Synthetic Men Page 24

  “Nathan!” His voice bore an overtone of wonder. “The rays don’t have the power up here that they had below. You don’t suppose they’re running out of fuel for the Kuhlon guns?”

  “They don’t use fuel.” Nathan stared blankly at him, then swung his glance to the port as a ray flashed within ten feet of the ship. All of a sudden the sharp creases around the old man’s mouth relaxed. He began to laugh. Softly, then wildly, triumphantly.

  “Patrick!” he gasped. “Do you know the full name of the Kuhlon gun?”

  “Kuhlon disrupter auxiliary, I think,” Ian Patrick muttered.

  “Auxiliary—there’s your answer right there! They don’t take the place of ordinary weapons, merely supplement them. The Kuhlon is deadly in a planet’s atmosphere, but it’s not worth a damn in space! Works through the heavier molecules, I suppose. [1] Now, if we can just lure them out a few hundred miles before they know what’s happening! Then we can pick them off at our leisure!”

  Flashed over the ship, that news almost caused a riot. From frightened lambs, the men became a pack of hungry wolves. In the gun room, Sparks waited impatiently for the moment when his gun would get a chance to sink metal fangs into the Plutonian ships. The Oracle streaked out into space, eating up several hundred miles.

  With the Vengeance uncomfortably close, Nathan chose to act. He caused the rocket to sputter and miss, as if they were running low on fluid. The pursuers leaped after them like mad dogs. Jared Nathan gave them three seconds to close the gap, Then he skidded the Oracle around and faced them head-on!

  “Fire!” He roared the command into the microphone.

  The pursuing ships scrambled wildly out of the way. Pink tongues of flame streamed incessantly from their guns, but the rays fell on the Oracle as harmlessly as spotlight beams. The flat side of a Plutonian disk showed to the Earthmen for an instant, and before the craft could dart out of the way, a bullet had crashed through the shell and brought death to the crew.

  The disks were perfect targets for the Oracle as she pivoted and raced after them. Nathan blasted four more shots into their midst and brought down another. Panic claimed the attackers. They were high-tailing it for home before another minute passed, their erstwhile victim right after them!

  Nathan had to concentrate on the ship behind the Vengeance, for the flagship was out in the lead. He kept firing until finally a shot crashed through the craft and put it out of the fight.

  At full rocket, the Vengeance and the Oracle seemed to have about the same power. Faster and faster, nearing their ultimate speed, they roared back toward the invisible planet. And now another element entered the fight.

  Nathan had used six shells on the dodging renegade ship and none had found its mark. He had his sights lined for a seventh shot when the radio crackled with Sparks’ excited voice.

  “My God, Nathan—we’ve used our last shell!”

  * * *

  Strength drained from Jared Nathan as water escapes through a dynamited dam. He slumped against the back of the chair. His haggard eyes found Ian Patrick’s.

  “Now what?” he croaked.

  Patrick shoved stiff fingers through his hair.

  “We could make more shells—”

  “But not in time. Another three minutes will see us back in the atmosphere. Patrick, if Vickers makes it, we’ve lost. He’ll be out with the Kuhlons and finish us!”

  Nathan’s eyes went desperately about the cabin—and stopped on a portable acetylene outfit standing in the corner, which had been used in repair work on the bridge. He sat straight up.

  “There’s the gun that’s going to win for us!” he pointed.

  “An acetylene torch? I don’t get it,” Patrick frowned.

  “Listen! If we don’t have any shells, we’ve at least got one more projectile. I mean me—in a space suit! Cut the cannon power down to one-tenth, and I could be launched and land safely on the Vengeance. Armed with that torch, I’ll cut a hole in the ship big enough to drive a wagon through!”

  Ian Patrick felt his heart begin to hammer with new hope.

  “You know it means death for you!” he asked. “The explosion when the air inside rushes out will destroy everything around the ship.”

  Jared Nathan was already on his feet and pushing Patrick into the pilot’s chair.

  “Do you think I care about that?” he rasped. “Maybe I prefer it that way. Call the gun room and tell them to have a small charge of fuel ready.”

  Ian Patrick gripped the old man’s hand as he started to waddle out in the cumbersome suit.

  “You’re all right, Mister!” he breathed. “This makes you about even with society, I’d say!”

  Nathan smiled, the smile of a tired little old man.

  “Tell that to them—back on Earth—will you? It means a lot to hear that—after all these years.”

  Then he was gone, and Patrick settled down to the grim business of keeping on the tail of the Vengeance. He could discern, faintly, a gray blotch on the horizon that was the asteroid. After what seemed minutes, Sparks’ voice whispered through the audio.

  “Ready!”

  Patrick centered the cross sights.

  “Fire!” he clipped.

  The cannon made a dull pop! A small object darted from the nose of the Oracle. Jared Nathan, halfway across the space between the two ships, turned and waved his arm at the others. Patrick wondered how many of them had lumps in their throats at that moment…

  Seconds later Nathan was abreast of the enemy, a little to port. They saw him turn on the acetylene torch and use its hissing flame to force himself near the Vengeance. He managed to get one magnetic footplate on the sleek, black hull, and after that he was ready to work.

  Feverishly, he sprang to the job. He burned a large circle on the metal with his blazing torch. Patrick glanced at his watch. Thirty seconds left out of the three minutes Nathan had given them. Thirty seconds before they would be back in the denser atmosphere at Vickers’ mercy—

  Nathan crawled about like an ant, swinging his torch, fighting against time, anxiously glancing ahead every few moments. Patrick could almost hear him swearing and praying in the same breath.

  Fifteen seconds, now; ten—

  The circular piece of metal, worn thin by the bite of the acetylene torch, burst loose like a manhole blown high by exploding sewer gas. The sharp edge of it sliced through Nathan’s spacesuit armor and let the precious air out. He writhed for an instant, then his body exploded like a deep-sea fish dragged to the surface.

  The Vengeance began spewing men and equipment out that gaping hole, gutting herself of everything that was not bolted down. Pent-up pressure tore the hole wider, ripped the craft from stem to stern. A hundred little pink balloons vomited from the gash, to explode within seconds of reaching the atmosphere. Once those balloons had been men; now they were spatial dust.

  * * *

  Captain Ian Patrick had little more than the strength to turn the Oracle and point her homeward. Already the battle, all the trying events of the past week, were commencing to seem like an ugly nightmare. There was only one thing that mattered now—home!

  Home—and explanations to an anxious world. Whatever else those explanations included, they would be filled with praise for a man who had been branded a coward and a traitor, and had proved himself the bravest man Ian Patrick had ever known!

  The End

  [1] In all probability, the Kuhlon gun is helpless in a vacuum—space—and can operate only when the force of its disintegrating discharge is carried through the atmospheric belt surrounding a planetoid or an asteroid. In other words, some property of atmosphere, or perhaps a combination of them—oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, argon, among other constituents—provides the conductivity necessary for the metal-shattering ray to reach its objective. To prove this point, it would be an interesting experiment were the miniature lethal rays already invented, and which are said to be capable of destroying certain forms of animal life, such as a goat or a dog, to be focused on thei
r victim through a vacuum.—Ed.

  *******************************

  The Day Time Stopped Moving,

  by Ed Earl Repp

  Amazing Stories October 1940 {as by "Bradner Buckner"}

  Short Story - 5714 words

  All Dave Miller wanted to do was commit suicide in peace.

  He tried, but the things that happened after he'd pulled the

  trigger were all wrong. Like everyone standing around

  like statues. No St. Peter, no pearly gate, no pitchforks or

  halos. He might just as well have saved the bullet!

  CHAPTER I

  Dave Miller would never have done it, had he been in his right mind. The Millers were not a melancholy stock, hardly the sort of people you expect to read about in the morning paper who have taken their lives the night before. But Dave Miller was drunk—abominably, roaringly so—and the barrel of the big revolver, as he stood against the sink, made a ring of coldness against his right temple.

  Dawn was beginning to stain the frosty kitchen windows. In the faint light, the letter lay a gray square against the drain-board tiles. With the melodramatic gesture of the very drunk, Miller had scrawled across the envelope:

  "This is why I did it!"

  He had found Helen's letter in the envelope when he staggered into their bedroom fifteen minutes ago—at a quarter after five. As had frequently happened during the past year, he'd come home from the store a little late ... about twelve hours late, in fact. And this time Helen had done what she had long threatened to do. She had left him.

  The letter was brief, containing a world of heartbreak and broken hopes.

  "I don't mind having to scrimp, Dave. No woman minds that if she feels she is really helping her husband over a rough spot. When business went bad a year ago, I told you I was ready to help in any way I could. But you haven't let me. You quit fighting when things got difficult, and put in all your money and energy on liquor and horses and cards. I could stand being married to a drunkard, Dave, but not to a coward ..."

  So she was trying to show him. But Miller told himself he'd show her instead. Coward, eh? Maybe this would teach her a lesson! Hell of a lot of help she'd been! Nag at him every time he took a drink. Holler bloody murder when he put twenty-five bucks on a horse, with a chance to make five hundred. What man wouldn't do those things?

  His drug store was on the skids. Could he be blamed for drinking a little too much, if alcohol dissolved the morbid vapors of his mind?

  Miller stiffened angrily, and tightened his finger on the trigger. But he had one moment of frank insight just before the hammer dropped and brought the world tumbling about his ears. It brought with it a realization that the whole thing was his fault. Helen was right—he was a coward. There was a poignant ache in his heart. She'd been as loyal as they came, he knew that.

  He could have spent his nights thinking up new business tricks, instead of swilling whiskey. Could have gone out of his way to be pleasant to customers, not snap at them when he had a terrific hangover. And even Miller knew nobody ever made any money on the horses—at least, not when he needed it. But horses and whiskey and business had become tragically confused in his mind; so here he was, full of liquor and madness, with a gun to his head.

  Then again anger swept his mind clean of reason, and he threw his chin up and gripped the gun tight.

  "Run out on me, will she!" he muttered thickly. "Well—this'll show her!"

  In the next moment the hammer fell ... and Dave Miller had "shown her."

  Miller opened his eyes with a start. As plain as black on white, he'd heard a bell ring—the most familiar sound in the world, too. It was the unmistakable tinkle of his cash register.

  "Now, how in hell—" The thought began in his mind; and then he saw where he was.

  The cash register was right in front of him! It was open, and on the marble slab lay a customer's five-spot. Miller's glance strayed up and around him.

  He was behind the drug counter, all right. There were a man and a girl sipping cokes at the fountain, to his right; the magazine racks by the open door; the tobacco counter across from the fountain. And right before him was a customer.

  Good Lord! he thought. Was all this a—a dream?

  Sweat oozed out on his clammy forehead. That stuff of Herman's that he had drunk during the game—it had had a rank taste, but he wouldn't have thought anything short of marihuana could produce such hallucinations as he had just had. Wild conjectures came boiling up from the bottom of Miller's being.

  How did he get behind the counter? Who was the woman he was waiting on? What—

  The woman's curious stare was what jarred him completely into the present. Get rid of her! was his one thought. Then sit down behind the scenes and try to figure it all out.

  His hand poised over the cash drawer. Then he remembered he didn't know how much he was to take out of the five. Avoiding the woman's glance, he muttered:

  "Let's see, now, that was—uh—how much did I say?"

  The woman made no answer. Miller cleared his throat, said uncertainly:

  "I beg your pardon, ma'am—did I say—seventy-five cents?"

  It was just a feeler, but the woman didn't even answer to that. And it was right then that Dave Miller noticed the deep silence that brooded in the store.

  Slowly his head came up and he looked straight into the woman's eyes. She returned him a cool, half-smiling glance. But her eyes neither blinked nor moved. Her features were frozen. Lips parted, teeth showing a little, the tip of her tongue was between her even white teeth as though she had started to say "this" and stopped with the syllable unspoken.

  Muscles began to rise behind Miller's ears. He could feel his hair stiffen like filings drawn to a magnet. His glance struggled to the soda fountain. What he saw there shook him to the core of his being.

  The girl who was drinking a coke had the glass to her lips, but apparently she wasn't sipping the liquid. Her boy friend's glass was on the counter. He had drawn on a cigarette and exhaled the gray smoke. That smoke hung in the air like a large, elongated balloon with the small end disappearing between his lips. While Miller stared, the smoke did not stir in the slightest.

  There was something unholy, something supernatural, about this scene!

  With apprehension rippling down his spine, Dave Miller reached across the cash register and touched the woman on the cheek. The flesh was warm, but as hard as flint. Tentatively, the young druggist pushed harder; finally, shoved with all his might. For all the result, the woman might have been a two-ton bronze statue. She neither budged nor changed expression.

  Panic seized Miller. His voice hit a high hysterical tenor as he called to his soda-jerker.

  "Pete! Pete!" he shouted. "What in God's name is wrong here!"

  The blond youngster, with a towel wadded in a glass, did not stir. Miller rushed from the back of the store, seized the boy by the shoulders, tried to shake him. But Pete was rooted to the spot.

  Miller knew, now, that what was wrong was something greater than a hallucination or a hangover. He was in some kind of trap. His first thought was to rush home and see if Helen was there. There was a great sense of relief when he thought of her. Helen, with her grave blue eyes and understanding manner, would listen to him and know what was the matter.

  He left the haunted drug store at a run, darted around the corner and up the street to his car. But, though he had not locked the car, the door resisted his twisting grasp. Shaking, pounding, swearing, Miller wrestled with each of the doors.

  Abruptly he stiffened, as a horrible thought leaped into his being. His gaze left the car and wandered up the street. Past the intersection, past the one beyond that, on up the thoroughfare until the gray haze of the city dimmed everything. And as far as Dave Miller could see, there was no trace of motion.

  Cars were poised in the street, some passing other machines, some turning corners. A street car stood at a safety zone; a man who had leaped from the bottom step hung in space a
foot above the pavement. Pedestrians paused with one foot up. A bird hovered above a telephone pole, its wings glued to the blue vault of the sky.

  With a choked sound, Miller began to run. He did not slacken his pace for fifteen minutes, until around him were the familiar, reassuring trees and shrub-bordered houses of his own street. But yet how strange to him!

  The season was autumn, and the air filled with brown and golden leaves that tossed on a frozen wind. Miller ran by two boys lying on a lawn, petrified into a modern counterpart of the sculptor's "The Wrestlers." The sweetish tang of burning leaves brought a thrill of terror to him; for, looking down an alley from whence the smoke drifted, he saw a man tending a fire whose leaping flames were red tongues that did not move.

  Sobbing with relief, the young druggist darted up his own walk. He tried the front door, found it locked, and jammed a thumb against the doorbell. But of course the little metal button was as immovable as a mountain. So in the end, after convincing himself that the key could not be inserted into the lock, he sprang toward the back.

  The screen door was not latched, but it might as well have been the steel door of a bank vault. Miller began to pound on it, shouting:

  "Helen! Helen, are you in there? My God, dear, there's something wrong! You've got to—"

  The silence that flowed in again when his voice choked off was the dead stillness of the tomb. He could hear his voice rustling through the empty rooms, and at last it came back to him like a taunt: "Helen! Helen!"

  CHAPTER II

  Time Stands Still

  For Dave Miller, the world was now a planet of death on which he alone lived and moved and spoke. Staggered, utterly beaten, he made no attempt to break into his home. But he did stumble around to the kitchen window and try to peer in, anxious to see if there was a body on the floor. The room was in semi-darkness, however, and his straining eyes made out nothing.