The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 18

  Was the crystal cube which Glugun was now clasping something which humans had always longed to clasp? Had the Rigel System planetarians the same urge, and worked out a scientific means of gratification?

  With considerable effort Bosworth fought back a desire to retch. He was back inside his body now. He couldn’t move his limbs yet, but he could see his chest, blink his eyes, and corporeality had returned to his stomach.

  How long had Glugun slept, he wondered wildly. How long had he slept. Seven hours—ten? Beyond the open door of the hut there was now a redness, as though the dry air outside had caught fire, and—Bosworth’s thoughts congealed. The Rigel System planetarian had changed his position. He had lowered the cube and was leaning sharply forward, and out of the owlish face two slitted eyes were parrying Bosworth’s stare with unmistakable derision.

  In the spherical control room of the sidereal cruiser Joan Mallory’s coppery hair seemed to set up a blaze.

  “You should have told him the truth,” she said, raising her voice to make herself heard above the droning of the atomotors. “He didn’t know what he was letting himself in for.”

  “He knows now,” Griscom grunted, drawing on his pipe, and staring out through the viewpane across a wet-dry plain that was already a blur in the wake of the thrumming vessel.

  There was nothing out there he was sorry to be bidding good-by to, he told himself savagely. Six company sheds, smoldering in dry rot. Three smoldering in wet. The metal-sheeted posts of the stockade, mottled green and pink. Eighteen wasted months, receding like spectral horsemen over the hump of the plain. He’d know what to say to anyone who tried to claim you couldn’t visualize a month. He’d have an answer ready.

  He swung about with an angry gesture. “Why should I have alarmed him with a lot of vague suspicions. I’ve been getting weaker for months and you’ve been feeling it, too. They have a crystal cube, and when I looked into it I saw you. That’s absolutely all I know. I fell into a drugged sleep and when I woke up I felt…all right, I’ll say it…sluggish and all warm inside like a satiated vampire bat.”

  Griscom drew on his pipe. “I didn’t feel like a Dracula in the flesh, you understand. It wasn’t as gross as that. But ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay. Sing it out loud and I don’t see how it can add up to anything but a kind of mental vampirism.”

  “Yes, I think so,” the girl agreed.

  “You want to know why I didn’t warn him. I’ll tell you. He happens to be the youngest son of the President of the Intergalactic Trading Co. He’s an ambitious young whelp, and he wanted to prove to papa he could make good on his own. If I’d laid my cards on the table, a realistic report telling the truth about a planet is the one thing I couldn’t have wheedled out of him. He had to see for himself. He had to think he was improving our chances of pulling urns of beaten gold out of a very rank hat.”

  The girl looked at him. “You mean he had to be a guinea pig,” she said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  Griscom reddened. “He got back all right, didn’t he? He’s safe on his bunk in the cuddy, isn’t he? A bit white around the gills, but safe. I tell you, I had to make sure the post will stay abandoned. Now that he’s actually seen what’s inside the hat he’ll back me to the hilt. The company won’t just pigeonhole my report, and send another proctor out.”

  Griscom strode to the control board and studied the estimator. He manipulated a rheostat. He tested the synchronization of the automatic drive controls with a wet thumb and forefinger.

  Then it came: “When I was a kid, we had a pirate’s den in the backyard. We hung toy effigies from the yardarm of a little wooden ship. But when I grew up I put such things behind me. Rigel System planetarians may not be criminals. They may simply have failed to grow up.”

  Joan said slowly: “Just what does that mean?”

  “Nothing, except that I’d rather live in a six by eight room with an Irrawaddy cobra.”

  The girl directed a startled glance at Griscom’s stooped shoulders. “Jim, I thought you were a thoroughgoing materialist. If the crystals—”

  Griscom straightened heavily. “The crystals are dangerous, but not in the way you think. Any bright and shining object would be dangerous—if you had what it takes.”

  He nodded. “It’s as clear as a pikestaff. When the vision becomes fixed on a bright and shining object the subconscious leaps into the saddle, and believes everything it’s told. There is no actual outside compulsion—people hypnotize themselves. But if the operator had telepathic powers, and could get inside our minds—”

  Griscom’s face was grim. “Hypnosis might not be a self-induced state at all. Look at it this way. There may be something in the human mind which can be—manipulated. A kind of inhibiting sixth sense, perhaps, a faculty which keeps us from hopscotching it back down the shoreline into the pelagic muck. Perhaps that faculty, that inhibiting something can be filched.”

  “Filched?”

  Griscom nodded. “You know what filch means—petty pilfering, the sly taking away of something that’s not likely to be missed. Apparently Rigel System planetarians can drain organic vital energies from a distance, and most effectively, perhaps, with the aid of a shining object. Perhaps if our brains were properly manipulated we could, too. Telepathic hypnosis, however induced, should be potent and pervasive enough to overcome an evolutionary quirk.”

  “Jim!”

  Griscom frowned. “It would be an extra-sensory faculty, of course. But it could go back to a very early form of terrestrial life. For all we know even unicellular organisms may have extra-sensory endowments. Long ages ago some lowly form of life may have acquired the power and handed it on to us. Cilio-telepathy. Some primitive Cambrian—sea jelly, perhaps, or a fleshy, fat worm with a blood-red proboscis. But such a power would have to be sidetracked, or the species would end by destroying itself. So natural selection built up a barrier, an inhibiting sixth sense—”

  “Just a minute, Jim!” Joan was pressing her palms to her temples. “I don’t feel I can stand any more. I don’t believe it, it’s too revolting, I… Jim, why did you have to talk about it? Why couldn’t you have left it the way it was?”

  Griscom looked at her for a long time. “Nothing nature does or fails to do should surprise you,” he said. “Her sins of commission are bad enough, but her sins of omission—”

  His voice sharpened and became tinged with rancor, as though he were airing a grievance. “Half blind she is, a lazy and unscrupulous strumpet, but she never fails to pocket the tip, and walk off with her chin in the air. With just a little extra trouble she could have doubled our life spans, given us telescopic vision—or microscopic, for that matter—and a much richer enjoyment of scents.”

  Bosworth sat up. There was a dryness in his throat, and his brain was ticking like a clock. He tried to go to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Now he wasn’t trying any more. Now he was only interested in stopping the shaking of his limbs, and getting the cobwebs out of his brain.

  With a shudder he moved to the edge of the berth and felt around with his bare toes for his slippers on the thrumming deck. He couldn’t sleep because certain memories were much too fresh in his mind. But by tomorrow or the next day they’d begin to recede, to shrink and shrivel up, and he wouldn’t have to keep reminding himself he was in danger of cracking up.

  He was going to be all right. When he poured himself a stiff one the cobwebs which kept creeping under his eyelids would cease to trouble him. There just wouldn’t be any cobwebs and he might feel calm enough to make out a report backing Griscom to the hilt. If he couldn’t sleep, writing steadily would help to calm his nerves, and—He had only a confused recollection of descending to the deck, lurching across the cuddy and flinging open the metal cabinet which stood against the opposite bulkhead. But that he had stooped and reached inside the cabinet he could not doubt, for he suddenly found hims
elf pouring amber fluid into a glass that mirrored his face in all its haggardness.

  Although the cobwebs were creeping under his eyelids again he could see the glass clearly. His hand had trembled a little, and a thin film of spilled fluid encircled the glass. In the cold light from the lamp-studded overhead the deep-toned Scotch had a very pleasing aspect.

  He grasped the edge of the cabinet and stared down as though fascinated.

  At first there was nothing but a weaving opacity in the depths of the glass. Then the filminess cleared a little, and he saw something that glittered. The glass grew brighter and the glitter resolved itself into a gleaming control panel, very small and far away, as though he were staring down at it through the wrong end of a telescope.

  Standing in front of the panel was a tiny human figure. There was no longer any opacity inside the cube, and he could see the cold light glinting in Joan Mallory’s hair.

  Bosworth’s temples tightened, and his eyes began to shine.

  THE TRAP

  Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1945.

  It was a beautiful morning. The mist had come up deep and blue, the air was not too cold, and out of the blueness a great ship loomed, its hull outlined in garish radiance against a shimmer of light so vast and tumultuous it seemed to span the Galaxy.

  “She’s sure coming in fast!” called a voice from the star station.

  William Hanley knocked the dottle from his pipe, and scowled at a rent in the mist where a few truant stars still hung like droplets of flame. At first the ship had loomed up soundlessly, but now the landing strip was vibrating, and the drone of the huge vessel’s motors had become a deep, throbbing roar overhead.

  “She’ll take the station with her!” Hanley groaned. Then, as though his mind rejected the thought: “She’ll veer—she’ll have to. No astragator this side of the Coal Sack could be that malicious!”

  As if in confirmation a sudden, vibrant clang rang out in the stillness. Not the resonant crash of buckling gravity plates, but the more reassuring sound of magnetic mooring cables clattering against a smooth metal hull.

  Hanley stood perfectly motionless, his mouth hanging open. For an instant he had the distinct and awful feeling that he had parted company with his sanity. That the forward ends of mooring cables—a scant half-dozen magnetically groping strands—could steady and slow down a ship three hundred meters in length was against all reason.

  Yet it was happening. From the great vessel’s bow there projected a notched metal half-moon which gathered up the questing strands and bound them into a stabilizing skein a hundred yards from the mooring mast. Faster and faster, more and more incredibly, until the ship hung completely motionless—an immense, blue-black ellipsoid agleam with winking lights.

  “Bill! Did you see that? Did you see it?”

  Peering back over his shoulder, Hanley could make out the startled face of his assistant hovering like a plucked owl’s head in the station’s mist-filled doorway. As he stared in consternation young Gregg withdrew his head, and the mist which swirled in the doorway brightened. A moment later the station’s one window glowed.

  Hanley swore softly, aware of a stirring of panic deep down in his consciousness. Mingling with his alarm was an angry realization that Gregg was turning on all the lights in the station.

  On a Rigel System refueling station a million light-years from nowhere time could hang heavy with uneventfulness. A process of desensitization could set in so profound that even the coming and going of trans-Galactic cruiser flotillas—“great old ships in sidereal splendors veiled”—impinged on the mind with a mirage-like vagueness. Yet now, in a few brief moments, the pattern of months had been shattered.

  Hanley knew what was happening, of course.

  He was slowly going crazy.

  A ship with a bowsprit that gobbled up mooring cables was on par with young Gregg’s habit of yodeling to the ogreish shadow-shapes which haunted the mist-draped planetoid from dawn to dusk. And Gregg was crazy, had been for months.

  The youth hadn’t been told yet, but he was crazy. How could he be sane and want to play a saxophone into the small hours, wrenching from that utterly base instrument music that made Hanley physically ill. Most of the time he stayed by himself at the far end of the dingy station, and that, too, was a bad sign.

  Was lunacy contagious?

  Behind Hanley there loomed four cyclopean fuel tanks, their conical summits bathed in a fuzzy glow. The star station, which was also conical, had been constructed out of discarded scraps of metal in great haste by a Galactic Commission engineer bent on getting back to Terra in time for Christmas holidays.

  “The tanks’ young ’un,” Gregg had ironically dubbed it.

  There was no law, of course, to prevent Gregg from coining names for objects which got on his superior’s nerves. But as Hanley swung about and strode into the wretched structure he told himself that Gregg was more case-hardened than the average run of criminals. He was forever committing breaches of simple decency by refusing to keep his thoughts to himself. He—

  Hanley shuddered, and stood blinking at the personification of all his woes regarding him from the depths of the station’s dingy, blank-walled interior, the train of his thoughts derailed by something in the youth’s stare which infuriated him to the core of his being.

  The bright but rapidly disintegrating personality that was Gregg was not incapable of a kind of fish-cold sympathy which verged on condescension, verged on pity, and all because—Well because Gregg was forever insisting that he, Hanley, had no poetry in his soul, and no appreciation of what it meant to be an artist. Sporadically the youth painted, wrote poetry, and thought of himself generally as a misunderstood and maladjusted man of genius.

  Actually there was no lazier youth this side of Betelgeuse. When something showed signs of blowing he could be a competent grease monkey, could climb all over the big tanks till sweat dripped from him. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t lazy. Things had to come to an almost calamitous pass before he’d exert himself.

  Gregg now sat now on a narrow cot with his hands locked across the back of his head, a slight frown creasing his handsome face. Having helped himself to one of Hanley’s cigars, he was keeping his feet firmly planted on the floor, so that his superior would not suspect that he was wearing holes in a borrowed pair of cello socks.

  “Well, Bill?” he said.

  “Why did you duck out of sight just when I needed your advice?” Hanley flared.

  Gregg looked startled. “You needed my advice?”

  “Certainly.” Hanley was bitter. “When you disagree with me, I know I’m right. When you don’t, I have to watch my step.”

  Gregg took the cigar out of his mouth and stared hard at the glowing tip. “I don’t think we should ignore the message just because there were no code numerals on the tape,” he said. “I’ve a feeling it will be followed by an official message.”

  He looked up, serious concern on his face. “That’s my honest opinion, and I’d advise you not to shrug it off just because you don’t like the cut of my jib.”

  “That’s for me to decide,” Hanley snorted. Then his features softened: “The cut wouldn’t matter so much if we had more elbow room. Shut two or six or a dozen men up together in a station this size for six months running and any one of ten million personality traits can produce downright hostile reactions. You get so you resent the way a guy draws on his socks.”

  He smiled bitterly. “Even when they’re your socks.”

  “Holes in mine,” Gregg said, shamelessly. “You borrowed my magnetorazor, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, and your second best pipe. It stank up the whole planetoid.”

  Hanley fumbled in his pocket, drew out a crumpled tele-message. “It doesn’t mean a thing to me that this came in over a sidereal communication
circuit,” he said, defensively. “Any screwloose could have sent it.”

  He read aloud: “Ship of peculiar design and unknown origin, recently triangulated in Eridanus, is now believed to be approaching Orion. Vessel refuses to communicate.”

  “And that’s all,” Hanley grunted, crumpling the flimsy message for the twentieth time. “No description of the ship, no—”

  “How about ‘peculiar design’?” Gregg asked.

  “Do you call that a description?”

  “Perhaps whoever sent that message wanted you to fill in the gaps,” Gregg suggested, with a twisted smile. “If he’d said there was a ship loose in space with a cable-eating bowsprit, you know where you’d have tossed that message.”

  “It wouldn’t have cost him anything to describe the ship!” was Hanley’s embittered response.

  “No, it wouldn’t.” Gregg admitted. “But perhaps some sympathetic little minor official somewhere knew there’s nothing quite so unnerving as a terse, carefully-phrased understatement. Perhaps—”

  “Stop right there!” Hanley snapped. “I’m sick and tired of your circumlocutions.”

  “But don’t you see? He could be trying to warn you without stepping on official toes. The Commission may not want to commit itself—yet. So far the ship hasn’t made port. The Commission may be waiting to see what happens when it does. A clever man would use just that approach—throw out a hint without seeming to do so.”

  “Anything more?” Hanley exploded.

  “Only that we ought to thank our lucky stars the message came through when it did. We might have permitted her to refuel.”

  Hanley started across the room. Gregg’s eyes following him. He swung about before he reached the door.

  “Just a minute, Gregg. What do you suggest we do?”