Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 5

“I wish we knew what those three words on the book meant. ‘Advanced H-u-m-a-n A-n-a-t-o-m-y.’ ”

  “Nothing too important, really. Or we’d’ve known their meaning. Well, there will be other things to build, and we need energy. Let’s go to Maintenance and recharge out plates.”

  “Good thought. I guess those things wouldn’t have been strong enough to build anything anyway. At any rate, they can’t be dangerous . . .”

  The Death Star

  Alone he conquered his ultimate world, this lost little Earthman doomed by the stars—a world that fulfilled all man’s dreams—save the one without which he must die!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lost in the Void

  DON’T call it perspiration—the word is sweat.

  If you’ve got some on your forehead, okay. If you haven’t, maybe this is for you more than the other guy—at least that’s how I feel about it. Just my opinion. I’m nobody important; I’m not the type. If you want my star-map to Qyylao when I’m finished, you can have it. But the pink tea will have to be on you.

  My name is Joe Kosta, and I’m a Deep Space prospector. I’m no deadbeat—I’ve got enough money to pay my own freight, and I’ve earned it all myself. The hard way. I never hit a big strike in my life—not until Qyylao.

  It’s true, what some of my fancy-pants friends in Venus City will tell you—I could’ve quit Deep Space ten years ago and taken things easy on a Martian orchid-ranch for the rest of my life. Swimming pools, lawn chairs, and all that jetwash. You know.

  But even when the power-pack on my suit quit halfway back to where my ore-lugger was circling in its orbit around the planetoid I’d just surveyed, I don’t think I could’ve been sold on the idea that I was in the habit of biting off more Deep Space than I could chew. Sure, Deep Space makes oceans look like spilled tea in a saucer. But you don’t just tiptoe into the edge of it. You grab it with both fists and kick like hell all the way out and all the way back again.

  I had found an uncharted planetoid belt out there, and had singled out one big hunk in particular that looked good—gold, uranium, deutronium—but I hadn’t even seen Qyylao until after I got in trouble. Like you do if you know your business, I figured out an orbit for the lugger, put on a suit equipped with an Omicron drive unit, and jumped out after my find.

  It was a good find, all right. A heavy chunk of rock, loaded to its top strata with ore that was plenty rich in the kind of stuff I liked to trade in. The spectronoscope in the observation bubble of my lugger hadn’t lied to me. I figured from the preliminary survey I made, just walking around the thing and chipping off ore samples here and there, that I could fill my hull in maybe two months’ time, and take back home about a half-million in gold and three times that in deutronium. Good find. Worth two cold months on canned air on a lonesome little chunk of rock in the middle of the biggest nowhere the Lord ever made.

  Satisfied, I picked up the radar signal from the ship and computed a quick trajectory to it, and started driving back for the portable equipment. I was still accelerating when the Omicron and the radar quit.

  If I’d’ve been a little closer, I could’ve met the ship on its way around just by drifting. Had that happen once before. But this time I was caught too far out, and I knew I stood to miss the ship, as it came around, by a good twenty miles. It might as well have been twenty million. I’d had enough acceleration to carry me out beyond the little planetoid’s gravity field—if I hadn’t, I’d’ve fallen back and broken my thick neck. The thing had no atmosphere envelope, so the chute pack I carried for planets that did have would’ve been as much use as an ice-cube in hell. I always pack a chute, though, because when you can use one, it saves the drive-unit on your suit a lot of wear and tear.

  So, once beyond the grav-field, I just kept drifting, and when the ship came around again about an hour later, I guess I was a good seven or eight hundred miles away from it.

  I had air for about twenty hours and good insulation in the suit. I wouldn’t freeze.

  Just suffocate after a while.

  Well, as the old saying has it, there I was, a thousand miles up and flat on my back.

  . . . The only thing bad about any spacesuit you buy is that in order to make any kind of repairs on the things—especially on the drive-units—you have to take ’em off, and then get going with your emergency repair kit. So I was stuck there, too.

  I had a lot of time to try to think of some way out, and not much time to live if I didn’t. And like those pals of mine who go vacationing on Venus all the time will tell you, I get a little far off the beaten path in my job. Far enough so that the nearest transport or freighter route was a good half light-year away. The only answer I got to the whole thing was that I was drifting at about eight hundred miles an hour straight out into no place.

  At a slow speed like that you hardly know you’re moving. You wouldn’t, if you didn’t keep a close eye on familiar constellations, and even then it’s damned near impossible to tell unless you’re a pretty old hand at navigation in Deep Space. You get a little panicky, too—there’s no bottom or top to anything—no real direction at all. Just you and a lot of stars, only you need to keep on breathing. It’s sort of funny, too, and you get to laughing a little. There you are, trapped as neatly as a squirrel in a cage—without a thing holding you. And you have nothing to hold on it—except the emptiness of space.

  I ADMIT it began to get me. Not just because I was going to die, but because there was nothing I could do. A man has to do something, even when he’s on the way out. I was getting so bothered about it that I forgot to think about the possibilities in a planetoid belt. The little hunks of rock are usually separated only by a few thousand miles—not hundreds of thousands or millions as between planets in a regular system. I’d drifted maybe ten hours and never thought of it.

  So I was surprised and even a little panicky when I felt my feet suddenly pressed against the soles of my boots. They say you can always tell when you’re falling, and I could. Falling feet first, but I couldn’t see toward what.

  With the Omicron shot, I had no power to break the fall, so instead of having about ten more hours to live, it looked as though I’d be cashing in in a matter of seconds. I even resented having that much time taken away from me—but again, there was nothing to do. Just hit and splatter.

  I didn’t catch on until the shrill whistle around my heavy lead-lined helmet began to deepen to a soft roar. What I was able to see below me by that time was nothing but a barren, jagged gray wasteland like any other planetoid—who’d think it still had an atmosphere?

  It wasn’t a big hunk—maybe a thousand miles in diameter at most. But it had a gravity like Earth’s, so I knew it was another of the “heavy” planetoids like the one I’d surveyed, and probably loaded with all the uranium and deutronium a man could ask for. Heavy, so it had kept an atmosphere long after it had become too barren to support even a scrubby vegetation.

  But I didn’t have much time, because the envelope was probably less than fifty miles thick. I Waited until the dull roar around me subsided to a low moan, then I hauled with everything I had on the rip-cord of my chute.

  And I got down in one piece without so much as a stubbed toe to show for it.

  I was still alive—to suffocate in ten hours. Unless, of course, that junk I’d chuted down through was breathable—and the chances, as always when you’re in a jam with no way out, were plenty to one against that.

  I laid flat on my back a while, just resting, figuring, and trying to get up the nerve to try an atmosphere test.

  The planetoid was a barren mess; even the Pluto stonemoles wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. There was a little light as there always is on these wanderers of Deep Space—light from countless thousands of far-off suns. A twilight, sort of, that makes you think you see what you don’t, and doesn’t show you the things you should.

  But I know the outlines of a city when I see them.

  If your granddad ever told you ghost stories when you we
re a kid, and described how haunted houses look in the light of the full moon, you’ll have an idea of how the city looked. Dead—eerie, shadowed so you couldn’t be sure how high the highest spire stood, or how far away the first building was. You just knew it was empty and hadn’t echoed to voices or footsteps in a million years.

  I thought about it, all the while trying to get up the nerve to open the testvalve in my helmet and sniff the stuff that this rock used for air.

  I felt like a kid trying to muster enough guts to take his first jump from a high diving board.

  At that point, you either do it or you don’t. I opened the valve a quarter-turn, held my breath, and let some of the stuff mix with the canned air in my helmet. I turned it off, and then I took a breath.

  The first whiff made me sneeze.

  And the second and the third and so on from there—well, it smelled like an old basement that had been without plumbing for too long, but after I fooled with it for half an hour, I knew I could breathe it and not even need smelling salts. And even better—it was warm!

  Sometimes you get the breaks when you need ’em most. That thousand-to-one shot.

  Why the stuff was warm—by that I mean about plus forty degrees Fahrenheit, which certainly is warm compared to what I expected—I don’t know.

  I didn’t get the sleepy feeling until I was out of the suit and opening up the emergency tool kit. I was just getting the Omicron ready for a look at its trunk circuits when the Sand Man clubbed me good.

  For no good reason under any sun there is, I was out like a busted jet before I could even start swinging.

  WHEN I woke up they were all around me, quiet-like, and the place was as bright and warm as if it were swinging in the orbit of good old Earth herself. There was lush, lavender grass beneath me, and the landscape all around the spot on which I lay was thick with foliage in pastels more varied than even a Martian artist had ever caught on canvas. The sky ended in a pale green haze, and the low swell of a mountain chain on the horizon reflected a deep, burnished gold.

  A warm breeze rippled the grass around me and caressed me as though I were its lover. It was an intoxicating breath, no more like the dank, stale stuff I’d breathed a while back than Venusian perfume is like the stink-weed of Uranus.

  They were watching me, so I stood up. I had the curved butt of my ray-pistol caressing the palm of my hand just in case, my forefinger relaxed on its trigger.

  The first thing they did when I stood up was laugh a little, and I though it was at me and I wasn’t in the mood for it. I drew the pistol just to let them know I meant business. The musical sound of their laughter stopped as though it has been on a transcriptograph and somebody pulled the plug out. It was as sudden as that.

  We exchanged stares. I was sure the laughter was still in their wide, gold-flecked eyes, but you can’t shoot a woman for just laughing with her eyes. Not any woman as beautiful as they were.

  I guess there were about a dozen of them ringed around me, all dressed in the Same kind of shimmery, gauze-like stuff that they still won’t let a gal wear back in Boston, on Earth.

  Their voices were as beautiful and graceful as they were; I couldn’t tell you the story without admitting that for a while, anyway, they had me believing in Utopia. They tried talking to me and when that didn’t work out, I guess they telepathed. Whatever they did it worked, and when I talked back they seemed to understand all right.

  I stuck the pistol back in its holster.

  “What is this place?”

  “Qyylao,” came the soft, gently whispering thought in reply.

  “All right. What was that lousy gray place I lit on first?”

  “Qyylao,” the reply came again.

  I got a funny feeling up the back of my spine and caressed the pistol butt again. Because, in the distance, I could-see the same outline of a city that I had seen before, and that it was the same city there couldn’t have been a doubt. The same—only different, now. You could feel the life that was in it, just as you could see the beauty of its many-faceted alabaster columns, glittering like a huge polished diamond in sunlight that came out of n0where.

  “Things look different in daylight,” I said. “Does the stone turn to grass every morning?”

  The laughter again, but I didn’t draw the pistol. I didn’t think I’d need to, unless they began not answering questions.

  “We will take you to our city, calloused one. And to the Garden of Dreams, and tin Lake of Forgetfulness—”

  “What’s this calloused business? And how about explaining how you change scenes around here so fast? If I don’t know where I am, dammit, I won’t be able to find out where I’ve—uh, been.

  For two cents, I thought, I’d forget these Red Riding Hoods and go to work on my suit. But then they came a little closer, and the price went up two bits. It occurred to me that things weren’t bad around here at that—maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let the Omicron wait a while . . .

  “Calloused?” the thought came in answer to my question. “The mark of a lesser being, who works to live! But we meant no offense, strong one. It is only that you—appealed to us, and so we let you see Qyylao as it actually exists. It is perhaps no fault of your own that you have been a worker.”

  I didn’t get sore, but maybe if I had right then both sides could have saved each other a lot of trouble. Instead, I tried to get a line on Qyylao, both versions.

  The tallest of the women stepped forward, and the fragrance of her mingled with that of the air I was breathing was almost enough to make me stop asking practical questions right there. If I’d’ve been built like anybody else, and if my pop hadn’t been a pick-swinger from the old country, maybe I would’ve stopped, The look she had in her eyes was the real McCoy, not the jazzed-up version you get from the country-club set back home.

  “Qyylao,” she told me slowly, “is bleak and dead to strangers, whom we do not wish to trespass. It is an illusion fostered by a device created by the last of our scientists, who lived uncountable eons ago, in a truly forgotten past. But even so far back, when our race was still chained by the fetters of daily toil, we had solved the many riddles of the mind. We wished, even then, no trespassing on our lovely sphere by—the wrong sort of people . . .” Don’t ask me why I swallowed that one. I guess that’s when I really started slipping. She kept explaining, and I kept trying to understand while sizing up the rest of the surroundings as matter-of-factly as possible. I slipped some more.

  “The device our men of science perfected is merely a creator of illusions; an amplifier of thought-impulses electronically recorded on a series of vacuum grids, which functions perpetually to effect an instantaneous hypnosis for any intruder.”

  I could tell the way she said it that she didn’t know a word of what she was talking about. It was as though the explanation, itself, had been recorded, ready for parroting when necessary.

  “So your gadget makes chance intruders think they’re busted in on a dead hunk of rock, not even worth a second look, is that it? They just get disgusted, and take right off again.”

  “Fundamentally, that is correct. And for many ages, it has not failed us.”

  “I can see how it wouldn’t. But what I want to know is how come you let me in on your nice layout? How do I rate?”

  She just laughed again.

  And we started walking toward the beautiful city.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The City of Dreams

  THE city wasn’t half as far away as it looked. Or maybe the walk seemed short because of the company I was keeping. I knew they were communicating among themselves, but the only remarks addressed to me were from the blue-haired beauty that had spoken to me first. She seemed to have taken on the self-appointed job of guide, and I can’t say that I minded. I suppose I was beginning to get ideas when a rather practical thought crossed my mind.

  “Where,” I asked as we entered the city’s gold-laced gates, “are the men of this planet?”

  “In the city,” she said. “At
sport, or in the garden or the lake, or perhaps in the Valley of Melody. They are very kind—they have always left to us the privilege of greeting acceptable strangers. Which is, after all, only just, because our lives were the more—that is, because—

  She didn’t have that explanation down so pat, and I waited for her to get it ironed out. She didn’t. She changed the subject. “First,” she said, “we will show you our city. And then—”

  “Just show me to a restaurant,” I said. “I’d appreciate some solid chow. I’ve been on concentrates for Lord knows how long.”

  “You have not dined?”

  “Not like the Romans used to, anyway. Pills.” I showed her my half-filled tube of concentrates.

  “Then, first, a banquet! Straightaway, in the Hall of Suns, there shall be a least in honor of your presence on Qyylao!”

  It was like so much magic. For all I knew, it could’ve been just that, but I had a hunch there was a lot more to it than skilled practice of the black arts.

  The Hall of Suns was an open amphitheater, nestled in the heart of the glittering city. Perhaps three hundred yards in length and a third that in width, it reminded me of the old football bowls we used to have back on Earth, except that it would have made any old Grecian architect turn greener than a mildewed penny. The slender pillars that tapered upward to perfect points from their elliptical bases about the circumference of the ovular “hall” must have given the place its name, for hanging in mid-air about a foot above their tips were, so help me, actual miniature suns. They coruscated with the blue-white beauty of a nova, and T reasoned that here was the first example I had even seen of the science of atomics turned to decorative use. But I was corrected.

  “Decorative, of course,” the tall woman at my shoulder said, “but without them, Qyylao would have neither, heat nor light.

  Their energy is so distributed that no one part of the entire planet receives a concentration of either in greater quantity than another.”