Collected Short Fiction, page 522
But Ruth didn’t like blue for him—
He remembered, then, with a stab of pain, that she was lost to him. A sudden sick loneliness cut through him, but the dark-haired stranger in the mirror looked gravely cheerful still, and the straight shoulders made a quiet little shrug of calm acceptance.
Then he found the plaque, hung beside the mirror on the glowing wall. A thin rectangular block of some black crystal, polished sleek and golden-veined. Across the face of it was a green-lettered message—Ruth had always used green ink, and he knew her rapid printing:
Dear Webb,
Congratulations, on this Awakening Day. We’re all three truly glad you’re well again, and we rejoice in the new felicity which you should discover now.
The Frank Ironsmiths
Felicity—that was a pet word of Ruth’s. The plaque had a slight, clean hint of Sweet Delirium. He read the message twice, and then a sudden stinging in his eyes blurred her neat green lettering.
With a painful throbbing in his throat, he found the round stud inset in the base of the plaque, and pressed it. The printing dissolved: The darkness of the crystal brightened, and the golden veinings faded.
The plaque became a window.
Beyond it, he saw a simple gay pavilion, which must have been erected by telurgy, standing on a happy landscape. The flowering trees about it were all violet flame, and light danced on far blue water, and soft green hills were topped with the silver towers of the Institute.
Frank Ironsmith and Ruth came out of that bright building, followed by a little yellow-haired girl. Ironsmith grinned at him warmly, and Ruth waved a white lace handkerchief. They hurried toward him off the picture, holding the hands of the slender child between them.
Ironsmith looked a little heavier, he thought, pink with health and calmly self-content, His smooth, sun-browned jaws moved a little, and Claypool thought he must be chewing gum. Ruth was straight and radiant, her dark hair lustrous with red lights.
They paused, in the picture. Beaming rather fatuously, he thought, Ironsmith took up the little girl. Ruth reached out to caress the yellow curls, and Claypool saw her fond and happy pride. She had never looked quite so young, lie thought, not even on their own wedding day at Starmont, never so light and Lair and gay.
The round stud clicked softly back again, and that tiny window closed itself. The polished crystal darkened, and the golden veinings knitted back. The green lettering was still erased, but that faint sweetness of Ruth’s perfume lingered heavy in the air, a somber ghost of sorrow.
That stale sweetness seemed suddenly stifling in the room. His fingers went back, automatically, to the row of buttons beside the mirror. He glimpsed himself again, a tall brown stranger, and then the mirror became a crystal window.
He punched another button, and that clear panel dropped. A fresh morning breeze cooled his face.
Ruth’s lingering thin perfume went out with the wind, and that ghost of old sadness with it. He inhaled clean air, and felt that he was free.
He turned to the window, and gaped again.
Far away, beyond the red expanse of the landing stage and below the uneven edge of the mountain’s crown, he saw the rolling vastness of the desert he had known—but now no longer a tawny desolation.
For now new lakes glinted blue in the valleys, above giant dams the humanoids must have built, and scattered villas made gay islets of bright roof-color in a new sea of tender green, and now a somber green of new-grown forest clad the higher summits, which had been bleak and bare.
Dark forests, grown since he was here!
“That grid!” he breathed. “How long?”
He was turning to call back that oddly obedient machine to answer his baffled questions, when he caught a shimmer of moving color against the sky. A little rhodomagnetic cruiser dropped silently, the oval mirror of its hull aglow with blue and green reflections and the red of the landing stage. It touched gently, and a black mechanical sprang down to help a girl alight.
He stood at the window, watching that girl, and something caught his breath. He didn’t know her, and yet something set a haunting wonder in him. Something made his pulse beat faster, and he forgot that vanished ghost of yesterday.
The girl left the humanoid waiting by the cruiser. She came obliquely across the stage, walking with a long, free, confident stride. She was tall, and splendid to him. Her flowing dress was clinging silver, scarlet-belted, and she wore a scarlet flower in her black, shining hair.
He didn’t know her name, and yet the swinging way she walked awoke a haunting recognition. He must have seen her eyes before, long and limpidly dark. And the flower in her hair, a gay badge of courage, was somehow like a tattered scrap of scarlet ribbon.
She saw him at the window. Her half-remembered face—thin-lipped and narrow, sensitive and strong, with high cheekbones—turned lovely with a smile he must have known, somewhere. She paused on the red stage, and called to him in a rich clear voice that he must have heard before.
“Hi, Webb!”
He didn’t know her name, and yet that baffled recognition took hold of him. The tall stranger he had seen in the mirror waved back to her, and leaped over the low window ledge with a young man’s effortless ease, and ran smiling eagerly to meet her. She gave him her hand, and her grasp was strong and glad.
“Do you feel all right?” But she didn’t wait for him to say. “I felt you were ready to come back,” she said happily. “So I asked Mr. White, and he told me this would be your Awakening Day. And he told me to come and welcome you—or at least he said I might.”
She saw his breathless uncertainty.
“What’s the trouble, dear?” Her laughing voice held gentle malice. “Don’t you remember me?”
He stared into her dark shining eyes.
“Dawn!” he whispered unbelievingly. “Could it be?”
“Perhaps I’ve changed a little, since you remember me.” She straightened and posed in the clinging silver and turned herself before him, tall and gay and proud, laughing at him. “How do you like it now?”
He liked her more than he could understand, but he only nodded blankly, thinking of those dark forests grown on mountains that had been cragged and barren.
“How long has it been?” he whispered faintly. “How many years?”
“This is the fiftieth Awakening Day.”
A cold wind blew on his spine.
“Awakening Day comes every year,” she said, “when those who are ready are released from the grid. A great holiday. Mr. White wanted me to stay for the celebration at the Institute tonight. He has been back for thirty years, you know. Now he’s a research man, working with Mr. Ironsmith.”
Still Claypool couldn’t speak.
“But I wouldn’t stay,” she said, “because I knew you’d be back, and I wanted to be here. Sometimes it is a little difficult and confusing, at first. I came back, at Dragonrock, on the last Awakening Day, and I remember being lonely.”
He blinked at her shining loveliness, trying to understand.
“Mr. White and Mr. Ironsmith are always so busy, you see, with this new research. And our other old friends are still under the grid—Mr. White says that Mr. Graystone and Mr. Lucky should be ready in a few Awakening Days, but I’m afraid it will be a long time before poor Mr. Overstreet is out.”
Her dark head tilted, and she smiled again.
“So I’ve been waiting for you, darling, alone at Dragonrock.”
Floundering in his stunned confusion, Claypool groped for her warm hand, and let her laughing strength draw him back to sanity. He swallowed hard, and found his voice.
“Fifty years!” he whispered. “Then I’m—ninety!”
“And I am sixty,” came her soft girl’s voice. “The grid works slowly—Mr. White and Mr. Ironsmith are working now to speed up the processes. But it has healed our bodies and our minds, and it can make us young again.”
Her limpid eyes turned thoughtful.
“Darling, isn’t it strange we were so awfully wrong? And too bad we ever fought Mr. Ironsmith?”
He looked over her shoulder, at the computing section where Ironsmith used to work. The old evergreens clumped about it were taller, now, and the little red-roofed building sagged with age. Against the white-painted wall, where Ironsmith used to lean his bicycle, stood a tall memorial tablet.
Claypool nodded dazedly.
“I guess we were all of us sick and blundering and mistaken,” he said slowly. “I guess Ironsmith is a shining genius and a great hero—but still I don’t like that habit of chewing gum.”
The tall girl laughed throatily. “Darling, I’m glad you’re still you. ‘Cause I’ve been waiting for you.” Somehow, then, in her rich husky voice, he could hear a child’s clear treble, “You see, Webb, I’ve been in love with you ever since the day you carried me in your arms, and ran from that digging machine. ’Member?”
Claypool remembered. The tall youthful stranger of the mirror heard the music of her voice, and caught her hand again. He wanted flowers to give her, and swift telurgy shaped red and thornless roses from the air.
But he remembered those fifty years again, and the shock of them checked that stranger’s smiling confidence. The telurgic roses in his hand somehow had the musky odor of Sweet Delirium, and they recalled that ghost of sadness he had tried to banish.
Dawn took the flowers from his numbed hand, laughing.
“It’s no use, your fighting, dear.” Her voice had a faintly malicious bite. “And no use to dream of Ruth. ’Cause I came to see you here, right after my Awakening Day. I liked you, and I told Mr. White I wanted you, and he fixed it for me in the grid. He says you simply can’t hate me now.”
THE END.
1949
Seetee Shock
First of Three Parts. Trouble with “seetee”—contraterrene matter—was inevitable. But an engineer could handle that; it was trouble with men that meant death. And this is the story of a man already killed, yet fighting his murderers!
The void leered. Implacable hostility flattened itself against the frosty dark, waiting the time to strike. Shocking danger fled away from him into the sucking emptiness, and cunningly eluded him, and ruthlessly returned. Timeless peril watched forever, with the cruel, cold eyes of the stars.
Nicol Jenkins, spatial engineer, fought back silently.
The seetee bull was his weapon. He rode the ugly metal bulk of it, sealed in chafing dirigible armor, seated astride the pile chamber. He drove it, his lanky body crouched against insensate enmity, his gray eyes alert. He gripped the cold wheel, hands stiffly numb in his clumsy plastic gloves, and turned the heavy machine against the baleful disdain of unfeeling space.
“Back, little man—better go back!”
The only sound his ears could hear was the faint hiss of oxygen from the regulator valve under his jaw, but his private hopes and terrors turned that thin susurration into a warning voice, whispering unceasingly out of the airless, soundless spatial night.
“Back, human being,” it jeered. “Your place is Earth. You weren’t designed for space. You and your puny kind are too feeble to exist here, and far too foolish to use the deadly toys you’re grasping for. No man can tread the contraterrene drift!”
Clumsy in the bulky armor, Jenkins tried impatiently to shake himself awake. He didn’t want to listen to that murmur of his own thoughts in the jet, but Tie had been too long in space. It was too many weary months since he had seen the green land and glinting seas of Earth, or felt the wind of Earth on his face, or heard the voice of a woman.
Once there had been a girl. For a long time, fighting the spatial night, he had been able to banish the whispering menace of it by thinking of her. Once the memory of her had been a precious link to the human world for which he strived, but now it was hard to recall the color of her eyes or the way her honey-colored hair was done.
He tried to see her now—
Jane Hardin had been her name. He met her on the long voyage out from Earth, over two years ago. They both we’re new to space. Together they had felt the first jarring shock of dark infinity, and its inhuman hostility had somehow joined them in a vital comradeship.
They had stood together on the observation deck, sharing the magnificence of man’s challenge to the encompassing sphere of bitter night and cruel, far splendor around the lonely atom of the liner. They had played shuffleboard and eaten their meals together, discovering with delight that they had both grown up in the same quiet suburb of Panama City. But then something happened.
Jenkins still didn’t know what had gone wrong. The night before they reached Pallasport, he had asked to see her again. She seemed radiantly pleased, until he mentioned that he was going to work for Seetee, Inc., then she recoiled from him, whitefaced, as if he had struck her.
She seemed inexplicably hurt at first, and then became coolly watchful and aloof. Hopefully, striving against that sudden, mistrustful reserve, he showed her his precious copy of his uncle’s book. He told her eagerly of Martin Brand’s splendid dream of unbounded power from seetee. Desperately, he begged her to tell him what was wrong.
Jane Hardin listened quietly, and told him nothing. She wouldn’t give him any address, and he lost her when the liner docked. He hadn’t seen her again—or any woman, in the two years since he came out to lonely Freedonia. Her bright image had dimmed in his thoughts, and all his wistfulness for her lost loveliness could no longer stop the hissing of his own apprehensions in the oxygen jet.
“You’ve been too long away from Earth,” that faint whisper mocked him now. “Your petty kind belongs to that little world, and you are fools to grope for control of seetee. You’re too frail and small for space, and the drift will only kill you if you grasp it.”
Jenkins tried not to listen. Crouching on the bull, he bent his head in the bubble of his helmet, watching the blank face of the radar-scope in the center of the control wheel. His lean brown jaw drew hard, his firm lips tightened. He couldn’t stop the jet, or the haunting dreads that found voice in it—but he refused to talk to himself.
“You men weren’t shaped for space,” that thin hissing mocked him. “Your feeble senses and your fragile, watery bodies were designed for a kinder environment. Your invasion here is rashest folly, and you’ll win no prize from the drift but death.”
He compressed his lips, and bent grimly to the job of collecting contraterrene metal for the shop on the airless rock called Freedonia. He had volunteered to drive the bull because Martin Brand was his uncle and because he might have asked for a softer assignment. Now he had no intention of turning back.
A white pip glowed on the scope. He swung the bull to center it, leaning clumsily to uncover the testing gun. He waited, riding the machine toward the unseen meteor, until the secondary pip on the distance scale reached the ten-kilometer mark.
Now!
Tense in the confining armor, he jabbed a stiff-gloved finger at the firing key. The fragment of drift that showed in the scope was still too far for his eyes to see, but the search beam trained the gun upon it. Silently, in the soundless night, the slender paragravity solenoid fired the tiny testing pellet of terrene iron.
Waiting for the flash, Jenkins turned the bull aside. That was always hard to do. The collector bin in front of him was shielded with a solid foot of lead, and he wanted instinctively to place that metal between his body and the flash. But human instincts weren’t fitted to space.
His engineering brain was well aware of that. The terribly penetrating rays from the flash would go through his unprotected body as cleanly as a bullet through a pane of glass, almost without harm. Striking any common shielding, however, they would multiply into showers of softer, more lethal secondary rays.
He swung the machine, to expose his body. Waiting, counting seconds, he ducked his head and flung up his armored arm to shield his face. An “utterly useless gesture—but he couldn’t help it. Two long years of driving the bull and working in the shops on Freedonia had taught him too well that men weren’t made to work the drift.
Fury!
The testing pellet from the little gun was only half a milligram of terrene iron. A tiny key to the blinding violence of the tee-seetee reaction. If it struck a contraterrene target, it would cease to exist as matter. Orbital electrons would collide with orbital positrons. Positive terrene nuclei would strike negative contraterrene nuclei. Unlike charges would cancel, merging into monstrous energy.
“The drift will get you, engineer,” the jet was snarling softly. “Perhaps you can shield your puny body against the emptiness and the cold. Perhaps you can manufacture oxygen and water and food. But all your feeble skill can’t protect you from those radiations—from seetee shock!”
That was the voice of his own deep dread. For human bodies weren’t designed to endure those deadly rays from the annihilation of clustered nuclei—and the deadlier secondaries they struck out of any common barrier. Men had known the effect of such radiations ever „ since Hiroshima.
And spacemen called it seetee shock.
Jenkins waited, crouching on the bull. He counted six seconds, and flinched from the flash of violet light that penetrated his closed eyelids. The analytic spectrograph attached to the gun clicked silently, and a shaded green lamp glowed softly on the recorder tape.
Awkward in the stiff fabric, Jenkins leaned down to read the analysis. Silicon, forty-four percent. Oxygen, aluminum, magnesium, and a trace of iron. A silicic rock, from the crust of the seetee Invader—
which collided with doomed Adonis to form the asteroids and the meteor drift long before the first man dreamed of voyaging space. Priceless fuel, if the power plant ever ran, it was useless now. He was after contraterrene iron and tungsten, that Lazarene wanted for the machines in the special shop. He shook his head and steered the heavy bull away, watching the scope for another fragment.
