Amazing Vignettes Page 5

  The serviceman who came out twenty minutes later found the trouble in a hurry. He couldn’t keep from grinning as he explained it to Bill.

  “One of the switches shorted,” he said, “and that overloaded the transmitter. Naturally the gadget poured a terrific amount of heat into the food all at once. Only one thing could happen and did—the food had to explode. That overloaded transmitter was shoving maybe ten or fifteen kilowatts of power into a potato. Bang! Up she goes. Don’t worry about now’, though. It’s O.K.”

  “I don’t want to go back to gas or electricity, dear,” Louise said, noting the rather crest-fallen look on her husband’s face.

  Space Wreck!

  Joseph Hill

  REMAIN calm and do not lose your head.

  The words repeated themselves over and over again, like a child’s rhyme, in Communication Officer Linton’s mind. Yes, that’s what the manual said: Remain calm and do not lose your head.

  Linton shivered in the confines of his space suit. Panic and terror fought to grip him. How impossible this was! Eight minutes ago he’d been in a rocket Speedster reporting to the Lunar base. In his mind’s eye, Linton saw the gauges on the panel go awry, then felt the flaring incandescent heat as the rocket-radioactives let loose. What a miracle that he’d been ejected by the blast without shearing his suit against a piece of metal. Yes, what a miracle!—to be left floating free in the vastnesses of empty space.

  And the words of the manual which they’d all memorized went through his thoughts again. But it had been so academic when they’d studied it. Who expected ever to be in this situation? It was merely a remote possibility.

  It was? Who are you kidding, brother? That’s where you are right now. Momentarily Linton wanted to scream aloud, to shout. He fought down the rising panic. Think, you fool, he told himself. Think! The suit will keep you alive for twenty hours. Surely the automatic radio pulse that instantaneously flares out at the first sign of trouble in a spacecraft, blasted out here. Don’t worry. The patrol will pick you up. It’s only a matter of time. Be sensible.

  Linton had, as have all spacemen at one time or another, imagined what it would be like to be marooned alone in interplanetary space. But in his wildest fancies he had never thought it could be so terrorizing. Being lost in space was like—was like—no images would come to mind. Here a man was the smallest thing in the Universe, less than an atom. How could they find him? He was going to die.

  You’re in the Moon’s gravitational field, he told himself. Eventually your perfectly preserved body will plunge into the pumice dust like a splashing meteorite. And no one will ever know. Linton. Clay, twenty-four, Communications Officer, died because of a technical accident on a Lunar mission. Yes, your name will be inscribed on the service rolls.

  With an effort Linton forced himself to stop the dangerous cynical trend of thought. The awkward metallic balloon that housed him needn’t be my coffin—they’ll find me before—before . . . Suddenly the phones in the helmet crackled: “Patrol Six-Oh-Nine—we’ve caught an emergency radio pulse. Are you in the vicinity? Key in your low power transmitter.”

  Linton gasped. He pushed the button in the sleeve. And then he fainted . . .

  “Well, Linton,” the executive officer was saying in the pilot room of the patrol craft, “was it very bad out there?” Linton looked up at him. There was a wry smile on his pale face.

  “No,” he answered, “it wasn’t too bad.” But he continued to stare out the port and the stars winked back at him.

  Visitor to the Future

  Joseph Hill

  CAIUS SEPTIMUS, centurion of the Fourth Legion, sweated and groaned with his seventy men, through these rocky fastnesses on the edge of the Nigerian desert. Caves and gaping slashes in the Earth testified the strangeness of the world.

  Curse Claudius, Caius thought, curse him a thousand times! He grinned wryly, but a centurion obeys a proconsul. If Claudius believed the silly tale of the giant reptile, brought in by some half-witted natives, he, Caius, would have to seek it out for the proconsul.

  The grumbling men toiled behind him, their armor intolerable in the humid heat. Now they were walking two abreast down a narrow defile. On Caius’ right was the mouth of a dank and gaping cave.

  Suddenly a hideous scream split the air. There was a rumbling earth-shaking sound. Everyone stood paralyzed for a moment at the apparition that greeted them. Caius’ Roman training had taught him nothing of the prehistoric dinosaur; he didn’t know that such things as Tyrannosaurus Rex ever existed on the Earth. All he saw was a monstrous reptilian thing, its mouth gaping like a huge furnace, its lungs bellowing, and its body emitting an overpowering stench of decayed and rotten flesh.

  It rumbled from the cave trampling down a dozen men in its path. Caius went white with fear, but as a legionary he could not betray his proud Roman heritage. He stood stock still, raging at his men. A few obeyed him, crouched, their shields overlapping, planted their pila butts in the earth and waited the onslaught. It was terrible. They were bowled over like ninepins, and the monster waddled past with the trivial pikes hanging from his thick and stinking skin.

  Caius stood to one side. He seized a pila from a soldier. With all his strength he flung it and had the satisfaction of seeing the weapon strike deep into one of the beady eyes. The giant threshed in agony, half-blinded, still a powerful machine of destruction.

  A dozen more men fell before its wild-flailing tail. Its horrible jaws crunched other. It dreadful little forefoot which hung from its chest did damage too.

  The legionnaires had scattered and even Caius crouched behind the bole of a heavy tree watching the monster fearfully as it thrashed about. Caius’ pila had penetrated the brain, but the rudimentary nervous system took time to send the message of death. Grunting and blowing the dying monster fled into the jungle.

  When the sounds of terror died away, the legionnaires reassembled. But Caius gave not his usual tongue-lashing. The fear was too great within him. A few brief commands and the remnants of the command returned the way they had come. Caius’ name is unknown now, but he had been the first and last man on earth to see a living dinosaur, a strange remnant of the world that existed before the conception of Man. What Caius thought is not recorded. What he felt we can easily imagine!

  Sun-Stuff

  H.R. Stanton

  WE WERE doing routine patrol work a good quarter of a light year beyond the System edge. It was dry and monotonous, the sameness of interstellar space a thousand times more boring than the flatness of the seas that the ancients used to complain about.

  Instruments were on and maybe that’s why we weren’t as alert as we should have been. We relied on them, but the Optic can’t be compared with a good pair of eyes. Anyhow we didn’t see the Body until it was quite close, a matter of two or three million miles at least.

  I happened to glance out of the port when I saw the piece of radiant matter. For a moment I thought we were near a sun, but that couldn’t be. Our instruments would have registered such a huge mass even if our eyes didn’t.

  Electron-scopes showed it to be a small—a few hundred feet in diameter—piece of radiant matter at a very high temperature. We were puzzled by the phenomenon. You don’t find small pieces of a sun floating around space, and it was clear that the surface temperature of the object was about ten thousand degrees.

  We got as close as we dared—about a half a million miles, and the radiation was intense. We dared not go nearer but we watched it clearly through suitable filters and through the ’scope.

  “That thing is a ship!” I cried out, “a lousy stinking space ship!”

  A half dozen voices echoed me. And it was just that. In spite of its being a huge radiant mass of gas, it was clearly and distinctly a vessel of some kind.

  Before I could say or do anything, Fenwick, the communications man, touched the trip and launched a bomb at the stranger. Seven seconds later it struck—it was an ultra-wave type—and the vessel literally disappeared into blinding
radiations all up and down the spectrum. We burnt out several spectros on it. It was to be expected. What else can happen when two atomic bombs strike each other?

  I waved the System immediately after confining Fenwick. The cameras took down the whole story and so that’s why we’re here. We destroyed a ship full of some kind of life from Ged knows where. That we did so is no tribute to us. Evidently the stranger didn’t expect to find warfare anywhere.

  So we’ll sit here and patrol and wait hoping—did I say hoping?—that we meet another. This time we won’t hurl any atomics without waiting. And then maybe we won’t have a chance to either hurl or wait. But we’ll wait . . .

  Space-Jaloppies

  William Karney

  UNTIL THE accident involving the Centaurus No. 1, nobody at all payed any attention to a problem which will have to be solved—junkyards! The one in Urane Center on Luna is the worst offender because a rugged mining community doesn’t care about who comes and goes through its airlocks as long as they pay the fee. But there are a couple of spots here on Terra that are bad too.

  As its name implies, the Centaurus No, 1,

  was the number one lifeboat of a spaceliner long since gone. The Crane yard in Urane center had dozens of beaten up old wrecks laying around. Anyone could come in and buy them, though for the most part they had to be moved by crane and tractor.

  Evidently, the C.N. 1 had still a good motor left, for the two boys just walked into the yard, plunked down the seven hundred credits and floated it off. You can’t reccommend this practice because too many kids are doing and have done it, but it does give you sort of a feeling of pride to think that kids like that have the nerve to buy up a junky space-boat, overhaul it, and take it into the system.

  Wilson and Lessing were picked up in the Asteroid belt by the Patrol by pure chance. If they hadn’t been, by now the kids would be dead. And they were only fifteen.

  The story gotten out of them was simple. Both were nuts about spacemen and anything pertaining to space. Lessing, the studious one taught himself a fair amount of astrogation, and in all fairness to the boy it must be said that it was a faulty octant that caused the mix-up. Anyhow they left their homes in Luna City, managed to get into Urane Center, bought the boat with hard-earned money, fitted It out according to their best means and decided to try a Martian “jump”.

  The make-shift engines broke down, the astrogation was bad, and the boys drifted in their little craft into the “Belt”. They drifted around for a month and a half—on quarter rations—before the Patrol picked them up. They had no communications. After giving them a good dressing down, the Patrol of course shipped them home, but the matter brought out the fact that there are many kids and some adults who have also gone into space in crummy jury-rigged junk. This is what the Patrol is fighting against. God only knows how many people have been lost by such foolhardy action.

  Agents are cracking down on all dealers in anything that can possibly get into space. You can be sure from now that this—the Twentieth Century word, “jaloppy” fits exactly—jaloppy-riding is going to stop!

  Malignant Mentor

  Leslie Phelps

  LIKE ALL of the offices of Telepathica, Inc., this one was little more than a simple, comfortably-furnished, room in the Administration Building. Through the large picture-window, the sunlight streamed in brilliantly. In a way, the room was beautiful. But I was not deceived—something was wrong.

  For I suspected the odor of death in this room.

  Three weeks ago Telepathica, Inc. had assigned me to the job of looking into a series of deaths its staff of operators had undergone. First a Martian agent, then two on Titania—all males, had died while “in reception.” Telepathica, Inc. which transmits and receives telepathic waves, using booster amplifiers and human senders and receivers, was plenty worried. Somehow some unknown was managing to push lethal thoughts over the safety barriers. As special agent for the company, I went to work and after a little deduction, an examination of times, and a strong suspicion, this Tellus office seemed to be the origin.

  The door opened and Lorane Senn, sender three-oh-four entered the room. She walked calmly over to her desk with its multiplicity of dials and sat down. I observed her carefully. She was young and attractive, but there seemed to be a tightness around her mouth as if she were under tension.

  And I knew full well, she was aware of my thought-screen. I would no more have entered the room without it, than I would have gone in nude.

  “May I help you?” she asked, in a high strained voice.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’d like a message put through and an immediate reply.” I handed her the slip of paper. It contained a innocuous business comment; actually it was a coded signal to a screen-protected agent on Luna.

  “If you’ll wait outside,” she said, “I’ll send it through at once.”

  I’d hoped she wouldn’t ask that, because I had to see her in action. Quickly I walked through the door, then through a side-corridor and with a master key into her private office. I opened the door quietly, just a hair. I could see her clearly. She bent over her board, her face screwed up in tight concentration. At first the look was the common abstracted look of one who is trying to telepath a message. Her eyes opened.

  I’ll never forget the look on her face that followed. It was compounded of hate and lust and anger and degeneracy. It was as if a beam of sheer concentrated hatred existed as a material thing in the room!

  At that instant, in my concentration, I leaned against the door. It swung open and I stumbled into the room. The girl looked up, saw me, and her eyes went wide with fear and hatred. The jolt had disturbed my screen slightly and the barest edges of a thought filtered into my mind. Then and there I would have died in spite of the screen, but my blaster was in my hand and in spite of the hideous blazing of her hypnotic eyes, I managed to judge and sentence her. My blaster flamed and she slumped behind her desk—dead.

  It was the first time I had killed a woman. I became sick momentarily, but my regret was little. The air still seemed to crackle with the malignant hatred of thought. . . .

  Chance

  June Lurie

  WHAT A miracle of irony! How the Fates must have laughed! The fanfare and the shouting that accompanied the first rocket to the Moon, now turns a little dry in our mouths when we think of what it did.

  It’s only nineteen eighty-three now, and it’ll be a long time—at least several decades the slide-rule boys say—before we are able to do much interplanetary journeying. And when we do that traveling we’re going to have to be mighty apologetic to the Martians. Oh, yes, there are Martians, we know that. In fact it’ll probably happen that they’ll beat us to the punch—and land on Earth first. Let’s hope they’re mighty understanding.

  Certainly it was a pure accident. It couldn’t have happened in a thousand million years. The laws of chance and probability are strictly against such a coincidence. It’s unheard of—but it happened.

  Perhaps you can remember the shouting and the gayety and the happiness with which that first rocket was launched. Ten years isn’t a long time. Remember the way they ballyhooed it? It was war-headed with two tons of magnesium powder and potassium chlorate mixed with powdered chalk. They wanted a flash of light—which they got—and they wanted a whitish spot on the Moon’s surface—which they got . . . along with a little red . . .

  The remote-controlled rocket took off like nobody’s business. A million hearts followed it over the video, a billion prayers hoped that it would be a success. Man’s ego got such a boost that night, that it had to be. Well, of course it was!

  Everybody who could beg, borrow or steal a telescope or a pair of opera glasses watched the Moon’s surface for zero hour. And plenty of people saw the brief flare of light which marked Man’s successful contact with the Moon. The rocket flared up and scattered its dust, and the bigger telescopes were able to note the spot exactly.

  Fine. Fine and dandy.

  Five years later, Eddie Felstrom an
d his three men landed on the Moon. That’s history too, and as great as it was and is, it didn’t make as big a splash in the public consciousness as the first rocket, the one with the explosive load.

  But when it returned and Eddie told his story . . . and when the other two rockets later confirmed it . . . there was a splash all right.

  For the Martians had landed in a rocket right smack on the spot where our first rocket loaded with magnesium and potassium chlorate, had struck! And of course the Martian rocket and crew vanish?® practically. Not quite. Parts of their ship and themselves were scattered all over the moonscape. You can see the remnants in the Smithsonian. And we know that they’re. remarkably like us. What did they think wheD their rocket didn’t return? We don’t know yet—but we will.

  But what makes it so maddening is the fact that it had to happen like some great cosmic joke. A tragic jokester, death. The first contact between interplanetary people had to be a matter of death. Why?

  We think the Martians, when they come, will be reasonable. After all, they’re like us, a lot like us . . .

  The Wager

  A.T. Kedzie

  IN THE infinite reaches of the vast tesseract that was all space, the two entities rocked with silent laughter.

  “By the gases!” roared One, “you were right! I owe you a myriad years of sheer thinking. I never thought the little mortals on Sol Three would ever guess it. But wait—it isn’t done yet. They’ll laugh him out of existence.”

  “No, no. That I don’t believe,” countered Two, “they’re intelligent—this Urey and this Von Weizaeker will make their point —and it’ll be common knowledge.”

  “I’ll give you another fifty years but no more—then we’ll see what the little devils do now that their ideas have been turned upside down.”