Synthetic Men Read online

  “Lucky!” The syllables fell from Tapley’s lips like leaden pellets. Roughly he shoved the man out of his way and began stumbling down the street.

  “Lucky!” The word sickened him, somehow. For he knew that, in its way, that accident was premeditated murder.

  Frazier’s words marched before him like soldiers in a line, taunting him:

  “Luck is the capacity for analyzing problems—unconsciously!”

  That was what he had done. He had wanted his partner and his wife out of the way, and the taxicab, looming up like that, provided the means of doing it. His mind grabbed at the opportunity, caused him to avoid the one chance to miss the cab; made his elbow strike the door-catch, letting him be thrown free.

  That was the day Norris Tapley realized his luck wouldn’t let him lose, even when it was best for him.

  Chapter IV

  Wanderer of Space

  He didn’t miss Evelyn much, as the weeks rolled on. What he did miss was Dave Frazier’s steadying hand on the controls. He had signed the contract with Bruning a week after the tragedy, refusing to look at the ring, afraid of what he might see in the heart of that cold green stone. He almost never looked at it now. Though the thousand fighting ships were now on the point of completion, he felt like a rocket cruiser with its rockets gone bad.

  The night when he was to meet Bruning at the little hidden aircraft field in the hills, to turn over the ships and receive the twenty million dollars, he was as jittery as a shell-shocked war veteran. An hour before he was to leave, he gave himself a severe going over.

  “Tapley,” he said, looking in the mirror at his haggard visage, “you’re a yellow coward. You couldn’t miss a trick if you tried. Yet you get stage fright on the eve of the biggest thing that’s ever happened to you. Don’t be a fool, man; you can’t lose!”

  Tapley was right, in a way; it was the biggest thing ever to happen to him. Also, it was the worst. At seven-thirty, he got in his fifteen-thousand-dollar coupe and sped into the hills.

  Where two arms of the hills curved around to lock a tiny valley inside, he halted in a grove of live-oaks and started to get out. Almost immediately a flashlight beam stabbed him.

  “That you, Bruning?” he hissed.

  The light snapped off and footfalls approached.

  “Yes. Is everything ready?”

  “All set! One thousand of Lightships’ finest are right around the point.”

  They began to walk, with difficulty, because of the rough terrain. Bruning panted, finally:

  “The guns are installed?”

  “Not yet. I couldn’t take that risk in my factory. But I had them shipped out here, and your own men can install them easily. The ships were brought here just yesterday. But I’d have your men take them away within the week, if possible.”

  “It will be done tomorrow night. Ah! I can see them now.”

  Through screening growths of shrubbery, flashes of gleaming metal came to their eyes. Hurrying ahead, they came upon the vast array of trim fighting craft. Noses pointed skyward, the savage little rocket ships were a thousand silver bullets ready to be launched against a helpless foe.

  Bruning strode to one that loomed larger than the rest; the flagship. His practiced gaze missed nothing as he ran an experimental hand over the smooth hull. Not a rivet, not a seam, existed.

  “Das ist schön!” he breathed admiringly.

  Tapley pointed at the gleaming nose above them.

  “This one’s got the bow gun in place,” he explained. “I had it put in to serve as a model for your pilots when they mount the others. Provisions have been stored too, as you requested.”

  “You forget nothing, my friend,” Bruning smiled. In his fingers, now, was the check for which already two lives had been forfeited.

  “If the ships are satisfactory, there will be many more orders for you. My thanks, Herr Tapley.”

  Tapley reached for the check. Every nerve, every fiber in him went rigid as light sprayed over them and a voice called:

  “Get your hands up, boys! The game’s over!”

  * * *

  Shock seemed to slam the pair against the side of the silver ship. From twenty points, men in Government uniform came running swiftly. A groan issued from Norris Tapley’s throat.

  “My God! Somebody tipped them off!”

  Bruning’s hand made a flashing movement toward his coat pocket. The gun was only half drawn when pistols barked, and the foreign agent went down in a writhing turn. His companion in the conspiracy watched him fall, then he was stimulated to action. One leap put him before the spaceship port. Instantly, guns began to speak again.

  Something seemed to grab at Tapley’s feet and he sprawled heading through the opening. Slugs burned the air over his head, but his tumble saved him. He scrambled around the corner and slammed the heavy door, threw the bolts securely. For an instant he stood irresolute, hearing the spat of futile lead against the ship’s walls, the dim cries of the Government men.

  What to do, that was the problem. They had him treed for sure. They could starve him out, or blast the craft to kingdom come. His only escape was—out in space!

  Tapley recoiled from the idea. The feeling still persisted that he and his luck didn’t belong in a Lightship. But it was the only way. Provisions stocked the cruiser, food for fifteen hundred men for two years. With a groan, he dashed for the elevator to the bridge. His steps rang hollowly through the empty rooms.

  Pointed upward, as the craft was, access to forward quarters was by an elevator that, on even keel, ran horizontally. Tapley shot full speed up to the control room and darted inside.

  He knew how to run the thing, even if he had never done it. But now, as he drew near to the ship, he felt his ring finger grow warm, and when he touched the door of the ship, the ring was burning beyond endurance. For a moment he stood irresolute, almost crying with pain. Then he tore the ring off his finger and entered the ship.

  He planted himself in the pilot’s chair, strapped himself in it. His left hand hovered over speed and deceleration dials, his right over directional levers. Between his knees was the firing lever for the bow gun. Pausing for only a moment, he twisted the starting dial full around.

  With a surge of power the ship zoomed upward.

  The stars, seen through thick glassite double-plates before him, grew momentarily brighter, as though a giant hand had twisted a rheostat. They were like iridescent spangles against the black velvet night; and the next instant sunlight flooded the bridge and the stars disappeared. Tapley was through the stratosphere and into space.

  His eyes lifted to the rear-view televisor. At what he saw there, shock poured through him. A dozen Government pursuers were on his tail! The whole ship lurched, began to roll nauseatingly, as a force-charge detonated within a few hundred yards of him.

  Savagely, his lips went back in a snarl. He gave the port rockets full blast and slewed around until he was shooting through space backward. The driving rockets began to belch once more, and the flagship shuddered to its last case-hardened plate. Momentum began to drop off. And as the pursuers zoomed up on him, Tapley began to fire his lone gun.

  He had the first ship right on the indicator crosshairs when he triggered. Projectile and pursuit ship met nose to nose. There was a blinding flash. Tapley jiggled the controls, jockeyed the skidding Lightship around to bring a second Government craft into his aim. Just as he fired, debris from the first ship began to rattle against the silver hull of his own, as it went by like a comet fragment.

  It was the same with the second pursuit ship. Then Tapley was forced to veer off to the side. Soon he was on the tails of his pursuers. Ruthlessly, he began to cut them down. The smaller ships were helpless. Antique Space-Craft they were, useless against ships twice as fast and ten times as maneuverable.

  It was a matter of minutes before the others realized their helplessness and dropped away from him. Tapley began to laugh as he hunched over the controls.

  “Yellow dogs!” he mutter
ed.

  Soon he forgot his amusement. A curious tingling in his body, at first unnoticed, had increased until his teeth seemed on edge. It was not unlike that unpleasant sensation when a limb, long asleep, returns to normal feeling, bringing needle-sharp little jabs with it. Only this tingling affected his whole body. Tapley strode about, trying to shake off the feeling.

  * * *

  But it wouldn’t depart, though he set the controls in the general direction of Venus and killed hours striding nervously through the ship.

  The tingling was a painful, crawling sensation by now, crawling like thousands of ants through his veins. Too, his eyes felt slightly bulging and his teeth ached. Norris Tapley was genuinely terrified. He was afraid to return to Earth, apprehensive of continuing any longer through space. There was only one course left for him. To send the ship through space to Venus as fast as possible and take up a new life there.

  * * *

  Twelve hours later he knew he could never make it to the foggy planet.

  It had been a shock when he saw himself in a mirror. He was looking at a strange creature with bulging eyes and drooling lips. In sudden horror Tapley tore his shirt from him in shreds. He could see the veins pumping under his flesh.

  Thoughts of Earth tantalized him. Lucky Norris Tapley! “The man who couldn’t lose!” He remembered when he had ridden around in the best cars money could buy, eating at the Colonial Club, flashing his luck and his money before an admiring world—

  The ring! He wasn’t wearing it! Feverishly he searched his pockets, found it, put it on. It was burning his flesh, but he endured it, screaming with pain, and made his way back to the controls.

  Sitting there in the pilot’s seat, hands shaking on the controls, he was like a corpse. There wasn’t a wisp of hair left on his body. He had lost half his teeth when he tried to bite through a steak when he had prepared his last meal. His nails were gone, and without them the fingers looked like fat, pink worms.

  His face—Norris Tapley twisted to stare at his reflection in the mirror-door.

  “Oh, God!” Tapley was on his feet, goggling at the incredible sight in the mirror.

  Above his collar, there was a semitransparent oval in which a lumpy gray mass and a few teeth were the only distinguishable human characteristics. He was as transparent as a jellyfish. His brain and teeth showed up as through a fluoroscope. And his eyes—they were inhuman, staring orbs that terrified him.

  Childishly, his fingers groped over flabby, invisible lips. In the next moment, Tapley started.

  The ring! His good luck ring—the damned thing was alive with a green, supernal brilliance! That was the thing which was turning him into a monstrosity, by converting solar energy into something devilish.

  He had long forgotten the burning. His finger was a charred bone, with the ring hanging loosely from it. He ripped it off and flung it against the controls. Then he locked himself in and sank exhausted into the pilot’s seat.

  Within an hour, the change was noticed. That maddening tingling left him. His teeth and gums ceased to ache. With Earth fast looming up at him, something of his old confidence was returning.

  “I’ll lick it!” he shouted. “Back on Earth I’m still the luckiest guy in the world! I’ll show ’em—”

  Utterly worn out, he fell asleep across the controls.

  * * *

  When he awoke, it was dark in the cabin. The significance at first escaped him. Then he realized—he was within Earth’s shadow! Startled, he dived for the deceleration rocket dials.

  Bucking and skidding, the Lightship broke its headlong plunge. Tapley’s eyes quested downward. He saw a shining spot that was a city.

  Northern New Jersey! Tapley started, realizing he had been gone just twenty-four hours. An intense longing built in him to land and be out of the ship. He ground down the impulse to hurry, sighted through the cross-hairs for a plain on which to land.

  Staring him in the face were rolling hills. He was approaching them at a speed of six hundred miles an hour. Beyond was a flat space, and safety. Tapley pulled at the rudder control. But it wouldn’t budge!

  All of his failing power went into the effort to move the slender baton back. He stood up, throwing his weight backward with hands clutching the rod. The rudder control only groaned in its socket.

  The jets blasted powerfully. Rocking and rolling, the ship tossed itself about. Tapley hung onto the edge of the table for dear life. But when the ship leveled off again, those uncompromising hills still loomed before him. Firing all the rockets simultaneously had merely added to the craft’s speed.

  Tapley sank into the chair, fighting the rudders.

  “I can’t lose now!” his cracked voice sobbed. “I’m too lucky. I’m the luckiest guy in the world—”

  On hands and knees he began searching for the ring. Only the ring could save him now. His mind was aflame. Burn—let it burn!—he had to find it!

  And there it was—but the stone was gone! The cheap setting stared up at him like an open, dumb eye, mocking…

  The stone was gone—and the ring worthless! It had fallen somewhere when he had thrown it from him.

  In the moments that followed, the whole history of his life swam before him, but it was the story of the ring. There it was—the finding, and everything that followed…

  Gone! “Lord,” he screamed, grovelling. “Let me find it! Let me find it!”

  But plead as he would, the high-crested hills continued to swim before the cross-hairs, rushing toward him. He was babbling like a half-witted child when the crash came.

  * * *

  They located the ruined ship a few days later, lying at the foot of the steepest hill as though it were a toy carelessly cast aside. Those who extracted Norris Tapley from the crumpled mass of girders and wiring found an odd thing. Wedged into the socket of the rudder-bar, so that the rod was immovable, was a little green stone that glittered cheaply when a chance ray of sunlight struck it….

  The End

  [1] Samuel G. Hibben, lighting engineer for Westinghouse, succeeded in carrying Florida sunshine to the New York World’s Fair, by causing it to be “absorbed” by a luminescent powder. It is supposed that the sunlight caused the outer orbit of electrons to be shifted to another plane of energy and lie dormant. Frazier did the same thing on a greater scale; his “canned solar energy” supplied a thousand times the power of dynamite when needed.—Ed.

  *******************************

  Worlds at War,

  by Ed Earl Repp

  Fantastic Adventures May 1940

  Novelette - 9662 words

  Instinctively Saran knew it was wrong to carry out his

  awful mission against the men of Earth, but he dared not

  fail—because somewhere, unseen, The Other was watching!

  Chapter I

  It was early night on this world called Earth. So the Korjans had told Saran, who was an Earthman, yet was seeing Earth for the first time in his twenty-five years of life.

  “I owe my life and my allegiance to Ryg and his subjects,” said Saran. “I have only hatred for the savages of the Earth. For when I was very young, they set my father and me adrift in a space ship, to die of hunger or madness. A Korjan vessel rescued me after my father’s death. From that time on I have loved the worlds of Korjan and now I will repay them and show my gratitude.”

  The space ship had landed here on a rough slope among low hills. Over them came the light of a moon that was as white as Saran’s hair was gold, and the earth glinted like the dark bronze of his skin. Tall and steel-muscled, he stood on one side of the thick glass wall that separated him from the Korjans. All his life had been a preparation for this moment.

  “Thank you, Saran.” The words smashed at Saran’s brain like the clang of metal. Ryg, High Leader of all the frozen planets of the Dark Star was communicating his thoughts. He seemed to Saran to be no more than a diaphanous, almost formless wraith that shimmered, lacy and spidery, beyond the glass partition that bisect
ed the room of the space ship.

  “You know you are our chosen one, Saran. Without you we cannot conquer. This earthly pressure of atmosphere would kill us quickly. Yours is the final phase. The energy-stations which we hid here on Earth must not be discovered. They must keep on killing the young at birth.”

  Saran listened. So many times he had heard the ritual of this talk. Now, as he listened, he stared out at the world called Earth, a strange world of trees and fields, oddly lovely in the moonlight, twisting his heart with vague memories. It was incredibly different from the Korjan worlds of ice and stone.

  “I will find this scientist known as Moss Hartley,” said Saran, when Ryg’s thoughts ended. “I will stop his dangerous meddling. The plan is an excellent one and will not fail.”

  For this he had voyaged millions of miles through the void. For vengeance, for gratitude. The white moon rose higher over the hills in the distance.

  “I know you will not fail,” came the response. “You will be watched constantly by—The Other.”

  Saran started. “The Other?” He frowned. “Who is The Other?”

  He felt the amusement among the Korjans beyond the wall. It was a sly, soundless laughter accompanied by the rolling of gruesome eyes and a vibration of tentacles like sea-growths stirred by vagrant currents.

  “The Other, Saran,” Ryg informed him, “is another Earthling who came to us just before you. He has been on Earth for months, spying for us. Yet he lacks your strength and intelligence, which we need now. But should you ever feel the urge to betray us, he has the means of destroying you promptly.”

  Anger stained Saran’s flat cheeks. “You mean I’m to be spied upon like—like a common Earthman?” he gave back, his muscles stiffening.