Read Ebook: Cosmic Castaway by Mullen Stanley Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 147 lines and 9356 words, and 3 pages

"I've listened," said Bell oddly. "I believe you're reasonably honest. But there's something you haven't told me. What is it?"

Hastings shook his head. "I wanted to make this easy for you, Bell. I asked for your interview. I was curious, true. Not only in the scientific sense but snoopy-curious, human-curious. That's the decent motive, curiosity combined with a desire to help. But there was another reason. You'll run into it from here on so I'll tell you straight: I'm afraid of you. Not just your interesting possibilities. I'm afraid of what you are now. You're different, you and I are civilized enough to know and accept it. But even we don't dare face how different. My chief emotion toward you is panic terror. Just how do you think other people will feel?"

"I don't have to guess," Bell admitted. "I'm wondering how my wife will feel. You're afraid of what you don't see in me. And I'm afraid of what I will see in her. But I have to see it myself. I still want to go home."

Hastings' gesture was hopeless. "And you won't be satisfied till you have a try at stowing away on the spaceship? Is that it?"

Bell refused audible comment. Hastings made a last try. "You can't do it, Bell. Ticket or no ticket. No captain or crew would dare trust you on a spaceship. Try it if you must. But don't hurt anyone. You know what that would mean."

Bell's reply was a mechanical grating. "I want people to like me. I don't want to hurt them. I'm not convinced but I'll think it over...."

"Be sure, Bell."

"I will be. But I haven't decided yet...." In silent glide, the man-robot was gone. Half an hour later, alarms blared....

Frowning, Hastings dialed security police headquarters. Yes, an alarm had come in. Yes, from Spaceport No. 4. But it was only a headfire temporarily out of hand; the jetmen were clearing a fused jet in the booster rockets, a reserve fuel bin ignited.

A blunt, reassuringly human face grinned from the visi-screen.

"Stop worrying, Hastings. Two men are watching Bell every minute. There's no chance of his getting aboardship. Only one spacer in the cradles at the moment: 11-9334. That's the ship he expected to take but there's not a chance for him. Passengers are all checked aboard, briefed for space and put to bed. However, if you'll feel any better about it, go over and recheck. If you've any doubts I'll put through emergency priority and you can go along with the ship to Earth. The staff here can take care of Bell and destroy him if necessary. Yes, I know the Company wants us to take no chance with him. Seems a waste after all the trouble you took putting him back together, but nobody argues with the Company."

Hastings shrugged unhappily. No, nobody ever argued with the Company. Regretfully he punched keys and Bell's card snapped from the electronically coded files. He stamped it with the properly impregnated ink and fed the pasteboard into a pneumatic chute.

"Better pick him up for protective custody," he said. "I've put the order through. Don't take chances with him but try to avoid rough stuff unless he forces it. You'd better get clearance from the population board if you do destroy him. I'm not sure the Company has authority for that. After all, he's not a beast."

"What is he, then?" The blunt face laughed unpleasantly.

"I don't know. My nerves are like fiddle strings and my leave's overdue. Clear my passage and I'll go along ... just in case."

Hastings reached Space Terminal No. 4 just after the police alarms went into convulsions. He checked with headquarters and the news was not reassuring. Bell had been picked up, asked to come along for questioning and agreed whimsically. Somewhere en route he had simply vanished, which is not as simple as it sounds in security arrest. Baffled police and company guards were still searching and a cordon had been thrown around the terminal area. It took a special order to pass Hastings through.

Escape from Pluto is a practical impossibility; a man would be mad to attempt the gamble. But Bell was not a man. The cargo holds were airless and scarcely insulated against the temperatures of space. Leakage from atomic fuel batteries was possible. Crew and passenger accommodations were so limited that scarcely a mouse could find hiding place. Rigorous inspection at the airlocks and hatches offered a problem beyond the powers of a magician, even a real one, not a mere trick artist.

Time passed and Bell did not appear near the spaceport. No attempt was made to crash through the cordon of guards. Nerves grew strained and the approaching deadline forced decision on Hastings. He dialed headquarters.

"I'm going with the ship," he told embarrassed officialdom. "If Bell is aboard, I'd better be along. Someone who understands the situation."

Officialdom nodded, no longer amused by the threat of Bell.

"Tell the captain to take no chances with him...."

Hastings shrugged unhappily.

Take-off was unspectacular. Pluto is a freak planet of nearly Earth-size, but denser, and with the standard peculiarities of the outer planets. Gravity provides additional problems of reaching escape velocity, but these are not complicated by atmospheric friction. All gases, even the lightest, are liquid or solid, and concentrated in thin layers on the surface.

A booster sequence of ring magnets operated automatically to raise the ship from the subsurface spaceport and catapult it past the planetary skin. Leaving the tube like a projectile, the spacer was carried beyond the immediate field of Plutonian gravity by triple-stage rockets which cut loose and dropped back to the surface for pickup. Afterward, orbit was trimmed just as for a free-flight to Earth, but the ship itself put in readiness for the hyperdimensional drive. Such immense distances are involved that no free-flight nor even steady-power atomic propulsion could solve the problem satisfactorily. Time and money are important outside Buddhist monasteries.

During most of the month-long journey from Pluto all occupants of the spaceship are either blacked-out from acceleration or existing in the dream-world of hyperdimensions. Building to the extremes of velocity required for the hyperdimensional translation is painful, dreary and dangerous. Once terminal velocity is reached and translation occurs, normal space is warped into a tight elliptical cocoon around the ship, all inertial forces partially damped out, and drugs or mechanical trickery must be resorted to while human minds skirt the dark, ravelled edges of the Unknown.

In that eerie, hour-long interval between primary acceleration and the prolonged nightmare of the pocket universe, Hastings and two crewmen turned out the living quarters and all accessible holds of the ship. Even the outer cargo holds were examined by scanner and it was obvious that Bell was not hiding out aboard. Rows of neatly racked crates, parcels, bins of ore, mail cans, and semi-activated fuel left neither space nor safety for a stowaway. All passengers and crewmen were double checked by the officers and by Hastings.

Afterwards, while alarm howlers vibrated hideously through the cabin-decks, service passageways and control rooms, Hastings lowered himself into the shock-block of molded plastic and tried to relax.

The process was one familiar to him from previous voyages to and from Pluto. Subconsciously he was aware of sound and movement about him but it was fading rapidly. From here on every internal function of the ship, even to the care and feeding of its human element, would perforce be relegated to robots and the automatic machinery. Grimly, Hastings recalled one part-machine....

Machines....

Quivering grayness surrounded him, claimed him as its own. A hard, bright core of identity remained alive, but the immaterial suspension of grayness seemed of infinite extension in all dimensions of time and space. Time perception and space perception meant little in themselves, became mere illusions which would pass away for a time and then return painfully. There had been few accidents, Hastings remembered, and he clung desperately to this last fading memory of consciousness.

Coming out was not necessarily as painful as rebirth but it could have awkward moments. Needle-bite was not the worst, and the tingling frost-fires spread through veins and nerves communicating Inquisitional tortures to the awakening body.

"Bad time, doc," said Bell's voice. "Hurry it up. I need you."

Idly, oddly, Hastings was not surprised to see the curiously humanoid figure bending over him. Hypo in hand, balanced in those tentacular fingers, Bell jabbed again, deftly. Awakening senses screamed with agony from the harmless, revivifying drug. Hastings did not question the urgency of command. Jangled universes came together in his tingling brain, became shimmering chaos, resolved as reality in three familiar dimensions came into sharp focus, as his disciplined body made habitual response.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Trouble, doc. Your department, not mine. Black Virus, I'd say...!"

"Oh, Lord! No...."

Hyperdimensional travel has its penalties. Among them, black virus infection, which is not black, not virus, not infection. One of the penalties. An alien protein native to those dark dimensions beyond dimension. A protein to which all mankind, most animals and plants, and even a few types of robots, were fatally allergic.

Strong fingers closed on Hastings' arm and hustled him along. Exertion cleared his mind and fear roused his senses to action. Now thoroughly awake, resistance to Bell did not occur to him. He permitted Bell to drag-lead him through the passenger compartments into the crew's quarters. One glance was sufficient. Half the crewmen were already dead. Hideously dead. Others writhed in convulsions, wrenched out of their shockblocks, their faces blotched with dark weals, chest and abdomens bloated and bursting with agony.

"Chiefly the crew, so far," Bell explained. "Only one of the passengers had contact with it. Or with them. They must have got it on the out voyage, before reaching Pluto."

Hastings nodded, numb with horror.

"Can we help them?" Bell asked calmly.

"Not much. Drugs by injection to kill the pain. A few may survive, the stronger ones, and they may wish they hadn't. We'll try to keep it from spreading to the other passengers. There are treatments, but not here. If we could reach the hospital at Luna City--"

Hastings' voice sounded hopeless.

"It's not too far," Bell commented. "We're well inside the orbit of Mars. A week of deceleration and orbit trimming. Plenty of fuel."

"But who'll handle the ship?"

"They can't?"

"None of them--ever. Even if they live to reach Luna City."

"Then I'll have to," Bell said confidently.

Hastings stared as if the robot-man had suddenly gone mad. "No one man could handle the ship," he gasped. "Even if you knew all about space ships and how to land them. Trimming orbit is a full-crew job. And landing is ticklish enough for old hands. You don't know a thing--"

Hastings wasted no time in futilities. "That's your department. Do whatever you can. Send a warning to Luna City for relay to Earth and Pluto. Then get me a couple of the more intelligent passengers. I'll need help."

"They won't come," Bell said, with the nearest a grunt of disgust he could manage. "They're human enough to be scared. Not that I blame them. I can remember being that human myself. You'll have to settle for whatever help I can give ... between errands."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet