchway in what Little considered the ceiling—though, in a second-order flight, it might as well have been a floor or wall. There was no furniture of any description. The walls were smooth, lacking even the rings normally present to accommodate the anchoring snaps of a sleeping bag. There was light shining through the grille which covered the hatchway, but from where he was Little could make out no details through the bars.
He began to wriggle his toes and fingers, ignoring as best he could the resulting sensations; and in a few minutes he found himself able to move with little effort. He lay still a few minutes longer, and then unsnapped the top fasteners of the bag. The grille interested him, and he was becoming more and more puzzled as to his whereabouts. He had no recollection of any unusual events; he had been checking over the medical stores, he was sure, but he couldn’t recall retiring to his room afterward. What had put him to sleep? And where had he awakened?
He grasped the top of the bag and peeled it off, being careful to keep hold of it. He started to roll it up and paused in astonishment. A cloud of dust, fine as smoke, was oozing from the fibers of the cloth with each motion, and hanging about the bag like an atmosphere. He sniffed at it cautiously and started coughing; the stuff was dry, and tickled his throat unpleasantly. There could be only one explanation; the bag had been drifting in open space for a length of time sufficient to evaporate every trace of moisture from its fibers. He unrolled it again and looked at the stenciled number—GOA-III-NA12-422. The first three groups confirmed his original belief that the bag had belonged to the Gomeisa; the last was a personal number indicating the identity of the former owner, but Little could not remember whose number it was. The fact that it had been exposed to the void was not reassuring.
Dismissing that phase of the problem for the moment, the doctor rolled the bag into a tight bundle. He was drifting weightless midway between ceiling and floor, almost in the center of the room; the hatchway was in one of the six corners of the ceiling. Little hurled the bundle in the opposite direction. It struck the far corner and rebounded without much energy; air friction brought it to a halt a few feet from the wall. The doctor drifted more slowly in the direction of the grating. His throw had been accurate enough to send him within reach of it; he caught hold of one of the bars and drew himself as close as possible.
Any lingering doubt that might have remained in his still befuddled brain as to whether or not he were still on board the Gomeisa was driven away as he caught his first glimpse through the grille. It opened—or would have opened had it been unlocked—onto a corridor which extended in two directions as far as the doctor’s limited view could reach. The hallway was about thirty feet square, but there its orthodox characteristics terminated. It had been built with a sublime disregard for any possible preferred “up” or “down” direction. Hatches opened into all four sides; those opposite Little’s station were circular, like his own, while those in the “side” walls were rectangular. From a point beside each opening, a solidly braced metal ladder extended to the center of the corridor, where it joined a heavy central pillar plentifully supplied with grips for climbing. Everything was made of the copperlike material, and the only light came from the orange-glow tubes set in the corners of the corridor.
Dr. Little maintained his position for several minutes, looking and listening; but no sound reached his ears, and he could perceive nothing through the gratings which covered the other hatchways. He also gave a few moments’ attention to the lock on his own grating, which evidently was operated from either side; but it was designed to be opened by a complicated key, and the doctor had no instruments for examining its interior. With a sigh he hooked one arm about a bar of the grating and relaxed, trying to reason out the chain of events which had led up to these peculiar circumstances.
The Gomeisa had been a heavy cruiser, quite capable of putting up a stiff defense to any conceivable attack. Certainly no assault could have been so sudden and complete that the enemy would be in a position to use hand weapons on the crew before an alarm was raised—the idea was absurd; and fixed mount projectors of any type would have left more of a mark on the doctor than he could find at this moment. Furthermore, the ship had been, at the last time of which Little had clear recollection, crossing the relatively empty gulf between the Galaxy proper and the Greater Magellanic Cloud—a most unpropitious place for a surprise attack. The star density in that region is of the order of one per eight thousand cubic parsecs, leaving a practically clear field for detector operations. No, an attack did not seem possible; and yet Little had been deprived of consciousness without warning, had been removed from the Gomeisa in that state; and had awakened within a sleeping bag which showed too plainly the fact that part, at least, of the cruiser had been open to space for some time.
Was he in a base on some planet of one of those few stars of the “desert,” or in some ship of unheard-of design? His weightlessness disposed of the first idea before it was formulated; and the doctor glanced at his belt. Through the glass window in its case, he could see the filament of his personal equalizer glowing faintly; he was in a ship, in second-order flight, and the little device had automatically taken on the task of balancing the drive forces which would, without it, act unequally on each element in his body. As a further check, he felt in his pocket and drew out two coins, one of copper and one of silver. He held them nearly together some distance from his body, released them carefully so as not to give them velocities of their own, and withdrew his hand. Deprived of the equalizer field, they began to drift slowly in a direction parallel to the corridor, the copper bit moving at a barely perceptible crawl, the silver rapidly gaining. The corridor, then, was parallel to the ship’s line of flight; and the coins had fallen forward, since the silver was more susceptible to the driving field action.
Little pushed off from the ceiling and retrieved the coins, restoring them to his otherwise empty pocket. He had not been carrying instruments or weapons, and had no means of telling whether or not he had been searched while unconscious. Nothing was missing, but he had possessed nothing worth taking. The fact that he was locked in might be taken to indicate that he was a prisoner, and prisoners are customarily relieved of any possessions which might prove helpful in an escape. Only beings who had had contact with humanity would logically be expected to identify which of the numerous gadgets carried by the average man are weapons; but the design of this craft bore no resemblance to that of any race with which Little was acquainted. He still possessed his wrist watch and mechanical pencil, so the doctor found himself unable to decide even the nature of his captors, far less their intentions.
Possibly he would find out something when—and if—he was fed. He realized suddenly that he was both hungry and thirsty. He had been unconscious long enough for his watch to run down.
Little’s pulse had dropped to somewhere near normal, he noticed, as he drifted beside the hatch. He wondered again what had knocked him out without leaving any mark or causing some sensation; then gave up this line of speculation in favor of the more immediate one advocated by his empty stomach. He fell asleep again before he reached any solution. He dreamed that someone had moved Rigel to the other side of the Galaxy, and the navigator couldn’t find his way home. Very silly, he thought, and went on dreaming it.
A gonglike note, as penetrating as though his own skull had been used as the bell, woke him the second time. He was alert at once, and instantly perceived the green, translucent sphere suspended a few feet away. For a moment he thought it might be one of his captors; then his nose told him differently. It was ordinary lime juice, as carried by practically every Earth cruiser. A moment’s search served to locate, beside the hatchway, the fine nozzle through which the liquid had been impelled. The doctor had no drinking tube, but he had long since mastered the trick of using his tongue in such circumstances without allowing any other part of his face to touch the liquid. It was a standard joke to confront recruits, on their first free flight, with the same problem. If nose or cheek touched the sphere, surface tension did the rest.
Little returned to the door and took up what he intended to be a permanent station there. He was waiting partly for some sign of human beings, partly for evidence of his captors, and, more and more as time wore on, for some trace of solid food, He waited in vain for all three. At intervals, a pint or so of lime juice came through the jet and formed a globe in the air beside it; nothing else. Little had always liked the stuff, but his opinion was slowly changing as more and more of it was forced on him. It was all there was to drink, and the air seemed to be rather dry; at any rate, he got frightfully thirsty at what seemed unusually short intervals.
He wound his watch and discovered that the “feedings” came at intervals of a little over four hours. He had plenty of chance to make observations, and nothing else to observe; it was not long before he was able to predict within a few seconds the arrival of another drink, Later, he wished he hadn’t figured it out; the last five or ten minutes of each wait were characterized by an almost agonizing thirst, none the less painful for being purely mental. Sometimes he slept, but he was always awake at the zero minute.
With nothing to occupy his mind but fruitless speculation, it is not surprising that he lost all track of the number of feedings. He knew only that he had slept a large number of times, had become deathly sick of lime juice, and was beginning to suffer severely from the lack of other food, when a faint suggestion of weight manifested itself. He looked at his equalizer the instant he noticed the situation and found it dark. The ship had cut its second-order converters, and was applying a very slight first-order acceleration in its original line of flight—the barely perceptible weight was directed toward what Little had found to be the stern. Its direction changed by a few degrees on several occasions, but was restored each time in a few seconds. The intensity remained constant, as nearly as Little could tell, for several hours.
Then it increased, smoothly but swiftly, to a value only slightly below that of Earthly gravity. The alterations in direction became more frequent, but never sudden or violent enough to throw Little off his feet—he was now standing on the rear wall, which had become the floor. Evidently the ship’s pilot, organic or mechanical, well deserved the name. For nearly half an hour by the watch, conditions remained thus; then the drive was eased through an arc of ninety degrees, the wall containing the hatchway once more became the ceiling, and within a few minutes the faintest of tremors was perceptible through the immense hull and the direction of gravity became constant. If this indicated a landing, Little mentally took off his hat to the entity at the controls.
The doctor found himself badly placed for observation. The hatch was about four feet above the highest point he could reach, and even jumping was not quite sufficient to give him a hold on the bars. He estimated that he had nearly all of his normal hundred and ninety pounds Earth weight, and lack of proper food for the last several days had markedly impaired his physical powers. It was worse than tantalizing; for suddenly, for the first time since he had regained consciousness in this strange spot, he heard sounds from outside. They were distorted by echoes, sounding and reverberating along the corridor outside, and evidently originated at a considerable distance, but they were definitely and unmistakably the voices of human beings.
For minutes the doctor waited. The voices came no nearer, but on the other hand they did not go any farther away. He called out, but apparently the group was too large and making too much noise of its own to hear him. The chatter went on. No words were distinguishable, but there was a prevailing overtone of excitement that not even the metallic echoes of the great hull could cover. Little listened, and kept his eyes fixed on the hatchway.
He heard nothing approach, but suddenly there was a faint click as the lock opened. The grille swung sharply inward until it was perpendicular to the wall in which it was set; then the side bars of its frame telescoped outward until they clicked against the floor. The crossbars separated simultaneously, still maintaining equal distances from each other, and a moment after the hatch had opened a metal ladder extended from it to the floor of the room. It took close examination to see the telescopic joints just below each rung. The metal tubing must be paper-thin, Little thought, to permit such construction.
