The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack Page 7

  EARTHBOUND

  It was hours after the last official ceremony before Clifton could escape the crowd of planetlubbers with their babblings, their eligible daughters, and their stupid self-admiration. They’d paid through the nose to get him here, and they meant to get their money’s worth. The exit led only to a little balcony, but it seemed to be deserted. He took a deep breath of the night air and his eyes moved unconsciously toward the stars.

  Coming back to Earth had been a mistake, but he’d needed the money. Space Products Unlimited wanted a real deepspace hero to help celebrate its hundredth anniversary, and he’d just finished the Regulation of Rigel, so he’d been picked. Damn them and their silly speeches and awards—and damn Earth! What was one planet when there were a billion up there among the stars?

  From the other side of a potted plant there was a soft, quavering sigh. Clifton swung his head, then relaxed as he saw the other man was not looking at him. The eyes behind the dark glasses were directed toward the sky.

  “Aldebaran, Sirius, Deneb, Centaurus,” the voice whispered. It was a high-pitched voice with an odd accent, but there was the poetry of ancient yearning in it.

  He was a small, shriveled old man. His shoulders were bent. A long beard and dark glasses covered most of his face, but could not entirely conceal the deep wrinkles, even in the moonlight.

  Clifton felt a sudden touch of pity and moved closer, without quite knowing why. “Didn’t I see you on the platform?’’

  “Your memory is very good, Captain. I was awarded publicly for fifty years of faithful service making space boots. Well, I was always a good cobbler, and perhaps my boots helped some men out there.” The old man’s hand swept toward the stars, then fell back to grip the railing tightly. “They gave me a gold watch, though time means nothing to me. And a cheap world cruise ticket, as if there were any spot on this world I could still want to see.” He laughed harshly. “Forgive me if I sound bitter. But, you see, I’ve never been off Earth!”

  Clifton stared at him incredulously. “But everyone—”

  “Everyone but me,” the old man said. “Oh, I tried. I was utterly weary of Earth and I looked at the stars and dreamed. But I failed the early rigid physicals. Then, when things were easier, I tried again. A strange plague grounded the ship. A strike delayed another. Then one exploded on the pad and only a few on board were saved. It was then I realized I was meant to wait here—here on Earth, and nowhere else. So I stayed, making space boots.”

  Pity and impulse forced unexpected words to Clifton’s lips. “I’m taking off for Rigel again in four hours, and there’s a spare cabin on the Maryloo. You’re coming with me.”

  The old hand that gripped his arm was oddly gentle. “Bless you, Captain. But it would never work. I’m under orders to remain here.”

  “Nobody can order a man grounded forever. You’re coming with me if I have to drag you, Mr.—”

  “Ahasuerus.” The old man hesitated, as if expecting the name to mean something. Then he sighed and lifted his dark glasses.

  Clifton met the other’s gaze for less than a second. Then his own eyes dropped, though the memory of what he had seen was already fading. He vaulted over the balcony railing and began running away from Ahasuerus, toward his ship and the unconfined reaches of space.

  Behind him, the Wandering Jew tarried and waited.

  DARK MISSION

  The rays of the sun lanced down over the tops of the trees and into the clearing, revealing a scene of chaos and havoc. Yesterday there had been a wooden frame house there, but now only pieces of it remained. One wall had been broken away, as by an explosion, and lay on the ground in fragments; the roof was crushed in, as if some giant had stepped on it and passed on.

  But the cause of the damage was still there, lying on the ruins of the house. A tangled mass of buckled girders and metal plates lay mixed with a litter of laboratory equipment that had been neatly arranged in one room of the house, and parts of a strange engine lay at one side. Beyond was a tube that might have been a rocket. The great metal object that lay across the broken roof now only hinted at the sleek cylinder it had once been, but a trained observer might have guessed that it was the wreck of a rocketship. From the former laboratory, flames were licking up at the metal hull, and slowly spreading towards the rest of the house.

  In the clearing, two figures lay outstretched, of similar size and build, but otherwise unlike. One was a dark man of middle age, completely naked, with a face cut and battered beyond all recognition. The odd angle of the head was unmistakable proof that his neck was broken. The other man might have been a brawny sea Viking of earlier days, both from his size and appearance, but his face revealed something finer and of a higher culture. He was fully clothed, and the slow movement of his chest showed that there was still life in him. Beside him, there was a broken beam from the roof, a few spots of blood on it. There was more blood on the man’s head, but the cut was minor, and he was only stunned.

  Now he stirred uneasily and groped uncertainly to his feet, shaking his head and fingering the cut on his scalp. His eyes traveled slowly across the clearing and to the ruins that were burning merrily. The corpse claimed his next attention, and he turned it over to examine the neck. He knit his brows and shook his head savagely, trying to call back the memories that eluded him.

  They would not come. He recognized what his eyes saw, but his mind produced no words to describe them, and the past was missing. His first memory was of wakening to find his head pounding with an ache that was almost unbearable. Without surprise, he studied the rocket and saw that it had come down on the house, out of control, but it evoked no pictures in his mind, and he gave up. He might have been in the rocket or the house at the time; he had no way of telling which. Probably the naked man had been asleep at the time in the house.

  Something prickled gently in the back of his mind, growing stronger and urging him to do something. He must not waste time here, but must fulfill some vital mission. What mission? For a second, he almost had it, and then it was gone again, leaving only the compelling urge that must be obeyed. He shrugged and started away from the ruins toward the little trail that showed through the trees.

  Then another impulse called him back to the corpse, and he obeyed it because he knew of nothing else to do. Acting without conscious volition, he tugged at the corpse, found it strangely heavy, and dragged it toward the house. The flames were everywhere now, but he found a place where the heat was not too great and pulled the corpse over a pile of combustibles.

  With the secondary impulse satisfied, the first urge returned, and he set off down the trail moving slowly. The shoes hurt his feet, and his legs were leaden, but he kept on grimly, while a series of questions went around his head in circles. Who was he, where, and why?

  Whoever had lived in the house, himself or the corpse, had obviously chosen the spot for privacy; the trail seemed to go on through the woods endlessly, and he saw no signs of houses along it. He clumped on mechanically, wondering if there was no end, until a row of crossed poles bearing wires caught his eye. Ahead, he made out a broad highway, with vehicles speeding along it in both directions, and hastened forward, hoping to meet someone.

  Luck was with him. Pulled up at the side of the road was one of the vehicles, and a man was doing something at the front end of the car. Rough words carried back to him suggesting anger. He grinned suddenly and hastened toward the car, his eyes riveted on the man’s head. A tense feeling shot through his brain and left, just as he reached the machine.

  “Need help?” The words slipped out unconsciously, and now other words came pouring into his head, along with ideas and knowledge, and that seemed wrong somehow. The driving impulse he felt was still unexplained.

  The man had looked up at his words, and relief shot over the sweating face. “Help’s the one thing I need,” he replied gratefully. “I been fussing with this blasted contraption darned near an ho
ur, and nobody’s even stopped to ask, so far. Know anything about it?”

  “Ummm.” The stranger, as he was calling himself for want of a better name, tested the wires himself, vaguely troubled at the simplicity of the engine. He gave up and went around to the other side, lifting the hood and inspecting the design. Then sureness came to him as he reached for the tool kit. “Probably the…umm…timing pins,” he said.

  It was. A few minutes later, the engine purred softly and the driver turned to the stranger. “Okay now, I guess. Good thing you came along; worst part of the road, and not a repair shop for miles. Where you going?”

  “I—” The stranger caught himself. “The big city,” he said, for want of a better destination.

  “Hop in, then. I’m going to Elizabeth, right on your way. Glad to have you along; gets so a man talks to himself on these long drives, unless he has something to do. Smoke?”

  “Thank you, no. I never do.” He watched the other light up, feeling uncomfortable about it. The smell of the smoke, when it reached him, was nauseous, as were the odor of gasoline and the man’s own personal effluvium, but he pushed them out of his mind as much as possible. “Have you heard or read anything about a rocketship of some kind?”

  “Sure. Oglethorpe’s, you mean? I been reading what the papers had to say about it.” The drummer took his eyes off the road for a second, and his beady little eyes gleamed. “I been wondering a long time why some of these big-shot financiers don’t back up the rockets, and finally Oglethorpe does. Boy, now maybe we’ll find out something about this Mars business.”

  The stranger grinned mechanically. “What does his ship look like?”

  “Picture of it in the Scoop, front page. Find it back of the seat, there. Yeah, that’s it. Wonder what the Martians look like?”

  “Hard to guess,” the stranger answered. Even rough half-tones of the picture showed that it was not the ship that had crashed, but radically different. “No word of other rockets?”

  “Nope, not that I know of, except the Army’s test things. You know, I kinda feel maybe the Martians might look like us. Sure.” He took the other’s skepticism for granted without looking around. “Wrote a story about that once, for one of these science-fiction magazines, but they sent it back. I figured out maybe a long time ago there was a civilization on Earth—Atlantis, maybe—and they went over and settled on Mars. Only Atlantis sunk on them and there they were, stranded. I figured maybe one day they came back, sort of lost out for a while, but popped up again and started civilization humming. Not bad, eh?”

  “Clever,” the stranger admitted. “But it sounds vaguely familiar. Suppose we said instead there was a war between the mother world and Mars that wrecked both civilizations, instead of your Atlantis sinking. Wouldn’t that be more logical?”

  “Maybe, I dunno. Might try it, though mostly they seem to want freaks—Darned fool, passing on a hill!” He leaned out to shake a pudgy fist, then came back to his rambling account. “Read one the other day with two races, one like octopuses, the other twenty feet tall and all blue.”

  Memory pricked tantalizingly and came almost to the surface. Blue—Then it was gone again, leaving only a troubled feeling. The stranger frowned and settled down the seat, answering in monosyllables to the other’s monologue, and watching the patchwork of country and cities slip by.

  “There’s Elizabeth. Any particular place you want me to drop you?”

  The stranger stirred from the half-coma induced by the cutting ache in his head, and looked about. “Any place,” he answered. Then the surge in the back of his mind grabbed at him again, and he changed it. “Some doctor’s office.”

  That made sense, of course. Perhaps the impulse had been only the logical desire to seek medical aid, all along. But it was still there, clamoring for expression, and he doubted the logic of anything connected with it. The call for aid could not explain the sense of disaster that accompanied it. As the car stopped before a house with a doctor’s shingle, his pulse was hammering with frenzied urgency.

  “Here we are.” The drummer reached out toward the door handle, almost brushing one of the other’s hands. The stranger jerked it back savagely, avoiding contact by a narrow margin, and a cold chill ran up his back and quivered its way down again. If that hand had touched him—The half-opened door closed again, but left one fact impressed on him. Under no conditions must he suffer another to make direct contact with his body, lest something horrible should happen! Another crazy angle, unconnected with the others, but too strong for disobedience. He climbed out, muttering his thanks, and made his way up the walk toward the office of Dr. Lanahan, hours 12:00 to 4:00.

  * * * *

  The doctor was an old man, with the seamed and rugged good-nature of the general practitioner, and his office fitted him. There was a row of medical books along one wall, a glass-doored cabinet containing various medicaments, and a clutter of medical instruments. He listened to the stranger’s account quietly, smiling encouragement at times, and tapping the desk with his pencil.

  “Amnesia, of course,” he agreed, finally. “Rather peculiar in some respects, but most cases of that are individual. When the brain is injured, its actions are usually unpredictable. Have you considered the possibility of hallucinations in connection with those impulses you mention?”

  “Yes.” He had considered it from all angles, and rejected the solutions as too feeble. “If they were ordinary impulses, I’d agree with you. But they’re far deeper than that, and there’s a good reason for them, somewhere. I’m sure of that.”

  “Hmm.” The doctor tapped his pencil again and considered. The stranger sat staring at the base of his neck, and the tense feeling in his head returned, as it had been when he first met the drummer. Something rolled around in his mind and quieted. “And you have nothing on you in the way of identification?”

  “Uh!” The stranger grunted, feeling foolish, and reached into his pockets. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He brought out a package of cigarettes, a stained handkerchief, glasses, odds and ends, that meant nothing to him, and finally a wallet stuffed with bills. The doctor seized on that and ran through its contents quickly.

  “Evidently you had money… Ummm, no identification card, except for the letters L. H. Ah, there we are; a calling card.” He passed it over, along with the wallet, and smiled in self-satisfaction. “Evidently you’re a fellow physician, Dr. Lurton Haines. Does that recall anything?”

  “Nothing.” It was good to have a name, in a way, but that was his only response to the sight of the card. And why was he carrying glasses and cigarettes for which he had no earthly use?

  The doctor was hunting through his pile of books and finally came up with a dirty red volume. “Who’s Who,” he explained. “Let’s see. Umm. Here we are. ‘Lurton R. Haines, M.D.’ Odd, I thought you were younger than that. Work along cancer research. No relatives mentioned. The address is evidently that of the house you remember first—‘Surrey Road, Danesville.’ Want to see it?”

  He passed the volume over, and the stranger—or Haines—scanned it carefully, but got no more out of it than the other’s summary, except for the fact that he was forty-two years old. He put the book back on the desk, and reached for his wallet, laying a bill on the pad where the other could reach it.

  “Thank you, Dr. Lanahan.” There was obviously nothing more the doctor could do for him, and the odor of the little room and the doctor was stifling him; apparently he was allergic to the smell of other men. “Never mind the cut on the head—it’s purely superficial.”

  “But—”

  Haines shrugged and mustered a smile, reached for the door, and made for the outside again. The urge was gone now, replaced by a vast sense of gloom, and he knew that his mission had ended in failure.

  * * * *

  They knew so little about healing, though they tried so hard. The entire field of medicine ran through Haines’ mind n
ow, with all its startling successes and hopeless failures, and he knew that even his own problem was beyond their ability. And the knowledge, like the sudden return of speech, was a mystery; it had come rushing into his mind while he stared at the doctor, at the end of the sudden tenseness, and a numbing sense of failure had accompanied it. Strangely, it was not the knowledge of a specialist in cancer research, but such common methods as a general practitioner might use.

  One solution suggested itself, but it was too fantastic for belief. The existence of telepaths was suspected, but not ones who could steal whole pages of knowledge from the mind of another, merely by looking at him. No, that was more illogical than the sudden wakening of isolated fields of memory by the sight of the two men.

  He stopped at a corner, weary under the load of despondency he was carrying, and mulled it over dully. A newsboy approached hopefully. “Time a’ News out!” the boy sing-songed his wares. “Scoop ‘n’ Juhnal ! Read awl about the big train wreck! Paper, mister?”

  Haines shrugged dully. “No paper!”

  “Blonde found muidehed in bath-tub,” the boy insinuated. “Mahs rocket account!” The man must have an Achilles’ heel somewhere.

  But the garbled jargon only half registered on Haines’ ears. He started across the street, rubbing his temples, before the second driving impulse caught at him and sent him back remorselessly to the paper boy. He found some small change in his pocket, dropped a nickel on the pile of papers, disregarding the boy’s hand, and picked up a copy of the Scoop. “Screwball,” the boy decided aloud, and dived for the nickel.

  The picture was no longer on the front page of the tabloid, but Haines located the account with some effort. “Mars Rocket Take-Off Wednesday,” said the headline in conservative twenty-four-point type, and there was three-quarters of a column under it. “Man’s first flight to Mars will not be delayed, James Oglethorpe told reporters here today. Undismayed by the skepticism of the scientists, the financier is going ahead with his plans, and expects his men to take off for Mars Wednesday, June 8, as scheduled. Construction has been completed, and the rocket machine is now undergoing tests.”