Time Travel Omnibus, page 379
When Ramone had landed the ship, just to be on the safe side, he burned off everything within a radius of a quarter of a mile of the spot where the ship rested. Now, if any vicious vermin infected this strange planet, it would be easy to see them running toward the ship, and burn them out of existence with a short blast of atomic fire.
“It’s a wonder the thing worked,” Mishi said cattily.
“I thought you liked my ship,” Ramone taunted.
“It has nice upholstery,” Mishi said. “That’s the only new thing in it.”
“Well, it has a guarantee,” Ramone said. He frowned at the thought this brought up. “That guarantee won’t cover the burning out of the hyper-drive, though. That was my own fault. It’ll take a month’s pay to replace it.”
“With a rebuilt one, of course,” Mishi taunted.
“Sure,” Ramone shrugged. “I’m in the same class you are, the working class.”
Whatever her reply, he didn’t hear it. He was watching the approach of several creatures across the still smoking scorched earth.
They were definitely human, but in a ludicrously distorted way. They were small, barely a third as large as the humans Ramone knew. Their legs were short almost to the point of being stubby, and their foreheads sloped back slightly from the eyebrows, showing so little space for a brain that it would be a miracle they had one.
Their clothing was voluminous to the point of absurdity, mostly ornamental rather than functional, and noticeably hindered their walking. In fact, their mode of walking was designed to protect and preserve the ornamental attributes of their dress.
Mishi burst out laughing.
“Have a good laugh now,” Ramone said, “because when we step out to meet these people we’ve got to treat them with respect.”
“But they’re funny!” Mishi said.
“So what,” Ramone said. “A thousand of them pitted against us wouldn’t be a laughing matter. We’ve got to stick to the advice the travel bureau has in its guidebook.”
“You’re right,” Mishi said, suddenly sensible. “It’s a rather bizarre experience to land right in the midst of what is probably a half-civilized, totally unscientific race.”
The small humans were within a hundred yards of the ship now, and by their manner they were trying to indicate friendliness. One, who seemed to be their leader, was still advancing, while the others held back in a compact group. None of them seemed to have any sort of weapon.
“I’ll slip into my spacesuit,” Ramone said. “We’re going to have to work fast or we’ll be stuck here for a long time.”
The spacesuit was made entirely of transparent plastic. When it was on him, its surface contours gleamed with reflected and refracted light in such a way that it seemed to be a field of eerie light surrounding him. Its coated surface was too perfect to be seen directly.
Mishi watched as he emerged from the ship to confront the natives. He towered over them so that three of them, standing head on head, would have just equaled him in height.
His appearance had an electric effect on them. They dropped to the ground, hiding their faces from him. Mishi’s mind catalogued this act as evidence of superstition. The natives would believe them to be supernatural visitors. The guidebook said this usually indicated that it would be a simple matter to dominate the native population That was something that would be very necessary if they were to ever get back home before they died of old age.
Mishi watched with an approving light in her eyes at the way Ramone dealt with the situation. He had picked up the groveling leader and set him on his feet, and squatted down so that he could talk with him.
The language would probably be unintelligible and very high pitched; but it would be easy to establish telepathic contact, and probably create the conviction in the natives’ minds that they were hearing their own language.
From the way the native leader was nodding his head and moving his lips and maneuvering his hands it was apparent that he understood.
Mishi’s red lips curled into an amused smile. The simple creatures were really to be pitied. They undoubtedly believed they were meeting some overlord of the universe, and they would be very surprised if they could realize that Ramone was only an underpaid clerk!
Her subconscious thinking placed herself outside his category. She was merely a secretary, but she was beautiful, and had a beautiful body, as well as sultry eyes and pouting lips.
When Ramone re-entered the ship he flashed Mishi a quick, encouraging smile, and went over to the dashboard.
“What now?” she asked lazily.
“Why don’t you get some sleep?” Ramone suggested. “I’m going to be pretty busy for the next few hours. First, I have to extend a stasis field out a few hundred miles. It has to be almost full stasis, because it’s going to take several years to do what’s necessary if we are to be rescued, and that few years must be condensed into a few non-static hours. I’ve got to extend it as far as those stone hills I saw when we were coming down. Also, I’ve got to do some fast figuring. Funny looking little people, aren’t they? Jerky movements and pipsqueak voices. They think I’m the Creator of the universal.”
“I should let them see me,” Mishi smiled. “They’d think I’m the Mother of Creation, but somehow, they are so little and have such small brains that it doesn’t really matter to me what they think.”
“Maybe not,” Ramone said, “but we’re going to have to put a hundred thousand of them to work for their whole lifetime, so we’d better place their feelings at the top of the list in importance.”
Mishi yawned.
“If you don’t mind, Ramone,” she said, “I think I’ll go into one of the sleeping locks and put it on nonstasis, so that the few years it takes you will go by in the few hours I nap.”
Ramone hesitated for the barest instant, then shrugged his shoulders.
“Go ahead,” he agreed indifferently, turning away from her.
“Oh don’t be that way,” Mishi said, irritated. “How do you expect me to feel? Here I go out for an evening’s ride in the sky with a new boyfriend who’s proud of his new second hand space job, only to have him strip the hyperdrive while we’re light years from home. If I don’t lose my job, I’ll at least have a couple of days lopped off my vacation time.”
“How do I expect you to feel?” Ramone echoed. “That is assuming that I care. Perhaps I did, but not any more. Frankly, I’m glad I stripped the hyperdrive. If I hadn’t, I might never have seen you as you really are until I married you.”
“Married me!” Mishi grabbed at the words. “The utter conceit of the man I When I marry, it will be to a man who has the ability to go out in the world and conquer it. It won’t be a pantywaist who has to take a clerk’s job and save his pennies until he can buy a real man’s cast off pleasure ship, antiquated at that. I’ll bet the used ship depot gave you a special buy on it, because no one else would take it at any price.”
Ramone flushed a deep red, angry because she had hit the bullseye. He had gotten a very special buy, and it was one that they had wanted to get rid of. The reason was that new regulating laws were coming in which would require all ships being sold by used ship dealers to have the latest safety devices. Privately owned ships wouldn’t come under that regulation.
But the ship itself was a honey. It had only one owner, and he had left it in the hangar more than he had used it. Its power units were only one tenth of a per cent exhausted. It would take plenty of power to throw out the type of stasis field—antistasis, to be exact—that would be required.
Mishi was glaring at him contemptuously.
“Oh shut up and go to bed,” Ramone said.
“You—you—!” Mishi took three quick steps toward him. Her hand flashed out and slapped Ramone, leaving a red imprint of her fingers.
For a long second he stared at her, a hurt look in his eyes. Then, abruptly, the hurt look was replaced by an assured amusement, and a strange confidence came over him.
He reached out and took her right wrist, twisting it sharply, forcing her to turn to avoid pain as he bent it. He applied pressure on it until she was half bent over. Then he pushed her over to a seat.
He sat down and pulled her arm until she lay across his lap.
“You asked for it, baby,” he murmured happily as he brought the flat of his hand down in a succession of stinging slaps, whose sound almost equaled Mishi’s cries of outraged protest at the indignity.
Her angry shouting changed to pleading by the dozenth blow, and to undisguised bawling by the two dozenth, and to a mixture of weeping and coaxing by the thirtieth. At the twentieth sharp slap on the target he had released her doubled up arm so she could use both hands to rub her eyes. When he stopped spanking her, she continued to lie there, weeping miserably.
With a satisfied grin on his face, Ramone turned away and bent over the controls. Behind him, Mishi got swiftly and silently to her feet. With all the strength she could muster, she placed a deftly-aimed kick where she thought it would do most good and stalked off for her nap.
The guide book gave directions for almost everything. It said that on anti-stasis, where everything within the field was speeded up, drouth would result. The normal flow of a river for twenty-four hours would stretch for the years that equaled that twenty-four hours. The same went for rainfall.
The guide book said that in building any call for help, the sense of irresponsibility of native creatures of semi-intelligence must be taken into account. The structure must be given some special meaning to them. Its parts must be large enough so they couldn’t tear it down or cart off its parts. It must tie in with their future closely so that it would become a mystery down through their history but become known all over elsewhere, so that any chance visitor would immediately find out about it and recognize it for what it was.
The guide book gave the equations for prophecying the life curves of any semi-savage civilization that was governed by chance. Such races kept inadequate records, and didn’t comprehend the nature of the forces affecting their mass thought. They didn’t even suspect that much of thought arises from the action of longwave radiation on the cells of the cortex. Such radiation bathes a planet according to cycles, and is shot down by reflection and re-radiation from nearby stellar cold bodies such as moons and sister planets in a solar system. The result—rise to waves of fevered, warlike impulses, to mass migrations, to intellectualism in the masses, to race interbreeding, to a large number of upsurging trends in the historical trends of the total race. Similar radiations in localized spots give rise to many of the characteristics of the peoples dwelling there, so that even peoples of all types and from all places, when gathered into a new place, soon exhibit a predictable national unity of spirit and tendency.
Ramone spent long hours studying all this in the guide book, and further long hours at the telescope, using the automatic navigator. The latter was used to isolate and study the various bodies in the system of moons and planets around the sun of the planet he had landed on. Finally he had a complete picture of all the forces controlling the race of quick darting, small people that had developed on this world. Further, by applying pure mathematics, he arrived at a comprehensive grasp of the current state of all the little people everywhere on the globe.
He finished his study as the first rays of the sun of this world rose above the horizon. Tired but satisfied, he stood up and went to the radar screen to see what was going on outside. There were more of the little people.
It was time to start things. He went back to the dashboard and started the stasis held, building it up until it extended hundreds of miles. Its outer reaches would fade gradually enough so that any living thing entering or leaving the area of the field wouldn’t notice much change.
There would be many things that would create legends of strange doings, however. A person from some village outside the stasis field might enter the field for a long visit—and return to his native village to find that he’d been gone only a few hours. Someone from inside the field might leave its area for a day or two rod return to the place he had left and find he had been gone for years.
Inside the stasis field the sun would take years to rise high in the heavens, and years in its slow fall to the opposite horizon. During those years the signal pile would be built. Hundreds of thousands of the little people would work long hours at the task of building it, starting now as young men, and growing old before it’s completion.
Ramone went back to the view-screen and studied the strange little people. Their life span would be quite short in all probability. Most of their beliefs would center around personified natural mysteries and the fulfillment of desires, some of which he could satisfy directly, while others he would just have to promise fulfillment. It wouldn’t do any harm, because it would give them something greater than themselves to look up to.
But Ramone knew he was dealing with much more than the mere handful of humanity in this small area of the globe. He was dealing with them—and their descendents for thousands of years to come. The massive beacon that would signal his presence to any ship that landed on this globe, and would tell its occupants that there was a stranded ship here that needed repairs, would have its effect on those descendants of this race of small people.
The very mystery of its existence would intrigue them, generation after generation. Their students would come to ponder over it, to wonder how their ancestors could have constructed it, to be amazed over the astronomical knowledge incorporated into its construction. This was the infallible knowledge of prophecy that enabled its designers to know what would happen a thousand years in the future, two thousand, and even three thousand years, etching that future history in imperishable stone.
He would have to work with them wearing his spacesuit in order to maintain proper atmospheric pressure. Since his muscles were accustomed to several times the gravity of this world, he would be a giant, radiant god, carrying the massive blocks of stone from the quarries to the base of the beacon. There thousands of skilled stonemasons would plane them down to the last fraction of an inch to fit them into their proper place in the edifice.
Ramone slipped into his spacesuit and left the ship to begin his work.
The huge ship appeared suddenly in the sky far above. It was there for a moment, then faded from view, only to re-appear in the same spot a moment later and remain in view. It sank slowly toward the giant pyramidal structure rising from the baked, flat terrain, and the ship resting on the ground a hundred yards from it.
The man sitting at the dashboard studied the large area of fertile ground, stretching almost from horizon to horizon, and frowned darkly, shaking his head.
He set his ship down near the one already there, put on his spacesuit, and left the ship. As his feet touched the atom-sterilized soil, another figure appeared from the other ship, hurrying forward to meet him.
Ramone hurried forward, but slowed his pace a little as he saw who his rescuer was. It was a space patrol officer, and there was a stern expression on his face that boded no good.
“H-hi, officer,” he said with a forced smile. “I’m glad you found my beacon and came. My hyperdrive burned out—”
“More than that burned out,” the space officer interrupted him. “Your brains did too—if you had any to start with. Do you know what you’ve done? Do you?”
“Why—why . . .” Ramone stammered.
“The trouble with you private citizens that get stuck away from space-drive distance of a service station is that you don’t consider all the factors of what you do.”
“What did I overlook?” Ramone asked. “I followed all the instructions in the guide book on dealing with natives and building a beacon. You found me all right. . .”
“See all that nice green stuff?” the officer said, waving his arm in a semicircle. “Looks nice, doesn’t it. Thousands of square miles of farms, an agrarian population. The only thing wrong with it is that when you placed it all in a stasis field you created a curvature that lifted the whole area just high enough so that the streams feeding it found new channels.”
“You mean this all became desert?” Ramone asked.
“That’s right,” the officer said with exaggerated calm. “With the powers invested in me by the Supreme Council I’m impounding your spaceship and taking your driver’s license away until you equip your ship with an interlock on the spacedrive-hyper-drive complex. The wrecker is on its way to pick your ship up. Anybody else on board? I’ll take you home—and stay there.”
Ramone hurried back into the ship, and emerged shortly with Mishi in tow.
The wrecker had appeared and was settling over Ramone’s ship. As Ramone and Mishi followed the officer into his ship, the wrecker settled onto the other ship and fastened its magnetic grapples.
Both ships rose slowly together, heading westward. The blue waters of the Mediterranean were to the north, and the sharp outlines of the gigantic pyramid rose behind them on its small island of scorched ground which was to soon spread and become a desert that covered all of northern Africa. The little people, who had been watching them depart, returned with religious zeal to the construction of more pyramids, inspired by the memory and inspiration of Amon Ra and Isis.
THE END
TRANSFER POINT
Anthony Boucher
It was a nasty plot Vyrko was involved in. The worst part was that he constructed it himself—and didn’t get the end right!
THERE were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the deadly yellow bands.
The great Kirth-Labbery himself had constructed the retreat and its extraordinary air-conditioning—not because his scientific genius had foreseen the coming of the poisonous element, agnoton, and the end of the human race, but because he itched.
And here Vyrko sat, methodically recording the destruction of mankind, once in a straight factual record, for the instruction of future readers (“if any,” he added wryly to himself), and again as a canto in that epic poem of Man which he never expected to complete, but for which he lived.
