The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (54 page)

“We
should
be immune now to Vestan attack,” Kenniston said prayerfully.

“But what good’s that going to do us?” Holk Or demanded. “Are you figuring to try an escape into the jungle?”

“No, I’m figuring on taking the
Falcon
—by using the Vestans,” Kenniston replied. “Holk, can you get into the ship and turn off the power that keeps the electric wall going? Can you drop the wall?”

The Jovian’s jaw dropped. “Why, sure, I could do that, but if I did, all those hordes of Vestans outside the wall will burst in here—”

He stopped, his eyes bulging. “Good God, then that’s your plan? To let the Vestans in?”

“That’s it,” Kenniston said tightly, his face grim. “To let the Vestans in on the pirates. That’ll give us a chance to take the ship—if the formula really makes us immune to the Vestans.”

The terrible nature of the proposal stunned them all. But in a moment a flame of purpose lit in the Jovian’s eyes.

“I’ll do it!” he swore. “It’s better than waiting for Dark to kill me like he’s planning. You be ready!”

The Jovian slipped out of the opening in the back of the hut. They saw him presently, casually approaching the door of the
Falcon
.

John Dark stood, a tall, dominant figure in the moonslight, barking orders to the scores of pirates who were bolting in the last of the new rocket-tubes. Kenniston’s eyes swung toward the shimmering electric wall, and the horde of Vestan-dominated animals outside it.

The wall suddenly died! And as the electric barrier vanished, into the clearing came rushing the swarm of asteroidal animals.

“The wall’s down!” John Dark yelled, his atom-gun leaping into his hand. “Get back into the ship—get back—”

The crash of his atom-gun drowned his own shout. Other pirates were firing wildly at the hideous creatures assailing them.

For the little gray Vestans had detached themselves from their animal victims and were swarming upon the pirates, clambering with blurring speed up their legs and backs, sinking into their necks the tiny antennae.

Kenniston glimpsed John Dark, with a hideous little gray bunch now fastened to the back of his neck, drop his gun and stalk stiffly away toward the jungle. His face was an unhuman, lifeless mask—he was a human automaton, dominated utterly by the alien creature.

“Come on!” Kenniston yelled to his friends. “Now’s our chance to get into the ship!”

They plunged out of the hut into the gruesome melee. Screaming pirates were now running into the jungle in vain effort to escape the hordes of Vestans. More than half the corsairs were now overcome.

Kenniston heard a scream from Gloria as they ran, felt a swift scurrying up his back, then the needle-like stab of antennae sinking into his neck.

But the parasitic creature did
not
overpower his will! He reached around, grasped and tore loose the hideous little thing, and with strong revulsion flung it to the ground.

“Your formula works, Ricky—we’re immune to them!” he gasped. “But hurry!”

Other Vestans were clambering up on them like ghastly gray spiders as they ran, but were powerless to overcome them. They tore away the creatures and plunged on.

Holk Or appeared in the door of the
Falcon
, his green face blazing as his atom-pistol pumped crashing fire into pirates inside the ship.

“I’ve got the ship cleared of them!” the Jovian shouted to Kenniston. “Let’s get out of here!”

It was time they did so. Almost the last of John Dark’s pirates had been possessed by Vestans and had become parasite-dominated robots stumbling off into the jungle. The remaining swarms of gray creatures were scurrying toward Kenniston’s group.

They tumbled into the
Falcon
and slammed shut the space-door. The ship, completely if roughly repaired, was ready for takeoff. Captain Walls and the men of the
Sunsprite
crew hastily started the newly-installed cyclotrons while Kenniston and the others raced up to the bridge.

Kenniston took the controls. He sent the big black pirate ship leaping up into the darkness upon flaming keel and tail-jets, and then it climbed steeply toward the wonderful sky of countless rushing moonlets.

By the time an hour had passed, the
Falcon
had groped out through the periodic break in the meteor-swarm around the asteroid. And it was throbbing at steadily increasing speed out into the vault of space, away from the World with a Thousand Moons.

“We’ll head for Mars,” Kenniston told the others. “We can report there to the Patrol.”

“If you don’t mind,” Holk Or put in hastily, “I’d just as soon you dropped me at some asteroid before then. I’ve no desire to meet the Patrol.”

Captain Walls told the Jovian, “Nonsense! After what you’ve done, you’ll get a full pardon from the Patrol.”

“You can count on it,” Hugh Murdock told the doubtful Jovian. “We have some influence, back at Earth.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go honest, then,” sighed Holk Or. “All the real pirate outfits are gone now, anyway.” He shook his head heavily as he walked away. “The System sure isn’t what it used to be.”

Captain Walls was asking Ricky earnestly, “You’re quite sure your formula will cure my son? All these years, I’ve hoped and prayed—”

“I’m certain,” Ricky smiled. “Within a few weeks after we get back to Earth, gravitation-paralysis will be a thing of the past.”

They moved off with the others. But Gloria lingered in the bridge with Kenniston.

“Where will you be going, after we get back?” she asked him quietly.

“Oh, back to space,” he answered, a little uncomfortably. “There’s nothing to hold me on Earth now that Ricky’s work has succeeded.”

“Nothing to hold you on Earth?” Gloria repeated. “That, I would say, is about the most ungallant speech on record.”

He flushed. “You don’t mean—that night on the
Sunsprite
—you weren’t in earnest, surely—”

“Your passionate proposal is accepted,” Gloria said calmly.

Kenniston was aghast. “But I didn’t propose! I mean—I do love you, and you know it, but you’re an heiress, and I—”

“We’ll have all the way back to Mars to argue
that
out,” she told him. “And I have an idea you’ll lose.”

Kenniston had the same idea.

THE STARS, MY BROTHERS

CHAPTER 1

Something tiny went wrong, but no one ever knew whether it was in an electric relay or in the brain of the pilot.

The pilot was Lieutenant Charles Wandek, UNRC, home address: 1677 Anstey Avenue, Detroit. He did not survive the crash of his ferry into Wheel Five. Neither did his three passengers, a young French astrophysicist, an East Indian expert on magnetic fields, and a forty-year-old man from Philadelphia who was coming out to replace a pump technician.

Someone else who did not survive was Reed Kieran, the only man in Wheel Five itself to lose his life. Kieran, who was thirty-six years old, was an accredited scientist-employee of UNRC. Home address: 815 Elm Street, Midland Springs, Ohio.

Kieran, despite the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor, was in Wheel Five because of a woman. But the woman who had sent him there was no beautiful lost love. Her name was Gertrude Lemmiken; she was nineteen years old and overweight, with a fat, stupid face. She suffered from head-colds, and sniffed constantly in the Ohio college classroom where Kieran taught Physics Two.

One March morning, Kieran could bear it no longer. He told himself, “If she sniffs this morning, I’m through. I’ll resign and join the UNRC.”

Gertrude sniffed. Six months later, having finished his training for the United Nations Reconnaissance Corps, Kieran shipped out for a term of duty in UNRC Space Laboratory Number 5, known more familiarly as Wheel Five.

Wheel Five circled the Moon. There was an elaborate base on the surface of the Moon in this year 1981. There were laboratories and observatories there, too. But it had been found that the alternating fortnights of boiling heat and near-absolute-zero cold on the lunar surface could play havoc with the delicate instruments used in certain researches. Hence Wheel Five had been built and was staffed by research men who were rotated at regular eight-month intervals.

Kieran loved it, from the first. He thought that that was because of the sheer beauty of it, the gaunt, silver deaths-head of the Moon forever turning beneath, the still and solemn glory of the undimmed stars, the filamentaries stretched across the distant star-clusters like shining veils, the quietness, the peace.

But Kieran had a certain intellectual honesty, and after a while he admitted to himself that neither the beauty nor the romance of it was what made this life so attractive to him. It was the fact that he was far away from Earth. He did not even have to look at Earth, for nearly all geophysical research was taken care of by Wheels Two and Three that circled the mother planet. He was almost completely divorced from all Earth’s problems and people.

Kieran liked people, but had never felt that he understood them. What seemed important to them, all the drives of ordinary day-to-day existence, had never seemed very important to him. He had felt that there must be something wrong with him, something lacking, for it seemed to him that people everywhere committed the most outlandish follies, believed in the most incredible things, were swayed by pure herd-instinct into the most harmful courses of behavior. They could not all be wrong, he thought, so he must be wrong—and it had worried him. He had taken partial refuge in pure science, but the study and then the teaching of astrophysics had not been the refuge that Wheel Five was. He would be sorry to leave the Wheel when his time was up.

And he was sorry, when the day came. The others of the staff were already out in the docking lock in the rim, waiting to greet the replacements from the ferry. Kieran, hating to leave, lagged behind. Then, realizing it would be churlish not to meet this young Frenchman who was replacing him, he hurried along the corridor in the big spoke when he saw the ferry coming in.

He was two-thirds of the way along the spoke to the rim when it happened. There was a tremendous crash that flung him violently from his feet. He felt a coldness, instant and terrible.

He was dying.

He was dead.

The ferry had been coming in on a perfectly normal approach when the tiny something went wrong, in the ship or in the judgment of the pilot. Its drive-rockets suddenly blasted on full, it heeled over sharply, it smashed through the big starboard spoke like a knife through butter.

Wheel Five staggered, rocked, and floundered. The automatic safety bulkheads had all closed, and the big spoke—Section T2—was the only section to blow its air, and Kieran was the only man caught in it. The alarms went off, and while the wreckage of the ferry, with three dead men in it, was still drifting close by, everyone in the Wheel was in his pressure-suit and emergency measures were in full force.

Within thirty minutes it became evident that the Wheel was going to survive this accident. It was edging slowly out of orbit from the impetus of the blow, and in the present weakened state of the construction its small corrective rockets could not be used to stop the drift. But Meloni, the UNRC captain commanding, had got first reports from his damage-control teams, and it did not look too bad. He fired off peremptory demands for the repair materials he would need, and was assured by UNRC headquarters at Mexico City that the ferries would be loaded and on their way as soon as possible.

Meloni was just beginning to relax a little when a young officer brought up a minor but vexing problem. Lieutenant Vinson had headed the small party sent out to recover the bodies of the four dead men. In their pressure-suits they had been pawing through the tangled wreckage for some time, and young Vinson was tired when he made his report.

“We have all four alongside, sir. The three men in the ferry were pretty badly mangled in the crash. Kieran wasn’t physically wounded, but died from space-asphyxiation.”

The captain stared at him. “Alongside? Why didn’t you bring them in? They’ll go back in one of the ferries to Earth for burial.”

“But—” Vinson started to protest.

Meloni interrupted sharply. “You need to learn a few things about morale, Lieutenant. You think it’s going to do morale here any good to have four dead men floating alongside where everyone can see them? Fetch them in and store them in one of the holds.”

Vinson, sweating and unhappy now, had visions of a black mark on his record, and determined to make his point.

“But about Kieran, sir—he was only frozen. Suppose there was a chance to bring him back?”

“Bring him back? What the devil are you talking about?”

Vinson said, “I read they’re trying to find some way of restoring a man that gets space-frozen. Some scientists down at Delhi University. If they succeeded, and if we had Kieran still intact in space—”

“Oh, hell, that’s just a scientific pipe-dream, they’ll never find a way to do that,” Meloni said. “It’s all just theory.”