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

  He could see the seeds dropping—dropping from pods which reminded him of the darkly horned skate egg sheaths which he had collected in his boyhood from sea beaches at ebb tide.

  It was the unwholesomeness of the vegetation which chiefly unnerved him. It looked dank, malarial. There were decaying patches on the fungus growths and a miasmal mist was descending from it toward the ship.

  The control room was completely still when he turned from the quartz port to meet Forrester’s startled gaze.

  “Dave, what does it mean?” The question burst explosively from the captain’s lips.

  “It means—life has appeared and evolved and grown rotten ripe inside the bubble, sir. All in the space of an hour or so.”

  “But that’s—impossible.”

  Lawton shook his head. “It isn’t at all, sir. We’ve had it drummed into us that evolution proceeds at a snailish pace, but what proof have we that it can’t mutate with lightning-like rapidity? I’ve told you there are gases outside we can’t even make in a chemical laboratory, molecular arrangements that are alien to earth.”

  “But plants derive nourishment from the soil,” interpolated Forrester.

  “I know. But if there are alien gases in the air the surface of the bubble must be reeking with unheard of chemicals. There may be compounds inside the bubble which have so sped up organic processes that a hundred million year cycle of mutations has been telescoped into an hour.”

  Lawton was pacing the floor again. “It would be simpler to assume that seeds of existing plants became somehow caught up and imprisoned in the bubble. But the plants around us never existed on earth. I’m no botanist, but I know what the Congo has on tap, and the great rain forests of the Amazon.”

  “Dave, if the growth continues it will fill the bubble. It will choke off all our air.”

  “Don’t you suppose I realize that? We’ve got to destroy that growth before it destroys us.”

  * * * *

  It was pitiful to watch the crew’s morale sag. The miasmal taint of the ominously proliferating vegetation was soon pervading the ship, spreading demoralization everywhere.

  It was particularly awful straight down. Above a ropy tangle of livid vines and creepers a kingly stench weed towered, purplish and bloated and weighted down with seed pods.

  It seemed sentient, somehow. It was growing so fast that the evil odor which poured from it could be correlated with the increase of tension inside the ship. From that particular plant, minute by slow minute, there surged a continuously mounting offensiveness, like nothing Lawton had ever smelt before.

  The bubble had become a blooming horror sailing slowly westward above the storm-tossed Atlantic. And all the chemical agents which Lawton sprayed through the ventilation valves failed to impede the growth or destroy a single seed pod.

  It was difficult to kill plant life with chemicals which were not harmful to man. Lawton took dangerous risks, increasing the unwholesomeness of their rapidly dwindling air supply by spraying out a thin diffusion of problematically poisonous acids.

  It was no sale. The growths increased by leaps and bounds, as though determined to show their resentment of the measures taken against them by marshalling all their forces in a demoralizing plantkrieg.

  Thwarted, desperate, Lawton played his last card. He sent five members of the crew, equipped with blow guns. They returned screaming. Lawton had to fortify himself with a double whiskey soda before he could face the look of reproach in their eyes long enough to get all of the prickles out of them.

  From then on pandemonium reigned. Blue funk seized the petty officers while some of the crew ran amuck. One member of the engine watch attacked four of his companions with a wrench; another went into the ship’s kitchen and slashed himself with a paring knife. The assistant engineer leapt through a ’chute opening, after avowing that he preferred impalement to suffocation.

  He was impaled. It was horrible. Looking down Lawton could see his twisted body dangling on a crimson-stippled thornlike growth forty feet in height.

  Slashaway was standing at his elbow in that Waterloo moment, his rough-hewn features twitching. “I can’t stand it, sir. It’s driving me squirrelly.”

  “I know, Slashaway. There’s something worse than marijuana weed down there.”

  Slashaway swallowed hard. “That poor guy down there did the wise thing.”

  Lawton husked: “Stamp on that idea, Slashaway—kill it. We’re stronger than he was. There isn’t an ounce of weakness in us. We’ve got what it takes.”

  “A guy can stand just so much.”

  “Bosh. There’s no limit to what a man can stand.”

  From the visiplate behind them came an urgent voice: “Radio room tuning in, sir.”

  Lawton swung about. On the flickering screen the foggy outlines of a face appeared and coalesced into sharpness.

  The Perseus radio operator was breathless with excitement. “Our reception is improving, sir. European short waves are coming in strong. The static is terrific, but we’re getting every station on the continent, and most of the American stations.”

  Lawton’s eyes narrowed to exultant slits. He spat on the deck, a slow tremor shaking him.

  “Slashaway, did you hear that? We’ve done it. We’ve won against hell and high water.”

  “We done what, sir?”

  “The bubble, you ape—it must be wearing thin. Hell’s bells, do you have to stand there gaping like a moronic ninepin? I tell you, we’ve got it licked.”

  “I can’t stand it, sir. I’m going nuts.”

  “No you’re not. You’re slugging the thing inside you that wants to quit. Slashaway, I’m going to give the crew a first-class pep talk. There’ll be no stampeding while I’m in command here.”

  He turned to the radio operator. “Tune in the control room. Tell the captain I want every member of the crew lined up on this screen immediately.”

  The face in the visiplate paled. “I can’t do that, sir. Ship’s regulations—”

  Lawton transfixed the operator with an irate stare. “The captain told you to report directly to me, didn’t he?”

  “Yes sir, but—”

  “If you don’t want to be cashiered, snap into it.”

  “Yes—yessir.”

  The captain’s startled face preceded the duty-muster visiview by a full minute, seeming to project outward from the screen. The veins on his neck were thick blue cords.

  “Dave,” he croaked. “Are you out of your mind? What good will talking do now?”

  “Are the men lined up?” Lawton rapped, impatiently.

  Forrester nodded. “They’re all in the engine room, Dave.”

  “Good. Block them in.”

  The captain’s face receded, and a scene of tragic horror filled the opalescent visiplate. The men were not standing at attention at all. They were slumping against the Perseus’ central charging plant in attitudes of abject despair.

  * * * *

  Madness burned in the eyes of three or four of them. Others had torn open their shirts, and raked their flesh with their nails. Petty officer Caldwell was standing as straight as a totem pole, clenching and unclenching his hands. The second assistant engineer was sticking out his tongue. His face was deadpan, which made what was obviously a terror reflex look like an idiot’s grimace.

  Lawton moistened his lips. “Men, listen to me. There is some sort of plant outside that is giving off deliriant fumes. A few of us seem to be immune to it.

  “I’m not immune, but I’m fighting it, and all of you boys can fight it too. I want you to fight it to the top of your courage. You can fight anything when you know that just around the corner is freedom from a beastliness that deserves to be licked—even if it’s only a plant.

  “Men, we’re blasting our way free
. The bubble’s wearing thin. Any minute now the plants beneath us may fall with a soggy plop into the Atlantic Ocean.

  “I want every man jack aboard this ship to stand at his post and obey orders. Right this minute you look like something the cat dragged in. But most men who cover themselves with glory start off looking even worse than you do.”

  He smiled wryly.

  “I guess that’s all. I’ve never had to make a speech in my life, and I’d hate like hell to start now.”

  It was petty officer Caldwell who started the chant. He started it, and the men took it up until it was coming from all of them in a full-throated roar.

  I’m a tough, true-hearted skyman,

  Careless and all that, d’ye see?

  Never at fate a railer,

  What is time or tide to me?

  All must die when fate shall will it,

  I can never die but once,

  I’m a tough, true-hearted skyman;

  He who fears death is a dunce.

  Lawton squared his shoulders. With a crew like that nothing could stop him! Ah, his energies were surging high. The deliriant weed held no terrors for him now. They were stout-hearted lads and he’d go to hell with them cheerfully, if need be.

  It wasn’t easy to wait. The next half hour was filled with a steadily mounting tension as Lawton moved like a young tornado about the ship, issuing orders and seeing that each man was at his post.

  “Steady, Jimmy. The way to fight a deliriant is to keep your mind on a set task. Keep sweating, lad.”

  “Harry, that winch needs tightening. We can’t afford to miss a trick.”

  “Yeah, it will come suddenly. We’ve got to get the rotaries started the instant the bottom drops out.”

  He was with the captain and Slashaway in the control room when it came. There was a sudden, grinding jolt, and the captain’s desk started moving toward the quartz port, carrying Lawton with it.

  “Holy Jiminy cricket,” exclaimed Slashaway.

  The deck tilted sharply; then righted itself. A sudden gush of clear, cold air came through the ventilation valves as the triple rotaries started up with a roar.

  Lawton and the captain reached the quartz port simultaneously. Shoulder to shoulder they stood staring down at the storm-tossed Atlantic, electrified by what they saw.

  Floating on the waves far beneath them was an undulating mass of vegetation, its surface flecked with glinting foam. As it rose and fell in waning sunlight a tainted seepage spread about it, defiling the clean surface of the sea.

  But it wasn’t the floating mass which drew a gasp from Forrester, and caused Lawton’s scalp to prickle. Crawling slowly across that Sargasso-like island of noxious vegetation was a huge, elongated shape which bore a nauseous resemblance to a mottled garden slug.

  Forrester was trembling visibly when he turned from the quartz port.

  “God, Dave, that would have been the last straw. Animal life. Dave, I—I can’t realize we’re actually out of it.”

  “We’re out, all right,” Lawton said, hoarsely. “Just in time, too. Skipper, you’d better issue grog all around. The men will be needing it. I’m taking mine straight. You’ve accused me of being primitive. Wait till you see me an hour from now.”

  Dr. Stephen Halday stood in the door of his Appalachian mountain laboratory staring out into the pine-scented dusk, a worried expression on his bland, small-featured face. It had happened again. A portion of his experiment had soared skyward, in a very loose group of highly energized wavicles. He wondered if it wouldn’t form a sort of sub-electronic macrocosm high in the stratosphere, altering even the air and dust particles which had spurted up with it, its uncharged atomic particles combining with hydrogen and creating new molecular arrangements.

  If such were the case there would be eight of them now. His bubbles, floating through the sky. They couldn’t possibly harm anything—way up there in the stratosphere. But he felt a little uneasy about it all the same. He’d have to be more careful in the future, he told himself. Much more careful. He didn’t want the Controllers to turn back the clock of civilization a century by stopping all atom-smashing experiments.

  WOBBLIES ON THE MOON

  Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1943.

  CHAPTER I

  Cry in the Lunar Night

  “John, John, wake up!” Vera Dorn screamed, pounding on the door of Carstairs’ sleeping turret. “The wobblies have broken loose!”

  The Curator of the Interplanetary Botanical Gardens stirred, yawned, turned over and buried his head in the bedclothes. “Ahhhh—” he sighed.

  “John, let me in! Open the door! The wobblies—”

  Carstairs leapt up in consternation, throwing back the bedclothes so violently that they wrapped themselves around his long legs and sent him sprawling. Shivering, he groaned, rolled over and struggled to a sitting position.

  “Take it easy, Vera,” he muttered, knuckling sleep from his eyelids. “The blasted things aren’t flesh-eaters.”

  “Oh, but, darling, if we should lose them! Our rarest specimens, walking around loose! Can you blame me for getting excited?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Carstairs grunted. “Open the door yourself. It isn’t locked.” The door opened a crack, and the pale face of John Carstairs’ attractive, coppery-haired secretary came into view. Wrapping the bedclothes tightly around his rangy bulk, Carstairs arose and crossed to the window. When he pulled up the shade a glint of Earthlight from the Lunar Apennines grazed his pupils, dazzling him. He blinked and stared out at the towering peaks which he had been contemplating with awe for several days now.

  Vera was sitting on the edge of the bed when he turned, her hands clasped around her knees.

  “It will be a shock to Gleason,” she said. “One of them came into my room and climbed out the window. I encountered another in the corridor. When I tried to catch it, it hurled a nettle at me. It’s still here, in my shoulder.”

  She turned and bared a portion of her right shoulder. Half-buried in her flesh was a huge, downy nettle. It was strawberry-colored, and five or six inches in diameter. It brought a shiver to Carstairs’ spine.

  “We’ll get it out,” he said. “They are loathsome creatures, but worth their weight in platinum.”

  “You don’t seem very upset about losing them,” Vera retorted. “They’re probably streaking back to the mountains by now.”

  Carstairs shrugged. “We’re Gleason’s guests, aren’t we? We’re spending the weekend with him. The right kind of host doesn’t let his guests down. If I’m any judge of character, he won’t rest until he’s tracked down some more specimens for us.”

  Vera Dorn’s freckled face crimsoned with indignation. “John Carstairs, you’re the most cynical, ungrateful person I’ve ever known. Gleason is an extremely wealthy man. He doesn’t have to collect specimens for you.”

  “He’s a good egg,” Carstairs grunted. “But vain. Endowing our lunar expeditions and collecting for us puffs him out like a kid’s toy balloon. He likes to pose as a scientific big shot. If I had a glassite-walled palace on the moon, decked out with seven black plastic bathrooms, I’d forget about science with a capital S. I’d just be myself.”

  “What makes you think a wealthy man can’t be a humble soldier in the army of science?” Vera flared.

  “Heck, we’re not fighting anything,” Carstairs snorted. “Am I a soldier? All I do is collect unhealthy looking plants, and hold down a dull job on Earth. Utterly nightmarish plants, from `glowing Venus to Neptune’s chill domain’—to quote from a book of bum poems I once read.”

  “John, what are you driving at?”

  “Well, do our expeditions save human lives? Is our work really important? Vera, I’m just a tired old man killing a dull weekend with an elderly playboy in his p
leasure palace on the moon. If he hadn’t sent me a space-o-gram telling me he had an extraordinary new specimen, and would I call for it, I’d be killing a duller one on Earth. Oh, heck.”

  “You got up on the wrong side of the bed, all right,” Vera sneered. “Old man, indeed! You’re a few hours past twenty-eight, on account of this is your birthday. But you’re not so old, and all you need to pep you up is a nice, juicy, murder.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You’re just disgruntled because you can’t help the New York police department crack down on the criminal element. You’re as sore as the dickens because you can’t neglect your research work and go rushing around like a turkey with its neck stretched out for the chopping block.” Carstairs gnawed at his underlip and glared at the attractive university graduate who had wangled a job for herself at the Interplanetary Botanical Gardens solely on her nerve. Bitterly Carstairs recalled that she had walked into his office on a rainy Sunday, pretending to be a research botanist of established reputation. Actually she had merely majored in botany at college, and had the softest eyes.

  “You’re a botanist eight days out of seven,” he flung at her. “But right now I’m fed up. Fed up, you hear?”

  “But, John—”

  “All right, wobblies are rare, wobblies are valuable. And Gleason is a resourceful collector. We didn’t even know wobblies existed on Luna until he hoisted three adult specimens out of a mountain crevice, and sent me that space-o-gram. I was elated at first, but it’s worn off. I’m bored, peeved, and if we’ve lost them, I just don’t give a Neptunian peso.”

  Vera Dorn’s lips tightened ominously. “Botanical Detective John Carstairs is going to eat crow,” she said.

  “He’s going to apologize to the most gracious host a man ever had for putting those valuable specimens in a fragile glass herbarium. And if you think he’ll go out, and collect some more wobblies for you—” She stiffened in sudden horror. A piercing, long-drawn scream had reverberated across the glassite-walled sleeping turret, congealing her vocal chords, and turning Carstairs’ blood to ice. It was followed by a silence so cloying that it seemed to muffle the tick of Carstairs’ Greenwich-synchronized wrist watch.