The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Read online

  “But why do you think the objects are moving so fast, Gibbs?”

  “They are invisible, or nearly so. That means either that they are composed of some alien form of energy which emits light waves too long or short for visual perception—or else that they are moving so fast that they can be seen only as faint blurs in bright light, and in darkness not at all.”

  The two started to walk from the laboratory. Helen took her husband’s hand.

  “It will be a terrible risk, Gibbs,” she said quietly.

  He looked down at her with a faint smile on his lips but said nothing.

  The next two hours were to confirm Helen’s fears more grimly than she had anticipated, but a perverse fate denied Crayley the privilege of sharing that risk in person. On the way up to the main observation chamber, the leader of the First Mercury Exploring Expedition wrenched a tendon in his right ankle atrociously on a ladder rung.

  Parkerson, Seaton, and Wilson stood white-faced, listening to him curse and rave. For the first time during the trip, Crayley surrendered to his emotions with an explosive vehemence which did not even respect the presence of his wife. The ankle wrench had thwarted him at a vital point.

  Helen suddenly found herself half smiling, catching Parkerson’s shocked gaze. Slowly a half grin spread across his face, too, and she knew his thought: Well, what do you know! The skipper’s human, after all!

  The other men immediately volunteered to serve as proxies, and Crayley, after he had calmed down, selected Seaton and Wilson. Helen found herself wondering if the men would have volunteered so readily had she not been present in the passageway. Meeting Parkerson’s half-disappointed gaze after the other two had been chosen, she suddenly realized that there was no doubt about it at all. A woman’s presence did act as a catalyst, making lonely men more willing to endure hardship and heightening the intensity of their subconscious drives.

  While the two men climbed into their spacesuits again, Parkerson went to get the stroboscopic camera from its storage compartment. It was a compact device, a small metallic cone about the size of an oxygen tank on top of a stroboscopic focusing panel and a curved, flexible carrier. Parkerson handed it to young Seaton, and then stood beside Crayley and Helen while the two men climbed awkwardly up the ladder to the airtight hatch above.

  Crayley took a step, and a spasm of pain convulsed his features. Helen tried to restrain him, but with a muffled grunt he pulled free of her grasp and limped across the chamber to seat himself in a swivel chair before the control panel of the ship. For a moment he swayed in the chair, while the pain receded.

  Then he threw a switch on the panel, and immediately a small opening appeared in the center of the wall above it. Swiftly the hole widened as the cobalt glass withdrew in overlapping crescents from an observation window of miraculously transparent glass.

  Through the exposed window the three in the spaceship stared out into the black Mercurian night. Suddenly one torch flared out, then another, and into the cone of light thrown by the first the cumbersomely clad figure of Allan Wilson moved. Slowly, slowly he walked, with testing staff extended and his own torch focused on the soil before him.

  Suddenly, for an instant, a purple light shone blinding clear above the plodding figure. Then it vanished, and as it did, Wilson seemed to stagger. For a full ten seconds the torches of both explorers continued to sweep across the terrain, but all at once it seemed as if Wilson was moving much too rapidly. Before any of the three could say a word, they saw the man pivot about, his legs kicking free of the surface, and abruptly disappear upward. With him went his torch, its beams dancing fantastically on objects far away.

  Seaton’s torch beam wavered, as if he had been shocked into indecision. It turned out later, however, that he had intrepidly set up the stroboscopic camera and was trying to take some pictures of the invisible horror that had captured his crewmate.

  Inside the ship, Crayley manipulated a rheostat near the center of the panel, and instantly the plain was flooded with a blue-white light from an immense arc lamp set in the spaceship’s entry hatch. In the light, the three in the ship saw a sight that none of them ever would forget. High above the rust-red plain the body of Wilson was dancing and bobbing about, arms thrown wide. He seemed spread-eagled against a field of star-flecked blackness—impaled upon empty air. Below the suspended man a vague, grayish blur seemed to intercept the light and dim the plain beyond.

  Crayley turned to the other two, his fists clenched. “He’s dead, I think,” he said. “He couldn’t live—”

  But then Helen gave a low scream and pointed out the window. The suspended figure had been released and was falling leaf-like to the ground. It struck and bounced, then rolled over and over, careening along the plain until it collided with a boulder, when it disappeared in a burst of flame.

  Seaton had turned and was racing headlong back to the ship. In one hand he held his torch, while his dynamometer staff, momentarily forgotten, jogged at his shoulder like a sheathed wagon. In the other hand he held the camera in a convulsive grip. Soon he disappeared into the ship’s shadow.

  Crayley swung about, shut off the arc-light control switch, and said in a coldly calm voice, “Seaton made it. Better help him in and get the camera, Fred.”

  Parkerson nodded and went up the ladder to the hatch, which soon opened, revealing a sagging Seaton still hanging on to the camera. Parkerson gently wrested it from his grasp, clicked open the wafer-thin steel cover, and thrust his hand deep into the protecting tube. The cold of space seemed to gnaw at his fingers as he grasped the little camera and drew it forth. He tossed it to Crayley and then helped Seaton down the ladder and unscrewed his helmet.

  As soon as it was off, Seaton gasped, “God, God!… It went for me… I could almost feel it…and Wilson ran to me…tried to throw his light at it…to attract it…it—it took him!…”

  Parkerson murmured, “I know, I know,” helplessly, mechanically, as he unloosened the fastenings on the difolchrome suit. Wilson and Seaton had been the kind of buddies Parkerson and Wilkus were. “But Bill—you ran the camera, didn’t you? You exposed some of the film? Maybe we can trap these—”

  Seaton nodded wordlessly, then slumped into one of the bunks, his head in his hands.

  Crayley broke open the camera and let fall from its interior a thin sheaf of automatically developed photographic plates. He handed these to Helen, whose fingers had not been chilled by the unbelievable cold of the camera.

  With wordless apprehension, Helen lifted the topmost plate and turned it slowly about under one of the control-room lights.

  The plate contained a clear image. Helen handed it to her husband, scarcely understanding what she saw. But Crayley took one glance and said:

  “It’s life, all right!”

  With that, both Parkerson and Seaton rushed to stare over Crayley’s shoulder. For a moment all that could be heard was the swift breathing of the four explorers.

  Then Crayley spoke again. “Life, Helen—a sentient form, perhaps not intelligent, but certainly sentient. Seaton, did you feel anything—out there?”

  Seaton said, “Feel?… Nothing… Nothing except…well, it was like a continuous electric shock, growing stronger and stronger… Horrible!…”

  Crayley studied the picture more closely. By comparing it with the metallic pebbles on the ground, he concluded that the shape was very large, perhaps four times as tall as a man, and proportionately huge in its other dimensions.

  It was cone-shaped, mathematically clean in line and yet disturbingly vital. From its broad base a single long rod descended to the ground, and four smaller rods projected sideways from its pointed summit. Where the base of the rod rested on the soil there were many little flares, as though the shape were standing on a surface which constantly reacted to it with electrical coruscations.

  Crayley said quietly, “The s
econd plate, Helen.”

  Helen looked at it, gasped. “Three of them.”

  Crayley seized the plate and studied it. “Three—and see how they are grouped!”

  “Five on this one,” said Helen, extending the third plate.

  Crayley swiftly went through the rest of the plates without another word. When he had finished examining the twelfth and last, he looked up slowly, his lips set in a tight line.

  “The ship is in danger,” he said.

  Parkerson stared. “What do you mean, Gibbs?”

  “Simply this. These cones are sentient entities. I think they are energy shapes, moving fields of force, endowed with intelligence and purpose. My guess is that they are connected in some way with the electromagnetic fields, the shock patches.”

  He stood up, wincing as the wrenched tendon reminded him of its presence. “I think these cones generate ultraviolet and nourish themselves on the electromagnetic resources of the shock patches. Remember that protoplasm itself is an electrical phenomenon, shaped by energy and radiation. But protoplasm is the product of an environment only lightly charged with solar energies. Mercury is different.”

  He handed the pictures to Parkerson. “Note this series, Fred. I think they prove that these cones are planning to attack. They seem to be forming some kind of a wedge-shaped formation. There are at least fifteen cones in the last shot—and all of them are pointing toward this ship!”

  Crayley pivoted and stared out through the view port. Below was blackness, save for the faintest glimmerings of light where the tenuous Venus rays glittered on tiny pebble points. But the explorer knew that strange shapes of power were there, though he could not see them. And he also suspected that the cones were assembling on the immense shock patch which lay less than five hundred feet from the stern of the ship.

  Time for action, Crayley thought regretfully. The odds were too great—this time. He sat again in his control seat, and turned to activate the starting motors of the great vessel.

  Before he could do so, a violent glare pierced through the ship. A roar drowned out all other sound. A shaking detonation vibrated every object in the control room. The floor seemed to rise up, suddenly and horribly. Then came the familiar crushing weight of acceleration, and Crayley blacked out momentarily, despite the fact that he was cupped in the cushions of the control chair.

  He regained consciousness by a feat of buried will, coming up hand over hand out of the mists of blackout. There was an ominous silence in the ship, punctured by eerie creaks and cracklings from the tortured cobalt-glass plates. Crayley glanced then at the vision port. The haunted plain, the distant, twisted hills of Mercury were gone, and in their place was black space and wheeling stars.

  Instantly his trained eyes flicked over the dials and gauges of the control panel. The great atomic motors were still. The only operating machinery was the auxiliary plant—light, heat, atmosphere. A red light glowed above one gauge, indicating the firing of two of the chemical jets which were used to give nonradioactive thrust at takeoff.

  Crayley’s quick mind assimilated and computed the evidence. The strange cones of the plain unquestionably had loosed a blast of energy which had fired the chemical jets and had sent the ship screaming upwards from the face of the planet. An occurrence so unlikely as to seem providential—except that Crayley knew that statistically it lay high in the realm of probability.

  His fingers played the switches on the panel with a controlled frenzy. The silence ended with a dull thunder from the atom motors, and the ship steadied as they took hold. Crayley let out a noisy sigh of relief: The atomic fuels were immune even to the fantastic temperatures of the cone’s ultraviolet radiation. Artificial gravity and running lights came on, and at last the great cobalt-glass ship was under full control.

  Only then did Crayley permit himself to look around.

  Parkerson was huddled in a broken heap by the after bulkhead. Next to him lay Seaton, his head turning slowly, his eyelids fluttering. And—

  “Helen!”

  He limped to her, unconscious of his own wrenching pain; touched her body swiftly, deftly, in a frantic mixture of caresses and skillful probing for injuries. She moaned.

  “Are you all right? Helen! Helen…”

  She opened her eyes, moaned again, and then gave him the tiniest of smiles. “Wh-what…”

  He helped her up. She was badly shaken but relatively unhurt. She had apparently hurtled back and struck Parkerson, and his body had cushioned the impact when they struck the bulkhead.

  Crayley gently lowered Helen onto one of the benches and turned to Parkerson. He was unconscious, breathing painfully. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.

  “Ribs broken,” said Crayley tersely. “Possible puncture. See to Seaton if you can, darling. I’ll take care of Fred.”

  An hour later they were droning through the dark, building up acceleration for the long loop back to Earth. Seaton, his arm in a sling, crouched over the computer, checking their flight line. Helen sat by Parkerson’s bunk, watching the flow of plasma from a plastic container into his veins. The automatic privacy screen was partly drawn, concealing the front of the control room from Parkerson’s view.

  “Home…” Parkerson said weakly. “It’s going to be good, Helen.”

  She nodded. “Try not to talk, Parky.”

  Ignoring her, Parkerson said, “Wilkus, Wilson, Grayson. Scottie, too. All dead. For what? Bloody unnecessary business. What has anyone gained because they’re dead?” Tears appeared under his lids. He shook them away angrily. “Sorry, Helen. But it’s such a waste.”

  With a strange, tight smile, Helen rose and raised the automatic screen. “Look,” she said softly.

  Parkerson slowly turned his head, following her gaze. Crayley was there in the control chair. His shoulders were squared, his hands quiet on the ledge of the panel before him, his face lifted to the spangled immensities of space. He did not move.

  She came back and sat down, her eyes first on the plasma bottle and then on the injured man. “Parky,” she whispered, “you wondered once whether he was human. Look at him now. We were driven off. They killed our men and hurt our ship. We were defeated. We cut and ran.” She smiled wryly. “But—look at him, Parky. He’s an explorer. He’s the new frontiersman, in an age which knows the greatest frontier of all.”

  She pushed back her hair with a tired motion. “Maybe he isn’t human. Maybe he’s just humanity. Look at him, Parky. In spite of death and in spite of danger, in spite of life forms which have all the advantage of their own mystery—he’ll be back. Don’t you see it?”

  Parkerson gazed at the still, strong figure and then at the woman.

  “He’ll be back,” he whispered. “Yes—that’s it.” And as the full realization of what Helen Crayley had been saying flooded him, he said, “We’ll be back!”

  THE SKY TRAP

  Originally published in Comet, July 1941.

  Lawton enjoyed a good fight. He stood happily trading blows with Slashaway Tommy, his lean-fleshed torso gleaming with sweat. He preferred to work the pugnacity out of himself slowly, to savor it as it ebbed.

  “Better luck next time, Slashaway,” he said, and unlimbered a left hook that thudded against his opponent’s jaw with such violence that the big, hairy ape crumpled to the resin and rolled over on his back.

  Lawton brushed a lock of rust-colored hair back from his brow and stared down at the limp figure lying on the descending stratoship’s slightly tilted athletic deck.

  “Good work, Slashaway,” he said. “You’re primitive and beetle-browed, but you’ve got what it takes.”

  Lawton flattered himself that he was the opposite of primitive. High in the sky he had predicted the weather for eight days running, with far more accuracy than he could have put into a punch.

  They’
d flash his report all over Earth in a couple of minutes now. From New York to London to Singapore and back. In half an hour he’d be donning street clothes and stepping out feeling darned good.

  He had fulfilled his weekly obligation to society by manipulating meteorological instruments for forty-five minutes, high in the warm, upper stratosphere and worked off his pugnacity by knocking down a professional gym slugger. He would have a full, glorious week now to work off all his other drives.

  The stratoship’s commander, Captain Forrester, had come up, and was staring at him reproachfully. “Dave, I don’t hold with the reforming Johnnies who want to re-make human nature from the ground up. But you’ve got to admit our generation knows how to keep things humming with a minimum of stress. We don’t have world wars now because we work off our pugnacity by sailing into gym sluggers eight or ten times a week. And since our romantic emotions can be taken care of by tactile television we’re not at the mercy of every brainless bit of fluff’s calculated ankle appeal.”

  Lawton turned, and regarded him quizzically. “Don’t you suppose I realize that? You’d think I just blew in from Mars.”

  “All right. We have the outlets, the safety valves. They are supposed to keep us civilized. But you don’t derive any benefit from them.”

  “The heck I don’t. I exchange blows with Slashaway every time I board the Perseus. And as for women—well, there’s just one woman in the world for me, and I wouldn’t exchange her for all the Turkish images in the tactile broadcasts from Stamboul.”

  “Yes, I know. But you work off your primitive emotions with too much gusto. Even a cast-iron gym slugger can bruise. That last blow was—brutal. Just because Slashaway gets thumped and thudded all over by the medical staff twice a week doesn’t mean he can take—”