Collected Short Fiction, page 594
A slight, frail, brown-eyed woman walked into the room and he seized her thin body instinctively in his arms, still holding the package in one hand. He found himself repeating brokenly:
“Ma! Ma, I’ve come back!”
For a long time the frail woman was silent in his arms, her narrow shoulders shaken with sobs, her brown eyes turned up to his face, full of tears. Then she murmured: “Davy—Davy—Davy! My boy! It’s been so long . . .”
Jason led her gently away from him. She sat down weakly on a kitchen chair. Then he became aware of the package, and began swiftly to open it.
And he said, as if another mind were speaking with his tongue:
“I’ve brought it back, Ma. All of it. Every cent. I hope it hasn’t been too hard for you, Ma.”
She stared at him mutely from the chair, brown eyes big and questioning.
“I was sorry as soon as I had time to think,” the voice in him went on. “I never spent any of it. But they were after me and I didn’t dare come back. Even when I read that the bank had failed because of my theft and that Pa had killed himself, I still didn’t return. I didn’t have the courage. Not until now. Today I knew I had to come. And it’s all here, I tell you. I didn’t spend a penny.”
The package was open now, in his hands. There was a flimsy cardboard shoe-box inside the newspaper. And the box was filled with paper currency and bonds, tied in neat little bundles. He dumped them from the box, into the frail woman’s lap.
She looked down at them for a moment. Then the shining brown eyes were lifted to his face again.
“Davy!” she murmured. “Davy! Davy, my son!” . . .
“Hurt much, Mister?” a gruff voice was asking, and the sound of it seemed to reach him through a deep haze, dimly.
Then Jason felt hands tugging at his body, and there was a white flash of pain at the back of his skull. He groaned as burning agony flamed through his chest.
They were lifting him from the wreckage of his sedan that lay beside the glistening hot pavement. The long black roadster that had cut sharp in front of him was stopped a few yards ahead. Behind it was a queue of cars and curious people leaning from them.
A still body lay on the pavement beside Jason. The hitchhiker. The man he had picked up back at the filling station. The wrinkled coat was bloody, now, and the thin face almost unrecognizable. But he knew it was the man who had carried the newspaper package.
“He’s dead,” they told Jason. “Skull crushed. Died instantly when your car turned over.”
“Don’t know him,” Jason gasped through mists of pain. “Just picked him up.”
“He has a letter in his pocket addressed to David Catlin,” they said.
Jason Garvie shook his throbbing head, trying to remember. Then he said, “Where’s the package? He had a bundle . . . a box wrapped in newspaper. . . .” There was no package. The crowd fanned out, searched all around the wreckage, even deep in the fields alongside the road.
But they never found David Catlin’s package.
1958
Beans
One of the good old names in science fiction makes his first appearance in these pages . . .
THROUGH SOME UNEXPLAINED CEREbral freak, John Slurvian was naturally immune to the hypnotic radiation of the invaders. Otherwise, he was an ordinary American—a speech teacher in a Midwestern high school. The day the invaders came, Slurvian was drawing a phonetics diagram on the blackboard when he became conscious of an unaccustomed quiet, and looked around to discover his pupils had progressed from their usual drowsiness into a coma-like sleep.
Three days later he emerged from the affected area with his news of the wrecked vehicles along the dead roads and the unfought fires eating up the stricken cities inside the Sleep-Out. Still immune, he was equipped with a portable radio transmitter and sent back as a military scout.
Radio reports from the heroic John Slurvian quickly pinpointed the beachhead of die invaders, high in the central Rockies. Although manned equipment was clearly useless, it seemed reasonable that unmanned rockets in sufficient numbers might save the country. All the nation’s remaining ballistic firepower, therefore, had been gathered on the edge of the Sleep-Out for a last desperate atomic offensive—when Communications, safely in the rear, picked up a final weak, fragmentary message from the wounded and apparently dying John Slurvian.
“Delay H-Hour!” That hasty order went out to the atomic installations. “Co-existence with invaders may be possible, if we demonstrate good will — evidently they are harmless vegetarians. John Slurvian reports, ‘Invaders eat only [word missing] beans’.”
H-Hour was postponed — too long. A sudden expansion of the Sleep-Out overwhelmed the crews around the waiting missiles, even as Headquarters’ final message echoed tinnily in silent command posts:
“Fire at once! Communications experts have reconstructed missing word in earlier John Slurvian message: ‘Invaders eat only human beans!’ ”
1959
Second Man to the Moon
It takes team work to get to the moon and back again. Doesn’t matter at ell if you hate the other guy on your team.
Rescue Rocket
to Search for
Lost Spaceman
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—General Otto Hahn, commander of the new United States Space Corps, announced at noon today that the giant rocket America IV will take off within a few hours in an attempt to rescue Captain Dan Slavik, space hero who carried the American flag to the moon.
Civilian space experts were quick to predict disaster for Captain James West, who will pilot the rescue rocket. They point out that the Space Corps has failed to find and remove the mechanical “bug” that has already destroyed three of the four American moon rockets. Captain Nick Emilani was only eighty miles above Cape Canaveral when his America I exploded into a green fireball visible from New Orleans to Havana. Captain Carlos Prieto was killed when his America II went out of control, six hundred miles above the Earth, and collided with the satellite stage that held his fuel for the actual moon trip.
Captain Dan Slavik, who took off from the rocket base here only eight days ago, was reporting unexplained control difficulties as he approached the moon. His radio transmissions were suddenly interrupted, as he prepared to fire a marker missile containing a shaped charge designed to spray powdered pigments through the vacuum of space to the surface of the moon. Slavik was at first believed to have died like Emilani and Prieto.
Only forty-eight hours ago, however, observers saw the missile explosion which painted an enormous American flag across the sunlit side of the moon. Although Slavik’s radio has not been heard again, this spectacular signal from the moon is proof that he is still alive. Fearing that he is trapped in his damaged rocket on the moon, in danger of being cooked alive by the two-hundred degree temperatures of the lunar day, General Hahn has taken personal charge of the final preparations for West’s rescue flight.
At his press conference today, Hahn refused to answer his civilian critics, who attribute all these disasters to the military choice of a solid fuel for the moon vehicles—
Waiting on the windy high platform of the gantry, two hundred feet above the scorched concrete firing pad at Cape Canaveral, Jim West looked up from that newspaper item, with a quick grin at General Hahn.
“Maybe they’re right.” Worry seamed Hahn’s lean face. “Maybe we should call it off.”
Leaner and younger than Hahn, West answered with only a shrug. Moving clumsily in the sagging fabric of his uninflated spacesuit, he crumpled the newspaper and tossed it into the wind.
“You know the odds are a thousand to one that you’ll lose your own life without helping Slavik,” the general insisted. “Even if he is your buddy—”
“He’s no buddy of mine,” West’s easy grin creased into a brief scowl of trouble. “In fact, I have personal reasons to dislike him. But he’s on the team. I intend to bring him back—even if I have to punch him on the nose when we land.”
“If you’re all that determined—good luck!”
Silently, West shook the general’s hand. He turned slowly to look back at the long empty beach and the sprawling buildings of the base, and then calmly climbed the steel ladder to the door in the blunt, bright nose cone. Moving stiffly in the pressure suit, he ducked into the narrow door of the ship.
“Watch your head—”
The general’s warning came an instant too late. He rubbed his bruise and made a face at the heavy fire extinguisher clamped just inside the door. Painfully, he grinned at Hahn.
“Couldn’t you find a better place for that?”
“Look inside.” Hahn waved toward the yellow oxygen tanks and black-cased electronic gear that filled every spare inch of space in the nine-foot metal ball that nestled in the nose cone. “Keep it where you can reach it,” he warned. “We’ve got just one clue to that bug in these beasts. Emilani had time to yell fire—”
“Minus two hours!” a rasping speaker in the rocket interrupted him. “Ground control to pilot,” another voice cut in. “Final instrument check will now begin. Pilot, are you ready?”
“Pilot ready.”
Lying on the crash pad, two feet beneath the knobs and dials of the intricate electronic gear that would really pilot the rocket, he began the elaborate checking procedure—the last search for the undiscovered “bug” that had got America I and America II and America III.
Two hundred miles from Cape Canaveral, Miss Victoria Hill came home to her rooming house from the Smithwick Junior High School. She found a letter waiting for her, on the table in the hall. Two minutes later she was on the telephone, calling Jim West.
“You’re too late, Miss,” a brisk official voice informed her. “He’s sealed in the rocket, and the final countdown has already started. We can’t interrupt the firing procedure.”
Vicky Hill had red hair, however, and a very stubborn chin. Twenty minutes later she was talking to General Hahn himself, begging him to delay the take-off.
“Because of a horrible misunderstanding!” she gasped into the phone. “You see, I met them both last year—Jim and that Captain Slavik—when I brought my ninth-grade science class to see Cape Canaveral. Slavik—well, he wasn’t very nice. But Jim was wonderful! Jim and I almost got engaged. But then he didn’t call—didn’t call me any more—”
Her voice cracked, and she had to stop.
“Please, Miss Hill. I’m extremely busy—”
“But I’ve got to talk to Jim.” She was frantic now. “Because I just got his note—his farewell note. Now I know why he didn’t call me. He believes I’m in love with Slavik—I guess Slavik told him something that wasn’t altogether true. I think he’s trying to rescue Slavik for my sake—”
“I doubt that,” the general broke in. “I know West and Slavik aren’t exactly friends. But they’re fellow spacemen, both devoted to our great task—which is blazing a trail from Earth to the planets. I’m very sorry you’re upset, but nobody here at Cape Canaveral has time just now to waste on any trivial romance—”
“It is not trivial,” she interrupted desperately. “Not to me! Not to Jim—”
The telephone clicked in her ear.
Back in her room, she tried doggedly to grade a stack of algebra papers, but x wouldn’t equal anything. She snapped on the portable television set that Jim had given her—while she still thought they were almost engaged.
“—Clem Peabody, bringing you the moon flight.” The hawk-faced announcer was holding a little globe, pocked with the craters of the moon and marked with a tiny flag. “It is minus five minutes, here at Cape Canaveral, as we bring you General Hahn in a taped interview.”
General Hahn looked almost as lean and hard and young as Jim.
“Now, General, can you tell us how a rocket moves, out into empty space?”
“The same way you do—by pushing back on something else.”
“Out in space, what has it to push against?”
“Its own jet of burning fuel,” the general said. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, as Newton proved. The expanding gases move backward, and the rocket is driven forward. To get away from Earth, you need a take-off velocity of about seven miles a second. That means the moon rocket must be nearly all fuel. Captain West is sitting on a small mountain of solid high explosive.”
The rocket ship flashed on the screen, a round white tower standing tall beside the spidery gantry crane, with the flat sea wide as space beyond. Staring at it, Vicky Hill clenched her hands and shivered as she listened.
“The pilot’s sphere weighs only four tons. The fuel in the ground stage weighs five hundred tons—and that’s just enough to put the sphere into orbit, six hundred miles up. There West must pick up the satellite stage. That’s another eighty tons of solid fuel—enough to take him out to the moon, and get him back to his rendezvous with the re-entry vehicle that is already waiting in orbit to carry him down to Cape Canaveral again.”
“Thank you, General Hahn!”
Clem Peabody’s excited hatchet face was back on the screen.
“The time is minus one minute, here at Cape Canaveral!” His voice was authentically breathless now. “Captain West is strapped to his crash pad, ready to go. His only duty now is to monitor the instruments. Ground control will guide the rocket for him, so long as he’s in range of their beam.
“Minus thirty seconds! Here’s the official countdown!”
“Twenty seconds!” twanged a thin nasal voice. “Ten seconds! . . . Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Zero!”
For a moment Vicky thought nothing was going to happen, after all. But then a great sudden cloud of white smoke exploded from the rocket, with a rumble like thunder. At first the smoke was all she could see. Then the rocket rose slowly out of it, standing on a tail of fire. It lifted faster, faster, till the buildings and the sea were gone and it was only a faint gray blur fading on the little screen.
The first roar of the rockets came only faintly to West, for their driving fire was nearly two hundred feet beneath his insulated sphere. He felt a slight vibration. Then a gentle pressure thrust his body down against the crash pad, and steadily grew.
“Ground to pilot!” It was General Hahn himself. “Jim, you’re on the way! But don’t forget to watch for fire!”
“I’ll—watch—” West’s muscles tightened, fighting that growing acceleration thrust. “And I’ll bring—” He had to stop and gasp for breath. “Slavik back!”
His breath was all crushed out again. As the fuel burned, the total mass of the rocket grew less. Since the thrust remained the same, the acceleration mutliplied. Its gigantic power ground him into the crash pad. His chest hurt. His eyeballs ached. Blackness fogged the instruments above him. Somewhere, he heard a shattering crash.
“Ground to pilot!” General Hahn’s anxious voice seemed faint and distant. “Was that a meteor?”
He had no breath for an answer. Anyhow, he didn’t know.
“Hang on, Jim!” the general’s voice was cheering him. “Ten more seconds, and you’ll have orbital velocity. This is it. Motors off!”
He waited for that crushing hand to lift. Instead, it grew heavier. The rocket motors kept roaring in his ears, their fire nearer now. He struggled to reach the manual controls, but his arms were pinned down with their own pitiless weight. Blackness was drowning him—
But suddenly then he was weightless, floating in a silent bath of air. He gasped and gasped, fighting to fill his empty, burning lungs.
“Ground to pilot!” Hahn’s sharp voice crashed into that sudden quiet. “What went wrong?”
“The rockets burned—” He struggled for his breath again. “Burned five seconds too long.”
“Try to locate the trouble, while you can.”
He stirred his bruised body gingerly. His legs floated off the pad, and held themselves up. His arms drifted. He turned his head to find the dials above him, and the movement made the whole rocket spin insanely.
“If I can,” he whispered. “But I feel—I can’t tell you how I feel—”
He loosened the straps and swam toward the door. Beyond the little plastic panel, it was dead black night. He snapped off his instrument lights, and the stars came out. They were hard sharp points of unglittering fire. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, their frozen, many-colored splendor stopped his breath again.
He watched them, fighting his vertigo, till a violet veil was slowly drawn across them. Behind it came a long misty curve of dazzling light, that blotted out the stars. He saw the cloud-blurred shape of Florida—above him, somehow, not beneath. He clung with a desperate sick longing to the great, blazing crescent Earth, until at last the crazy spinning of the rocket ceased.
“Pilot to ground,” he called hoarsely. “Now I’ll look for that bug—”
Sitting huddled before the television set that he had given her, Vicky Hill followed him out toward the moon. She chewed her nails when she learned that he had failed to run down the trouble. She held her breath while Clem Peabody told how he was trying to pick up the tons of high explosive in the satellite stage, without colliding with it. She prayed silently as the tracking telescopes followed the two small sparks drifting together in space, and breathed her thanks when they met without explosion. Her tired body tensed again, when she heard Clem Peabody announcing that West was ready at last for the real moon trip.
“The rocket is still under remote control, from the great electronic computers here at Cape Canaveral,” Peabody said. “The motors should burn for exactly one hundred and twenty-eight seconds, to boost West into his new trajectory.”
The gray spark on the screen exploded, then, into a long plume of fire. She leaned to watch it, counting off the seconds. Her count passed one hundred and twenty-eight, and still the long plume burned. Terror had taken her breath and stopped her count, long before something snuffed it out.
She relaxed a little then, half relieved, trying hard to convince herself that she had simply counted too fast. She sat staring at the fading speck on the tiny screen, trying blankly to imagine what Jim was doing and thinking and feeling, out there all alone.
