The good old stuff, p.9
The Good Old Stuff, page 9
I think Grimp’s the kind we can use.”
“He’s all right,” the pony agreed absently. “A bit murderous, though, like most of you .... “
“He’ll grow out of it!” Grandma said, a little annoyedly, for the subject of human aggressiveness was one she and the pony argued about frequently.
“You can’t hurry developments like that along too much. All of Noorhut should grow out of that stage, as a people, in another few hundred years.
They’re about at the turning-point right now—” Their heads came up together, then, as something very much like a big, dark rag of leather came fluttering up from the hollow and hung in the dark air above them.
The representatives of the opposing powers that were meeting on Noorhut that night took quiet stock of one another for a moment.
The Halpa was about six foot long and two wide, and considerably less than an inch thick. It held its position in the air with a steady, rippling motion, like a bat the size of a man. Then, suddenly, it extended itself with a snap, growing taut as a curved sail.
The pony snorted involuntarily. The apparently featureless shape in the air turned towards it and drifted a few inches closer. When nothing more happened, it turned again and fluttered quietly back down into the hollow.
“Could it tell I was scared?” the pony asked uneasily.
“You reacted just right,” Grandma said soothingly. “Startled suspicion at first, and then just curiosity, and then another start when it made that jump.
It’s about what they’d expect from creatures that would be hanging around the hollow now. We’re like cows to them. They can’t tell what things are by their looks, like we do—” But her tone was thoughtful, and she was more shaken than she would have cared to let the pony notice. There had been something indescribably menacing and self-assured in the Halpa’s gesture. Almost certainly, it had only been trying to draw a reaction of hostile intelligence from them, probing, perhaps, for the presence of weapons that might be dangerous to its kind.
But there was a chance—a tiny but appalling chance—that the things had developed some drastically new form of attack since their last breakthrough, and that they already were in control of the situation ....
In which case, neither Grimp nor anyone else on Noorhut would be doing any more growing-up after tomorrow.
Each of the eleven hundred and seventeen planets that had been lost to the Halpa so far still traced a fiery, forbidding orbit through space—torn back from the invaders only at the cost of depriving it, by humanity’s own weapons, of the conditions any known form of life could tolerate.
The possibility that this might also be Noorhut’s future had loomed as an ugly enormity before her for the past four years. But of the nearly half a hundred worlds which the Halpa were found to be investigating through their detector-globes as possible invasion points for this period, Noorhut finally had been selected by Headquarters as the one where local conditions were most suited to meet them successfully. And that meant in a manner which must include the destruction of their only real invasion weapon, the fabulous and mysterious Halpa transmitter.
Capable as they undoubtedly were, they had shown in the past that they were able or willing to employ only one of those instruments for each period of attack. Destroying the transmitter meant therefore t hat humanity would gain a few more centuries to figure out a way to get back at the Halpa before a new attempt was made.
So on all planets but Noorhut the detector-globes had been encouraged carefully to send back reports of a dangerously alert and well-armed population. On Noorhut, however, they had been soothed along. and just as her home-planet had been chosen as the most favorable point of encounter, so was Erisa Wannattel herself selected as the agent most suited to represent humanity’s forces under the conditions that existed there.
Grandma sighed gently and reminded herself again that Headquarters was as unlikely to miscalculate the overall probability of success as it was to select the wrong person to achieve it. There was only the tiniest, the most theoretical, of chances that so something might go wrong and that she would end her long career with the blundering murder of her own homeworld.
But there was that chance.
“There seem to be more down there every minute!” the pony was saying.
Grandma drew a deep breath.
“Must be several thousand by now,” she acknowledged. “It’s getting near breakthrough time, all right, but those are only the advance forces.” She added, “Do you notice anything like a glow of light down there, towards the center?”
The pony stared a moment. “Yes,” it said. “But I would have thought that was way under the red for you. Can you see it?”
“No,” said Grandma. “I get a kind of feeling, like heat. That’s the transmitter beginning to come through. I think we’ve got them!” The pony shifted its bulk slowly from side to side. “Yes,” it said resignedly, “or they’ve got us.”
“Don’t think about that,” Grandma ordered sharply and clamped one more mental lock shut on the foggy, dark terrors that were curling and writhing under her conscious thoughts, threatening to emerge at the last moment and paralyze her actions.
She had opened her black bag and was unhurriedly fitting together something composed of a few pieces of wood and wire, and a rather heavy, stiff spring ....
“Just be ready,” she added.
“I’ve been ready for an hour,” said the pony, shuffling its feet unhappily. They did no more talking after that. All the valley had become quiet about them. But slowly the hollow below was filling up with a black, stirring, slithering ride. Bits of it fluttered up now and then like strips of black smoke, hovered a few yards above the mass and settled again.
Suddenly, down in the center of the hollow, there was something else.
The pony had seen it first, Grandma Wannattel realized. It was staring in that direction for almost a minute before she grew able to distinguish something that might have been a group of graceful miniatures spires. Semi-transparent in the darkness, four small domes showed at the corners, with a larger one in the center. The central one was about twenty feet high and very slender.
The whole structure began to solidify swiftly ....
The Halpa Transmitter’s appearance of crystalline slightness was perhaps the most mind-chilling thing about it. For it brought instantly a jarring sense of what must be black distance beyond all distances, reaching back unimaginably to its place of origin. In that unknown somewhere, a prodigiously talented and determined race of beings had labored for human centuries to prepare and point some stupendous gun. and were able then to bridge the vast interval with nothing more substantial than this dark sliver of glass that had come to rest suddenly in the valley of the Wend.
But, of course, the Transmitter was all that was needed; its deadly poison lay in a sluggish, almost inert mass about it. Within minutes from now, it would waken to life, as similar transmitters had wakened on other nights on those lost and burning world s. And in much less than minutes after that, the Halpa invaders would be hurled by their slender machine to every surface section of Noorhut—no longer inert, but quickened into a ravening, almost indestructible form of vampiric life, dividing and sub-dividing in its incredibly swift cycle of reproduction, fastening to feed anew, growing and dividing again-Spreading, at that stage, much more swiftly than it could be exterminated by anything but the ultimate weapons!
The pony stirred suddenly, and she felt the wave of panic roll up in it. “It’s the Transmitter, all right,” Grandma’s thought reached it quickly. “We’ve had two descriptions of it before. But we can’t be sure it’s here until it begins to charge itself. Then it lights up—first at the edges, and then at the center. Five seconds after the central spire lights up, it will be energized too much to let them pull it back again. At least, they couldn’t pull it back after that, the last time they were observed.
And then we’d better be ready—” The pony had been told all that before. But as it listened it was quieting down again.
“And you’re going to go on sleeping!” Grandma Wannattel’s thought told Grimp next. “No matter what you hear or what happens, you’ll sleep on and know nothing at all any more until I wake you up .... “ Light surged up suddenly in the Transmitter—first into the four outer spires, and an instant later into the big central one, in a sullen red glow. It lit the hollow with a smoky glare. The pony took two startled steps backwards.
“Five seconds to go!” whispered Grandma’s thought. She reached into her black bag again and took out a small plastic ball. It reflected the light from the hollow in dull crimson gleamings. She let it slip down carefully inside the shaftlike frame of the gadget she had put together of wood and wire. It clicked into place there against one end of the compressed spring.
Down below, they lay now in a blanket fifteen feet thick over the wet ground, like big, black, water-sogged leaves swept up in circular piles about the edges of the hollow. The tops and sides of the piles were stirring and shivering and beginning to slid e down toward the Transmitter.
“... five, and go!” Grandma said aloud. She raised the wooden catapult to her shoulder.
The pony shook its blunt-horned head violently from side to side, made a strangled, bawling sound, surged forward and plunged down the steep side of the hollow in a thundering rush.
Grandma aimed carefully and let go.
The blanket of dead-leaf things was lifting into the air ahead of the pony’s ground-shaking approach in a weightless, silent swirl of darkness which instantly blotted both the glowing Transmitter and the pony’s shape from sight. The pony roared once as the blackness closed over it. A second later, there was a crash like the shattering of a hundred-foot mirror—and at approximately the same moment, Grandma’s plastic ball exploded somewhere in the center of the swirling swarm.
Cascading fountains of white fire filled the whole of the hollow.
Within the fire, a dense mass of shapes fluttered and writhed frenziedly like burning rags. From down where the fire boiled fiercest rose continued sounds of brittle substances suffering enormous violence. The pony was trampling the ruined Transmitter, making sure of its destruction.
“Better get out of it!” Grandma shouted anxiously. “What’s left of that will all melt now anyway!”
She didn’t know whether it heard her or not. But a few seconds later, it came pounding up the side of the hollow again. Blazing from nose to rump, it tramped past Grandma, plunged through the meadow behind her, shedding white sheets of fire that exploded the marsh grass in its tracks, and hurled itself headlong into the pond it had selected previously. There was a great splash, accompanied by sharp hissing noises. Pond and pony vanished together under billowing clouds of steam.
“That was pretty hot!” its thought came to Grandma.
She drew a deep breath.
“Hot as anything that ever came out of a volcano!” she affirmed. “If you’d played around in it much longer, you’d have fixed up the village with roasts for a year.”
I’ll just stay here for a while, till I’ve cooled off a bit,” said the pony. Grandma found something strangling her then, and discovered it was the lortel’s tail. She unwound it carefully. But the lortel promptly reanchored itself with all four hands in her hair. She decided to leave it there. It seemed badly upset.
Grimp, however, slept on. It was going to take a little maneuvering to get him back into the village undetected before morning, but she would figure that out by and by. A steady flow of cool night-air was being drawn past them into the hollow now and rising out of it again in boiling, vertical columns of invisible heat. At the bottom of the deluxe blaze she’d lit down there, things still seemed to be moving about—but very slowly. The Halpa were tough organisms, all right, though not nearly so tough, when you heated them up with a really good incendiary, as were the natives of Treebel.
She would have to make a final check of the hollow around dawn, of course, when the ground should have cooled off enough to permit it—but her century’s phase of the Halpa War did seem to be over. The defensive part of it, at any rate-Wet, munching sounds from the pond indicated the pony felt comfortable enough by now to take an interest in the parboiled vegetation it found floating around it. Everything had turned out all right.
So she settled down carefully on her back in the long marsh grass without disturbing Grimp’s position too much, and just let herself faint for a while.
By sunrise, Grandma Wannattel’s patent-medicine trailer was nine miles from the village and rolling steadily southwards up the valley road through the woods. As usual, she was departing under a cloud.
Grimp and the policeman had showed up early to warn her. The Guardian was making use of the night’s various unprecedented disturbances to press through a vote on a Public Menace charge against Grandma in the village; and since everybody still felt rather excited and upset, he had a good chance just now of getting a majority.
Grimp had accompanied her far enough to explain that this state of affairs wasn’t going to be permanent. He had it all worked out.
Runny’s new immunity to hay-fever had brought him and the pretty Veld-lit to a fresh understanding overnight; they were going to get married five weeks from now. As a married man, Runny would then be eligible for the post of Village Guardian at the harvest elections—and between Grimp’s cousins and Vellit’s cousins, Runny’s backers would just about control the vote. So when Grandma got around to visiting the valley again next summer, she needn’t worry any more about police interference or official disapproval ....
Grandma had nodded approvingly. That was about the kind of neighborhood politics she’d begun to play herself at Grimp’s age. She was pretty sure by now that Grimp was the one who eventually would become her successor, and the guardian not only of Noorhut and the star-system to which Noorhut belonged, but of a good many other star-systems besides. With careful schooling, he ought to be just about ready for the job by the time she was willing, finally, to retire.
An hour after he had started back to the farm, looking suddenly a little forlorn, the trailer swung off the valley road into a narrow forest path. Here the pony lengthened its stride, and less than five minutes later they entered a curving ravine, at the far end of which lay something that Grimp would have recognized Instantly, from his one visit to the nearest port city, as a small spaceship.
A large round lock opened soundlessly in its side as they approached.
The pony came to a stop. Grandma got down from the driver’s seat and unhitched it. The pony walked into the lock, and the trailer picked its wheels off the ground and floated in after it. Grandma Wannattel walked in last, and the lock closed quietly on her heels.
The ship lay still a moment longer. Then it was suddenly gone. Dead leaves went dancing for a while about the ravine, disturbed by the breeze of its departure.
In a place very far away—so far that neither Grimp nor his parents nor anyone in the village except the schoolteacher had ever heard of it—a set of instruments began signalling for attention. Somebody answered them.
Grandma’s voice announced distinctly: “This is Zone Agent Wannattel’s report of the successful conclusion of the Halpa operation on Noorhut—” High above Noorhut’s skies, eight great ships swung instantly out of their watchful orbits about the planet and flashed off again into the blackness of the boundless space that was their sea and their home.
The Galton Whistle
L. Sprague de Camp
L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF and fantasy. Much of the luster of the “Golden Age” of Astounding during the late ‘30s and the ‘40s is due to the presence in those pages of de Camp, along with his great contemporaries Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt. At the same time, for Astounding’s sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, he helped to create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing—funny, whimsical, and irreverent—of which he is still the ost prominent practitioner. (DeCamp’s stories for Unknown are among the best short fantasies ever written, and include such classics as “The Wheels of If,” “Nothing in the Rules,” “The Hardwood Pile,” and—written in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt—the famous “Harold Shea” stories that would later be collected as The Complete Enchanter.) In science fiction, he is the author of Lest Darkness Fall, in my opinion one of the three or four best Alternate Worlds novels ever written (it was reprinted in 1996, by Baen Books, bound in a package with David Drake’s To Bring the Light), as well as the at-the-time highly controversial novel (although it now looks rather tame) Rogue Queen, and a body of expertly-crafted short fiction such as “Judgment Day,” “Divide and Rule,” “A Gun for Dinosaur,” and “Aristotle and the Gun.”
DeCamp may be primarily known today as a humorist, perhaps best remembered for the Unknown stories and the “Howard Shea” saga, but everything he writes has a strong element of fast-paced adventure to it—just as even the most headlong and swashbuckling of his adventure tales contains a generous portion of wry humor. His greatest contribution to the evolution of the Space Opera is the “Viagens Interplanetarias”—which means “interplanetary tours” in Portuguese, the language of the dominant political and economic power of de Camps future Earth, Brazil—sequence of stories and novels (sometimes also referred to as the “Krishna” series, after the name of the alien planet on which many of them take place), detailing the intricate and sometimes contentious interrelations that develop between Earthmen and the intelligent native species who inhabit the nearby regions of space.
Intelligence is a quality that suffuses every de Camp story, just as surely as does humor—de Camp’s Space Opera is just smarter than that of most of his contemporaries: you can see that a very shrewd mind is working out the background details and structure of what such an interstellar society would be like, and the consequences that would inevitably result, insisting on logic, rigor, and consistency even within the framework of the Interplanetary Swashbuckler (there’s no such thing as Faster Than Light travel in the Viagens universe, for instance—and that generates some inevitable and surprising consequences that few other authors writing a Space Adventure tale would have bothered to deal with ...). T he intelligence of the conceptualization that went into the background of the Viagens stories shows up everywhere, not least in de Camp’s prediction that Brazil would be the dominant power on Earth by the middle of the 21st Century, the old superpowers having by then exhausted and bankrupted themselves—a prediction considered to be wild and extravagantly unlikely when de Camp made it back in the ‘50s, but one which seems increasingly credible these days, and one which makes the Viagens stories still look remarkably contemporary, in spite of being almost half a century old. Nor, in spite of all the intellectual rigor that went into them, are they the least bit solemn or slow—instead, they remain among the most colorful and vivid stories of Interplanetary Adventure ever written: as the sly and suspenseful story that follows will amply demonstrate.
