Collected short fiction, p.760
Collected Short Fiction, page 760
“If it wants us—” Hawker heard his own crisp command with astonishment, as if it had come from somewhere beyond him. “Take us down!”
“Damn you bo—” Something changed Petrescu’s fury. “Sir, I’ve got ’em in the scope. Those flashing red balloons. Look for yourself!”
He reeled aside. Hawker toiled to the telescope. Behind him, as he bent to the oculars, Petrescu strained to raise a fire extinguisher. The savage gravity helped him bring it down. Hawker fell to the deck, blood gushing from his shattered skull. Petrescu rolled his body to the bottom lock and cycled it through. Reeling with nausea in the reek of blood, he lurched back to the bulkhead door.
“The bastard—dead!” he yelled at Nicola. “Pull us up!”
She seemed not to hear. Deft hands on the manual override, she was working to trim the hard-driven craft. As if unaware of any danger, she wore a smile of ecstasy. Her eyes were closed.
“Nik! Wake up! Are you blind?”
Mad winds shrieked, louder than the screaming jets. Metal shuddered. The deck pitched under him. He clung to the bulkhead, croaking at her:
“Hawker’s dead! Take us home—”
“Pete, dear, it’s you who cannot see.” Her tender voice seemed oddly clear above the bellowing. “Because Derk isn’t dead. Transformed, rather—”
“Babble enough!” His red hand seized her shoulder. “Up!”
“Too late for that.” Her exultant eyes came slowly open as she turned to look at him, but she seemed not to see the blood. “Mass-tanks dry.”
The jets coughed and died. The dragging gravity eased a little as they dropped. The spacecraft nosed up and began to tumble. Killer winds slammed them. Tom metal screeched. Petrescu slipped in Hawker’s blood, and his own head hit the bulkhead.
At the Martian station, the JOVE crew had lost contact when Explorer I dived below Almathea, but watchers at the space telescope observed an orange-red plume that whipped out of the planet a few days later, reaching almost to the orbit of that minor moon. As it recoiled into the Red Spot, signals came again.
The spacecraft was lifting out from Jupiter, its mission finished. Structural damage had been repaired; the mass-tanks were full again. Professor Peter Paul Petrescu and Dr. Nicola Zarand were safe aboard, bringing their findings home.
Aboard, Petrescu found himself sitting in the cockpit with Nicola. Though a faint ache still throbbed in the back of his head, he felt remarkably fit, and he thought the cool air around them smelled delightfully sweet and clean. The stiff brown stains drying on his hands and spaceskins puzzled him for an instant, before he recalled, with a dim bewilderment, that they were Hawker’s blood.
“We’ve bigger news for Earth, but we’ll have to break it gently.” Nicola had been sending, but she pushed the video pickup aside and turned with an impish smile for him. “News about the powers of intelligence and the shapes it can take in our infinite universe. News about Derk’s transformation—”
“Derk’s dead—” The fact was strangely hard to recall. “I . . . I killed him, Nik.”
“His body’s gone.” She nodded, happily unconcerned. “Like those bubbles that flashed and vanished. But his mind’s alive. More than ever. Picked up by that undying being and now part of it.”
“I thought—” Blankly, he stared at his brown hands. “Nik, I can’t believe—
“Neither could it.” She shrugged. “Not till it knew Rana and Hawker. Because it had no common ground, nothing to help it see us as we are. Broken, lonely bits of mind, hating and loving, dying and killing. Hawker and Rana helped it see. They’re all wiser now. Maybe we are too.”
“I—I did kill him, Nik.”
“I guess you tried, but they want us not to grieve. They hold no grudges. Believe me, Pete, they’ve told me that—speaking with Hawker’s voice, and sometimes Rana’s. They’ve rescued us and healed us, rebuilt the spacecraft, lifted us toward home.”
Still bewildered, he was shivering.
She leaned to kiss him lightly.
“From Derk,” she breathed. “With love.”
1982
A Break for Dinosaurs
Lives there a person who hasn’t marveled over his own existence? What if his father hadn’t met his mother? What if they had met but hadn’t liked each other? What if, for some reason, his father had been called away at just the wrong time, or his mother had had a headache on the very day when the sperm with his name on it was all set—and the next day some other sperm cell had been tapped for the job? With all the things that could have happened, surely the actual existence of any particular human being is an amazing longest-imaginable shot.
And might this not be true of our entire species, or genus, or order, or class? What small things and odd coincidences in Earth’s long history had to come out just so? It’s enough to give you the shuddery feeling of spiders walking on your grave-that-would-never-have-had-to-be.
His mother had been Sabrina Gunderstone. Her forebears had fought the Civil War to its tragic end, fought Comanches farther west, forged a Texas cattle empire, its banner their Longhorn brand. Hard times had come later, but he v. as to restore the Gunderstone greatness. She named him Alexander, inspired him with her own soaring dreams.
“Poppycock!” his father used to snort. Lunatic piffle!”
Jonas Jones owned three thousand acres, now easily worth a thousand an acre, of what the later Gunderstones had lost. Moving off the farm into Longhorn, he had bought the Buick dealership. Preferring common sense to high romance, he tried to steer his son into banking or the law.
In defiance of his father, Alec chose greatness. That came painfully, but his mother refused to let their dream of glory die. When he came home with a bloody nose from his first day in school, she cuddled him in her arms and promised that in time he could shame the bully.
He grew up a winner, though triumph was never easy. The kids he beat said he cheated. In high school he was too light for football. When he went out for basketball, which was big at Longhorn, the coach discovered that he was no team player. The boys who made the team called him a glory hog.
He was crying when he told his mother that.
“Never mind the little idiots,” she told him. Youve got the Gunderstone gift. In your own time, you’ll become the greatest man on Earth.”
Even that was not enough. Space was big that year, with the first satellite station beaming solar power to New Mexico and the first manned rocket halfway to Mars. When Alec was blackballed out of his father’s fraternity at Longhorn College, he and his mother saw they must seek his high destiny in space.
He bought his own telescope, took flying lessons, and signed up for space science at Longhorn under Ben Tengel, himself a sadly battered hero and now the town’s most noted citizen. Ben’s great-grandfather had been a cowhand on the Gunderstone spread. Ben was a math teacher, wasting his talents on his own crazy notions of space-time geometry.
When he was young, still whole and handsome then, he had fallen for Sabrina Gunderstone. Whatever else she felt, she must have seen him as a penniless kid, maybe fun to know but uncrowned by any glow of greatness. She chose Jonas Jones and his rich bit of her ancestral empire. Ben left Longhorn and spent the rest of his life fighting to show her how wrong she had been.
He joined the Space Force. On leave, he helped design the power satellite. Recalled to active duty during the Atomic Standoff, he was pilot of the interceptor satellite that detonated the Peace Missile two hundred kilometers short of Paris. That feat saved ten million Frenchmen and nearly killed him.
Saved by medical miracles, Ben was now half mechanical, living in pain, confined to a wheeled machine. His vision injured, he saw the world through huge crimson-glinting artificial eyes. On his better days, he was a brilliant teacher, yet Alec disliked him from the first.
The inhuman eyes, like a monster insect’s. The overwhelming hospital reek of his machine. His explosive temper on the days when nothing eased his pain. His anger, worst of all, when he accused Alec of cheating on a math test. Yet he forgave that, perhaps because of Sabrina, and he wouldn’t let Alec quit.
“Sane men don’t go to space.” His larynx gone, his voice was a wheezy whisper roaring out of a special amplifier. “If you were sane, you’d go into business with your Dad and marry Bonnie Belle and pile up maybe forty million dollars. But I’m afraid you’re afflicted with the peculiar insanity it takes.”
Bonnie Belle was far more than willing, and Alec sometimes almost tempted. His only real friend in school, she had never been turned off by his proud certainty of greatness. Suddenly, now, she had emerged from ponytail and freckles to become a long-limbed beauty, elected Miss Longhorn of the year. His father offered to give him the Buick agency if he would marry her and settle down.
Yet he kept faith with his mother and his destiny. Bonnie Belle became a hazard to his plans. In the spring semester of their freshman year at Longhorn, she got pregnant. Crying and hysterical, she said he had to marry her. There hadn’t been anybody else, and she could make him happy.
He told her he had greater goals.
That night she ran her car off the railroad overpass. Gathered up alive, she stayed in the hospital till the baby came and then gave it up for adoption. Alec never saw it, or saw her again. With a lift from Tengel, he had gone on to the Space Academy.
Another lift from Tengel got him selected for the manned mission to Jupiter, his mother was prepared to welcome him home as Longhorn’s second space hero, but he came back unannounced and early, washed out of the Jupiter crew.
The reason was never clear. He said Congress had cut funds for space research. His father hoped he had finally found a spark of common sense. His mother didn’t tell him when Bonnie Belle tried to call. His future was still uncertain when Marty Marx caught him alone, getting grimly drunk in the Westex Bar.
“Remember Doc Tengel?”
“Sure. Why?”
On his fifth whisky, Alec had to squint before he knew Marty. Never a friend, Marty had been the bully who beat him up on that first day of school and later his rival for Bonnie Belle, maybe even the rat who told Tengel he had cheated. Now an attorney in sleek business gray, he had cultivated an air of phony heartiness.
“Where’s Tengel now?”
“Long gone from here. Marty dropped his voice, with a disapproving scowl at Alec’s drink. “Set up his own space corporation to make the most of his far-out math and his old military connections. Doing right well, thanks. I’m working for him as a space-law specialist, and he’s got a job he says is tailor made for you.”
“If it’s in space—”
It was in space. That was all Marty knew, but Alec was tired of his father’s frowns and his mother’s excuses for his unheroic return. He said he wanted to look at the job. Carrying Marty’s card with his own name scrawled on it, he caught a plane to Albuquerque and found Tengel Engineering.
It was a long shed of new sheet metal, south of Central, near the Sandia Labs. A security man at the gate peered at the card and phoned for an escort. The office was a tiny cubby, walled off with raw plywood and strong with Tengel’s antiseptic pungence.
It was empty when the guard left him there. He studied the drawings of new spacecraft tacked on the plywood till he caught a fresh wave of that hospital reek and turned to find Tengel rolling in on soundless wheels to stop behind the desk, which was another naked plywood slab.
“Sit down.” Tengel’s gritty whisper crashed out of a speaker above his head. “How’s your mother?”
“Okay, I guess.”
Alec sat down, trying not to stare too hard, not to mind the odor, not to be afraid. Tengel had always been too desperately intense, too savage in his battle to exist, sunk too deeply in the secret hell behind the crimson glitter of those unreadable insect eyes. It was hard to believe that the thing in the machine could ever have been merely a man, good-looking and young, dating the lovely Sabrina Gunderstone.
“Marty got me your Space Force records.” The blast of the speaker startled him again. our failure there doesn’t matter to me—in fact, it simply proves that peculiar madness I saw in you so long ago.”
Tengel paused with that, huge eyes peering. The scarred features beneath them were thinner now, Alec thought, the lines of pain bitten deeper. But the damaged man sat straight amid his life-support devices, bleakly defiant of misfortune.
Alec tried not to squirm.
“You’ll do.” The strange head nodded abruptly. “If you want the mission. Antipathy to teamwork is no handicap. You’ll be completely on your own. The odds are probably heavily against you, but with such stakes that can’t matter. You’re the one man I know with the special lunacy to pull it off. Do that, and you’ll go down in history as the man who saved the planet.”
The red eyes searched him again, cold as conscience. “Want the chance?”
“I think—I do!” Suddenly, Alec didn’t mind the eyes or the odor. “What’s the job?”
“Do you know what happened to the dinosaurs?”
“I don’t.” Alec had never cared much for nitty-gritty science. “Does it matter?”
“The dinosaurs died.” His scar-stiffened lips were hardly moving, and that metallic thunder seemed the voice of the machine itself. “Seventy million years ago they owned the Earth. Ruled the land, the air, the seas. Our own ancestors, the primitive mammals, were most of them tiny ratlike things, scrambling to survive in any odd ecological niche they could find.
“Till the dinosaurs were killed.
“All at once, by the record of the rocks. Big and little. Everywhere. It was that ancient disaster that opened the Earth to the mammals. If it hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be here. The cause of the kill-off has been a tantalizing riddle, but we know the answer now.
“An asteroid. Big enough. Struck some ocean, by the geologic evidence. Tidal waves swept the planet. Steam from the blast condensed into scalding floods. Dust from the impact filled the atmosphere, so thick and deep no light got through. A dreadful night that had no dawn, colder year by year. Ice and snow covered continents that had been tropical; oceans froze over.
“When the Sun came back, Earth was almost dead. Two thirds of the old species suddenly extinct. All the dinosaurs. Our own forebears were lucky enough to survive.” For emphasis, he lifted his stiff mechanical claw. “It was that asteroid that allowed the evolution of mankind.”
Alec sat listening, blankly bewildered.
“Fact.” The monstrous head nodded, the raspy whisper falling. “No longer in question. All the planets, you’ll recall, were formed by colliding asteroids—look at the craters on Mars or the Moon. They still strike the Earth—look in Arizona.
The Space Force has picked up another on the way.”
Tengel stopped. Relaxed for an instant, his withered features reflected an unrelieved and absolute despair. In the ringing stillness, Alec wondered if the long pain had overwhelmed his sanity.
“You’re stunned, of course.” He waved the claw again, trying perhaps to seem casual. “The object is still beyond the range of common telescopes. We found it in the course of testing a sophisticated missile detector.
“That was three years ago. We’ve spent them mounting an effort to save the planet. A long-range spacecraft, armed with a special nuclear device. Powerful enough, I believe, to divert the object from earth. Placing that on target is your mission—if you want to undertake it.”
Crimson glints twinkled across those multiple lenses, as Tengel cocked his head inquiringly. Alec shivered, drawing proudly more erect.
“Thank you, sir!” he breathed. “I’ve been trained, and I’ll risk anything. It’s the chance—the break I’ve lived for.”
The craft was ready for him, at a Space Force base on the Moon. Space Force officers in mufti briefed him on the missile and the drive. One of them gave him a dried rabbit’s foot. A catapult tossed him into space. Rockets lifted him to orbit. Speaking with Tengel’s raucous whisper, the flight computer told him when to shift to the long-range drive.
An engineering application of Tengel’s radial math, its principles were secret, but he wouldn’t need to know them. The computer would take him to their vital rendezvous and target the missile for him. All he had to do was follow Tengel’s canned commands.
At the instant of shift, the craft lurched giddily. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” had been booming out of the radio, beamed after him as a parting gift from the base commander, but that went off. Testing the receiver, he could hear nothing at all.
He flew on through total signal silence, troubled at first but then exhilarated. Face to face at last with his tremendous destiny, he felt himself its equal, happy that Tengel had chosen him to challenge extraordinary peril and claim extraordinary glory. The magnificent thing was his to do. His alone!
Far out beyond Mars, the asteroid met him. A misshapen little moon, scarred with craters of its own, bright-dusted with frosts unthawed through untold time. The flight computer brought him into place, framed its jagged image in the target scope. Tengel’s recorded whisper told him when to hit the red-glowing button.
That eerie stillness never broken, he watched the impact. The nuclear flash, painful even through the filtered lenses.
The exploding incandescent bubble, white-hot at first, slowly cooling, reddening, fading. The object crumbling very deliberately into separating fragments that he knew would miss the Earth.
At last, his destiny done!
Still in silence except for Tengel’s occasional commands, the computer brought him home, back at last into orbit near the Moon. He got its image in the scope and found its cratered face strangely changed. Bright green disks, laid out in long neat rows across the level maria. Identical silvery spires towering out of the identical disks, needle points tipped with hot red radiance.
Dazed, he obeyed the command to shift out of the long-range drive. The radio came on again, but not with the “Ride of the Valkyries” or any other sound of triumph. What he heard was a shattering cacophany of squalls and grunts and feral screams.
