Amazing Vignettes Read online

  She went in without saying anything, picked up Jake’s gun and then went to the Big Guy. That was my error—almost. As she reached for his holstered pistol his arms came down around her, clasping her to him. His own pistol was in his hand in an instant. “I’ll kill her,” he said, “just as sure as you move an inch. Drop that burp gun.”

  I let the gun slide down but at the same time my right hand, hidden by the wall, slipped out my automatic. When he saw the gun disappear, Big Guy made a fatal mistake. Still holding the girl, he walked toward the window. He had his gun on me and I could almost see his trigger finger tighten. Before he could fire, my automatic was over the ledge and I had sent three shots into him before he fell to the floor.

  I stepped into the room and put an arm around the girl. She was sobbing softly? “Don’t worry,” I said, “we’re going away. I’m going south, to South America. Maybe some people are left. Want to come along?”

  She didn’t answer but she pressed closer to me. . . .

  Routine Patrol

  Ralph Cox

  AN AMAZING VIGNETTE

  ANOTHER dyne—and that was it. We were matched to Bomb D-4. I opened the firing circuits and we were free. Ten meters outside the port I could see the bulky sphere that was D-4 perfectly paralleling us, matched to a centimeter per second’s velocity. I’d watch it from now ow and correct only occasionally.

  “It’s all yours, Jack,” I said to Sublieutenant Frisby. “Give it the once-over.” He locked his face-plate and his voice came over the speaker.

  “Right, Hank. First one of the season. Be back pronto.”

  He stepped into the tiny airlock of the patrol craft and a minute later he appeared to me through the port, riding in a straight line punched by a slight blast from his shoulder rockets. He mounted Bomb D-4 and opened the hatch, into which he disappeared a second later.

  We were on routine duty checking the U.N.’s “Bomb umbrella.” We’d both had two months on Terra and it had felt good to get back to the Satellite and then on patrol. Twenty-four atomic bombs blanket Earth with an ominous menace. Silently and perpetually they circle in their orbits, a constant reminder to any Terran aggressor nation that destruction complete could be visited from the skies at one word from the U.N. The triggers on the satellite would work, and minutes later, as the Bombs rocketed Earthward—blooey!—the cities of the aggressor would simply vanish. We of the Satellite were part of the U.N. patrol, our duty to check the bombs constantly to see that they were in perfect operating condition.

  I glanced out the port and looked wonderingly at the innocent sphere which hovered such a short distance away. Who would imagine at a casual glance that a bubble of aluminum like that would house eight hundred pounds of U-238? It seemed so harmless.

  A few minutes later Jack’s body appeared from the hatch, and he carelessly closed it and made for our patrol ship. I was surprised at his heedless haste. I was sure he hadn’t pulled down the dogs on the hatch cover. I’d have to pull rank on him, I thought humorously. You don’t say phrases like “sacred trust”, but you think them.

  Jack came into the ship and removed his face-plate. His face was flushed.

  “Damn!” he said. “Hank, there’s trouble brewing. That thing is as dead as a dodo.”

  “Dead?” I echoed pointlessly, “What . .?”

  “The circuits are a mass of junk,” he cut in. “Somebody scrambled that baby beyond recognition. You might as well have eight hundred pounds of lead floating around in space for all the power it’s got. Some joker went to work on it with a heat beam and there’s nothing in the circuits but fused copper and aluminum.”

  “Brother!” I whistled. “We’d better check D-5 right away.”

  Jack put through a call to the Satellite but there was no answer. I thought it funny, but Jack figured the circuits must be overloaded.

  Ten minutes later we’d matched velocity with Bomb D-5 and this time I went aboard it. It too was a simple mass of metal, every wire in the thing fused beyond any repair short of a complete rebuilding at the Satellite. Something was up!

  Immediately we tried to radio the Satellite and again got no answer.

  “Jack, this is emergency,” I said. “The hell with the patrol. I’ll bet twenty unies every single Bomb of the umbrella has been disarmed. This calls for action. Let’s raise the Satellite!”

  I set the patrol craft on automatic, picking a suitable orbit, and we went.

  Jack glanced through the port at the glistening bulk of Earth thirty thousand miles beneath us. He shook his head.

  “Hank, I don’t like this one bit. Something’s radically wrong. And I’ll guarantee the Sovs are at the bottom of it.”

  “You could be right,” I agreed. “The U.N. refused them Satellite construction rights only two weeks ago. And they’re spoiling for trouble. And as it stands right now nobody is going to plant a Uranium bomb on Moscow or Stalingrad. We know that!”

  “Hank?” Jack looked at me questioningly. “Are we making sense? We’re going back to the Satellite. How do we know the Sovs haven’t grabbed it? They must have disarmed the whole lot of Bombs. Surely they’ve got a rocket at the Satellite. They wouldn’t take a chance on Bomb launchings from it!”

  “That makes sense,” I agreed. I cut the ship from automatic and put it on manual. “We’ll creep up on it tangentially. It’s hard to bring a projector or a launcher to bear from that position. You know that from Satellite Defense exercises. If they’ve grabbed the Satellite, maybe we can pull some sort of a coup ourselves.”

  In twenty minutes the Satellite, like a huge spoked wheel, loomed visibly before us. We were so close to its plane that, as I cut down toward it, it took on the appearance of a line. From the landing hub, though, we could clearly see two craft moored, both long, slim rockets with no markings. We didn’t need lessons to know what they were! They were Sovs, if I’ve ever seen a Sov rocket!

  I cut our velocity and we floated free. Certainly radar couldn’t have failed to pick us up. And it hadn’t.

  “Bomb Patrol No. 3.” A strange voice came over the speaker. “Report in Lock 2 at once. Emergency condition red!”

  There was a condition red, all right, I thought. And how red!

  We didn’t do anything. The order was repeated. Again we did nothing.

  “Come in at once or face insubordination charges,” the voice added. That was a joke. We’d face a gun, a shooting gun.

  “Hey, Hank,” Jack jostled me. “I’ve got it. The Satellite rockets are jammed too. It must have been sabotaged so the Sovs could board without a fight. Get it?”

  “And how. You’re right, Jack. All they can do is get one of their rockets in action. Brother, this is where we have fun!” Even as we talked, we caught a glimpse of figures, space-suited, about the nearer rocket. They weren’t prepared for the return of a Patrol ship. They’d assumed we’d continue our rounds of the disabled Bombs before we came back. Well, that was their mistake.

  “O.K.,” Jack, let’s take ’em.”

  I gave her just a few dynes and we started to move toward the rocket, which was already lifting her nose from the Number 2 lock.

  Jack sat back of the forty-millimeter launcher. He opened the gun-lock and set a rocket in it gently. He flipped the arming stud, and glued his eye to the optical sight.

  “Where, Hank?” Should I put it amidships?”

  “Uh-uh,” I negated. “Plant one right on the tubes. We want this baby out of action.”

  He touched the trigger. A barely audible hiss replied. A streak of light lanced toward the enemy rocket. Then bang!—and her stern tubes vanished into crumpled sheet metal. She was out of commission.

  Hardly hesitating, Jack did the same thing to the Number 2 rocket, and both of the helpless craft floated like strange metal flowers around the central hub of the Satellite.

  A few ineffectual small-size rockets were launched at us from hastily rigged firing ports at the tangential sides of the Satellite, but they might as well have been firing at
a fast-flying bee. They didn’t even come near.

  Meanwhile Jack had put the transmitter on pulse, and he’d gotten, with this jury rig, a response from the Lunar station. Rockets were on the way.

  There was one more Sov rocket, returning from the completion of its Bomb destruction survey, and it almost got us. Jack clipped it nastily a couple of times with forty-millimeter rockets and it too lay quiet, but not before it had punched us once. We had to wait for the Lunar pickups to get us because our controls were damaged.

  By then it was anticlimactic. The Sovs who controlled the Satellite were helpless to take any action. Eight big boys from Luna rotated around the Satellite and accepted the surrender. It went off smoothly, except for a few fanatics, and they were ventilated in a hurry with ordinary booster rifles.

  We later learned that the Sovs had opened up a ground campaign fearlessly launched, knowing that the deadly Bombs overhead couldn’t damage their cities, but the Lunar boys jury-rigged one and dumped it squarely on Stalingrad. That stopped the incipient holocaust in a hurry! It doesn’t pay to play around with the boys who handle the Satellite and the Bombs—the Sovs learned the hard way. They say the U.N. plans a special decoration for us—and we’re not complaining. But we’re hanging onto the Bomb—check routine—it’s not as dull a life as you might think!

  Escape to Eternity

  Charles Recour

  An “Amazing” Vignette

  THAN PUT down the metal bowl and stretched. A feeling of well-being crept over him. His work Was done and now he could doze until the next work period. He put his six-foot length of hardened muscle into a sleeping chamber and prepared to relax. His body felt clean and warm from the baths and, naked except for the loin cloth, he was ready to retire from the cares of the day. Sometimes he thought—and that was bad. The Arachnida did not want Persons to think—just to work and eat and sleep and consciously felt they were right, though he never mentioned to Spiros, his master, that there were strange feelings in his mind sometimes.

  Just as he was about to doze off, he heard the sibilant rustling of Spiros, summoning him to the Chamber. Without hesitation he arose, picked up his trident, and went toward the Chamber.

  As often as he had been in that circular room, he never failed to feel a sense of awe each time he re-entered it, for Spiros was an imposing creature beside which the puniness of Persons was depressingly clear.

  Spiros was an Arachnid, a huge structure of hair and chitin seven feet in diameter, resting firmly on the eight pillars of his legs, squatting ever, rarely moving save for the motion of antennae or the swiveling of multifaceted eyes. Than entered and bowed before his master. “You called, Magnificence?” he inquired.

  “Ah, yes, Little Than,” the peculiar whistling sounds came from Spiros, “I have a task for you, an unpleasant task it is, for through you I must destroy an Arachnid. Corpus—he who occupies Chamber Seven—has gone mad. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Magnificence,” Than answered humbly with lowered eyes.

  “Take this—and your trident,” Spiros said, extending one hairy leg toward Than, in which was clasped a small glass cylinder. “It contains an agent, a poison which will kill Corpus—but it may take some short time. You will enter Chamber Seven, smash this capsule beneath the Arachnid, and then not leave the Chamber until you are certain of Corpus’ death—even if you have to expedite it with your trident. Is that clear?”

  Than felt himself tremble as he took the capsule. He knew the dangers of this mission. “Yes,” he acknowledged, “I will destroy Corpus. . . .”

  “You will not!” Spiros snapped in reply. “I am destroying Corpus through you. Than, you are only a Person, and an extension of me. Remember that,” he added sharply, as sharply at least as the hissing of his voice chamber could manage.”

  Minutes later Than had emerged from the Arachnid’s Chamber and had made his way over the few hundred feet of junglelike ground that separated Spiros’ Chamber from Corpus’. Fearfully he approached the open lid of the Chamber and, summoning all his courage, descended into it. He made his way the fifty feet to the bottom and prepared to walk into Corpus’ Chamber. He could hear the ghastly scrapings and the weird moaning sounds coming from it. He knew some Persons must have been trapped by the raging monster and he could visualize the shambles in the room. Sweat beaded his forehead but he went forward; he knew he could not escape Spiros’ commands.

  He flung open the door. The room was dark, the lights smashed, but his eyes had become accustomed to the dark. Along one edge of the wall he could see the crouched bulk of the mad Arachnid. The room was a holocaust of butchered Persons and the horrible sounds of the Arachnid’s feeding terrified him. Corpus did not at once detect him.

  Than started with fright as something warm pressed against him.

  “Oh, please . . .” a voice, terror-stricken, horrified, said—and he realized a girl was clinging to him. Blood was trickling from a slight wound on her cheek and her eyes were wide with fear. Than had never been sent to the Mating Chambers and his experience of women was nonexistent, but suddenly a powerful awareness went through him and his fear vanished. Only intention held him, a confident mastery of himself and his situation.

  “Be quiet,” he cautioned. “I will destroy Corpus,” and he exulted in his use of the personal pronoun. For some reason he realized it was he and not Spiros who was doing this. And, like a light in his brain, the thought occurred to him that he need never go back to Spiros—and perhaps the woman—but his thoughts were interrupted by Corpus, who had suddenly detected him and was now moving toward him.

  Without hesitation Than flung the capsule and watched it burst in a violent spray, covering the monstrous Arachnid with an evil-smelling red liquid. At once the Arachnid forsook his soft moaning and burst into shrill, tormented screams, twisting and writhing as the fiery spray ate into his hair-covered chitin. He recognized the source of his agony, and, slowly, dragging his body on his mangled eight legs, came toward Than.

  Than clutched his trident firmly. He went to meet Corpus, and this movement surprised him as much as the Arachnid. Without hesitancy, he aimed a vicious blow at the beast-thing and the three prongs of the trident destroyed, in a single stroke, the vision of the mad Corpus. Corpus reacted in convulsive, squirming agony, blinded and dying. Than stepped back, conscious only of the soft form of the girl pressed against him.

  Slowly the two left the Chamber and ascended to the outside. Than glanced across the intervening space to Spiros’ Chamber and wonder acted within his mind.

  “We are not going back to Spiros’ Chamber,” he said slowly.

  The girl looked up at him. The fear was slowly vanishing from her face.

  “No,” she breathed, “we are not going back to the Arachnida. . . .”

  The Man Who Couldn’t Quit

  Charles Recour

  AN “AMAZING” VIGNETTE

  SINCE THE end of “The Raid” (they don’t even call it a war!), there has been a tendency to slack down. We sit in “Fortress America”, secure beneath our umbrella of rockets and missiles, and think that the Pan-Asians have learned their lesson, that they will never attempt another attack in spite of all their drum-beating. The Raid cost them dearly, we tell ourselves, and they can’t hope to summon up enough might to make a second push. Besides, aren’t their basic intentions peaceful? Look at the way the “Supreme Ruler” trumps for “Universal Peace.”

  That’s a mockery. That’s a joke, a monstrous joke.

  The Pan-Asians came mighty close to success and, if we hadn’t lopped off their thinking head, their Headquarters Staff, with nearly every operational leader above the rank of Colonel, America today would be another district of Pan-Asia.

  The story of the disastrous repulse of the Raid is well known, but the role played in it by a fifteen-year-old boy isn’t, and yet—practically—it all hinged on him. Yes, Eddie Fenton, a fifteen-year-old American boy from San Francisco, gave us the breather. . . .

  The Fentons sa
t in the living room of their small home on the eastern edge of the city in quiet despair, listening to the droning sing-song voice of the announcer.

  “. . . curfew is to be enforced throughout the next day . . . any new subjects of the Supreme Ruler who violate this order will be shot on sight . . . no private automobiles or public conveyances will be in use . . . nothing must interfere with the glorious progress of the invincible Pan-Asian soldiery . . . remain in your homes. . . .”

  John Fenton reached over and switched off the radio. He looked at his wife.

  “It’s too late, Margaret,” he said, “we can’t get out of the city now. They mean what they say. Jim told me they’ve been cutting up columns of escaping automobiles all day. They’ve got tanks and rockets all over the place.” He looked at his son, Eddie. “Thank God, Louise is at Grandma’s in Denver. I think we’ll stop them before then.”

  His wife looked at him courageously. “We’ll make out all right, John,” she said. “It’s Eddie I’m worried about.”

  “Aw, Ma,” Eddie objected, “quit worrying. I’ll find a way for us to get through these dirty rats.” He said it so sincerely and forcefully that Mrs. Fenton couldn’t help smiling at her husband.

  Suddenly there was a knock at the doer. It was hard and peremptory, insistent and demanding.

  “Pan-Asians?” Mrs. Fenton breathed. Her husband nodded.

  “Remember,” he said, “don’t make them mad, they’ll kill all of us. Got that, Eddie?” Eddie nodded, but there was hatred and fury in his face.

  Mr. Fenton opened the door. A short, stocky Pan-Asian soldier stood outlined in it. He grinned at John Fenton.

  “You Fenton?” he queried. John nodded. “You come ’long. You work on telephone system. Got to make repair.” He gestured casually with the machine rifle cradled in one arm. “Come fast.”

  “Don’t go, John!” Mrs. Fenton said shrilly and abruptly. “They’ll kill you, John!” The Pan-Asian stared at her. Calmly he lifted his gun and shot her in the face.