Amazing Stories: Giant 35th Anniversary Issue (Amazing Stories Classics), Page 3

  Around and around and around went my coggery, the flashing, glinting muscles of my soul's heart. Oil surged through my metal veins. And Belloc was down below, smoking one cigarette after another.

  I thought about Ayres, about Captain Lamb and the way he barked, about Ayres and the way he kneeled and felt what he had to feel. About Hillary and Conrad thinking about a woman's lips. About The Slop troubling to invent a gravity soup plate.

  I thought about Belloc waiting.

  And Mars getting near. And about the war I had never seen but always heard about. I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to get there with Lamb and Hillary and The Slop!

  The Slop took away the plate the captain had cleansed with his spoon. "More?"

  Lamb shook his head. "No. just a hunk of fruit now. An apple or something." He wiped his small mouth with the back of his hand.

  "Okay," said The Slop.

  At that moment there was a hiss, an explosion.

  Somebody screamed, somewhere.

  I knew who it was and where it was.

  The captain didn't. "Dammit to hell!" he barked, and was out of the galley in three bounds. Slop dropped a soup kettle, following.

  WARNING bells clamored through me. Ayres, in Computation, grinding out a parabolic problem, jerked his young, pink face and fear came into it instantly. He arose and tried walking toward the drop-rungs, but he couldn't do it. He didn't have legs for the job.

  Conrad scuttled down the rungs, yelling. He vanished toward the engine room; the floor ate him up.

  Hillary grabbed the ship-controls and froze to them, listening and waiting. He said one word. "Alice—"

  Slop and the captain got there first in Section C.

  "Cut that feed valve!" yelled Lamb. The Slop grasped a valve-wheel glinting on the wall in chubby fingers, twisted it, grunting.

  The loud, gushing noise stopped. Steam-clouds billowed in my heart, wrapping Captain Lamb and The Slop tight and coughing. Conrad fell the rest of the way down the ladder into my heart, and the steam began to clear away as my vacuum ventilators began humming.

  When the steam cleared they saw Belloc.

  The Slop said, "Gahh. That's bad. That's very bad."

  Conrad said, "How'd it happen? Looks like he died quick."

  Lamb's leather-brown face scowled. "Quick is the word. That oil-tube burst, caught him like a steel whip across the bridge of his nose. If that hadn't killed him, scalding oil would have."

  Crumpled there, Belloc said not a word to anybody. He just bled where the oil pipe had caught him on the nose and cheek and plunged on back into his subconscious. That was all there was to him now.

  Captain Lamb cursed. Conrad rubbed his cheek with the trembling flat of his hand. "I checked those oil-lines this morning. They were okay. I don't see—"

  Footsteps on the rungs. Larion came down, feet first, quick, and turned to face them. "What happened ...?" He looked as if somebody had kicked him in the stomach when he saw Belloc lying there. His face sucked bone-white, staring. His jaw dropped down and he said, emptily, "You—killed him. You—found out what we were going to do—-and you killed him ..."

  The Slop's voice was blank. "What?"

  "You killed him," repeated Larion. He began to laugh. He opened his mouth and let the laughter come out in the steam-laden room. He darted about suddenly and leaped up the rungs. "I'll show you!"

  "Stop him!" said Lamb.

  Conrad scuttled up at Lariat's heels. Larion stopped and kicked. Conrad fell, heavy, roaring. Larion vanished. Conrad got up, yelling, and pursued. Captain Lamb watched him go, not doing anything himself, just watching. He just listened to the fading feet on the rungs, going up and up.

  The deck and hull quivered under Lamb's feet.

  Somebody shouted.

  Conrad cried, from far off, "Watch it!"

  There was a thumping noise.

  Five minutes later Conrad came down the ladder lugging a time-bomb. "It's a good thing that oil-pipe burst, Cap. I found this in Supply AC. That's where Larion was hiding it. Him and Belloc—"

  "What about Larion?"

  "He tried to escape through an emergency life-boat air-lock. He opened the inner door, slammed it, and a moment later when I opened that same inner door, I almost got killed the same way—"

  "Killed?"

  "Yeah. The damned fool must have opened the outer door while he was still standing in the middle of the air-lock. Space suction yanked him right outside. He's gone for good."

  The Slop swallowed thickly. "That's funny, he'd do that. He knew how those air-locks work, how dangerous they are. Must've been some mistake, an accident, or something ..."

  "Yeah," said Captain Lamb. "Yeah."

  They held Belloc's funeral a few hours later. They thrust him overboard, following Larion into space.

  My body was cleansed. The organic poison was eliminated.

  Mars was very close now. Red. Bright red.

  In another six hours we would be engaged in conflict.

  I had my taste of war. We drove down, Captain Lamb and his men inside me, and I put out my arms for the first time, and I closed fingers of power around Martian ships and tore them apart, fifteen of them—who tried to prevent our landing at Deimos‑Phobos Base. I received only minor damage to my section F. Plates.

  Scarlet ammunition went across space, born out of myself. Child out of metal and exploding with blazing force, wounding the stratas of emptiness in the void. I exhilarated in my new found arms of strength. I screamed with it. I talked rocket talk to the stars. I shook Deimos Base with my ambitious drive. I dissected Martian ships with quick calm strokes of my ray-arms, and spunky little Cap Lamb guided my vitals, swearing at the top of his lungs!

  I had come into my own. I was fully grown, fully matured. War and more war, plunging on for month after month.

  And young Ayres collapsed upon the computation deck one day, just like he was going to say a prayer, with a shard of shrapnel webbed in his lungs, blood dropping from his parted lips instead of a prayer. It reminded me of that day when first he had kneeled there and whispered, "Hell, I got the captain's time beat all hollow!"

  Ayres died.

  They killed Conrad, too. And it was Hillary who took the news back to York Port to the girl they had both loved.

  After fourteen months we headed home. We landed in York Port, recruited men to fill our vacancies, and shot out again. We knocked holes in vacuum. We got what we wanted out of war, and then, quite suddenly one day space was silent. The Martians retreated, Captain Lamb shrugged his fine-boned little shoulders and commanded his men down to the computation room:

  "Well, men, it's all over. The war's over. This is your last trip in this damned nice little war-rocket. You'll have your release as soon as we take gravity in York Port. Any of you want to stay on—this ship is being converted into cargo-freighting. You'll have good berths."

  The crew muttered, shifting their feet, blinking their eyes. Cap said:

  "It's been good. I won't deny it. I had a fine crew and a sweet ship. We worked hard, we did what we had to do. And now it's all over and we have peace. Peace."

  The way he said that word it meant something.

  "Know what that means?" said Lamb. "It means getting drunk again, as often as you like; it means living on earth again, forgetting how religious you ever were out in space, how you were converted the first trip out. It means forgetting how non-gravity feels on your guts. It means a lot. It means losing friends, and the hard good times brawling at Phobos-Deimos Base.

  "It means leaving this rocket." The men were silent.

  "I want to thank you. You, Hillary. And you, Slop. And you, Ayres, for signing on after your brother died. And you, Thompson, and McDonald and Priory. And that's about all. Stand by to land!"

  WE landed without fanfare.

  The crew packed their duffles and left ship. Cap lingered behind awhile, walking through me with his short, brisk strides. He swore under his breath, twisted his small brown face. After awhil
e he walked away, too.

  I wasn't a war-rocket anymore.

  They crammed me with cargo and shipped me back and forth to Mars and Venus for the next five years. Five long years of nothing but spider-silk, hemp and mineral-ore, a skeleton crew and a quiet voyage with nothing happening. Five years.

  I had a new captain, a new, strange crew, and a strange peaceful routine going and coming across the stars.

  Nothing important happened until July 17th, 2243.

  That was the day I cracked up on this wild pebbled little planetoid where the wind whined and the rain poured and the silence was too damned silent.

  The crew was crushed to death inside me, and I just lay here in the hot sun and the cold night wind, waiting for rescue that never seemed to come.

  My life blood was gone, dead, crushed, killed. A rocket thinks in itself, but it lives through its crew and its captain. I had been living on borrowed time since Captain Lamb went away and never came back.

  I lay here, thinking about it all. Glorious months of war, savage force and power of it. The wild insanity of it. I waited. I realized how out of place I was here, how helpless, like a gigantic metal child, an idiot who needs control, who needs pulsing human life blood.

  Until very early one morning after the rain I saw a silver speck on the sky. It came down fast—a one-man Patrol inspector, used for darting about in the asteroid belt.

  The ship came down, landing about one hundred yards away from my silent hulk. A small man climbed out of it.

  He came walking up the pebbled hill very slowly, almost like a blind man.

  He stood at my air-lock door. I heard him say, "Hello—"

  And I knew who it was. Standing there, not looking much older than when first he had shipped aboard me, little and lean and made of copper wire and brown leather.

  Captain Lamb.

  After all these years. Dressed in a black patrol uniform. An inspector of asteroids. No cargo job for him. A dangerous one instead. Inspector. His lips moved.

  "I heard you were lost four months ago," he said to me, quiet-like. "I asked for an appointment to Inspector. I thought—I thought I'd like to hunt for you myself. Just—just for old times' sake." His wiry neck muscles stood out, and tightened. He made his little hands into fists.

  He opened my air-lock, laughing quietly, and walked inside me with his quick, short strides. It felt good to have him touch me again, to hear his clipped voice ring against my hull again. He climbed the rungs to my control room and stood there, swaying, remembering all the old times we had fought together.

  "Ayres!"

  "Aye, sir!"

  "Hillary!"

  "Aye, sir!'

  "Slop!"

  "Aye, sir!"

  "Conrad!"

  "Aye, sir!'

  "Where in hell is everybody? Where in hell is everybody?" raged Lamb, staring about the control room. "Where in the God-blamed hell—!"

  Silence. He quit yelling for people who couldn't answer him, who would never answer him again, and he sat down in the control chair and talked to me. He told me what he'd been doing all these years. Hard work, long hours, good pay.

  "But it's not like it used to be," he told me. "Not by a stretched length. I think though—I think there'll be another war soon. Yes, I do." He nodded briskly. "And how'd you like to be in on it, huh? You can, you know."

  I said nothing. My beams stretched and whined in the hot sun. That was all. I waited.

  "Things are turning bad on Venus. Colonials revolting. You're old-fashioned, but you're proud and tall, and a fighter. You can fight again."

  He didn't stay much longer, except to tell me what would happen. "I have to go back to Earth, get a rescue crew and try to lift you under your own power next week. And so help me God, I'll be captain of you again and we'll beat the bloody marrow out of those Venerians!"

  He walked back through my compartments, climbed down into my heart. The galley. The computation. The Slop. Ayres. Larion. Belloc. Memories. And he walked out of the airlock with eyes that were anything but dry. He patted my hull.

  "After all, now—I guess you were the only thing I ever really loved ..." He went away into the sky, then.

  And so I'm lying here for a few more days, waiting with a stirring of my old anticipation and wonder and excitement. I've been dead a while. And Cap has showed up again to slap me back to life. Next week he'll be here with the repair crew and sail home to Earth and they'll go over me from seam to seam, from dorsal to ventral.

  And someday soon Cap Lamb'll stomp into my air-lock, cry, "Rap her tight!" and we'll be off to war again! Off to war! Living and breathing and moving again. Captain Lamb and I and maybe Hillary and Slop if we can find them after all this time. Next week. In the meantime I can think.

  I've often wondered about that blue-eyed Martian dancing girl with the silver bells on her fingers.

  I guess I could read it in Captain Lamb's eyes, how that turned out.

  I wish I could ask him.

  But at least I won't have to lie here forever. I'll be moving on—next week!

  DEVOLUTION

  By Edmond Hamilton

  Illustrated by Morey

  EDMOND HAMILTON and his deservedly famed wife, Leigh Brackett, are infrequently represented in science fiction magazines today, both being occupied with writing scripts for motion pictures and television. Hamilton is best remembered as a writer of vigorous action science fiction, with the stress on a hero who saves Earth invasion from space. This reputation obscures the fact that few living writers of science fiction have shown superior ingenuity in the presentation of new concepts (or clever twists on old ones) than has Edmond Hamilton. While dedicated to saving our globe from its—perhaps richly deserved?—disaster, Edmond Hamilton has tried not to be corny about it. The result has been that most of Hamilton's stories leave you with something to think about. Devolution is no exception. It provides a good counter-irritant for Darwin's theories, but one which the Fundamentalists would be equally loathe to accept.

  ROSS had ordinarily the most even of tempers, but four days of canoe travel in the wilds of North Quebec had begun to rasp it. On this, their fourth stop on the bank of the river to camp for the night, he lost control and for a few moments stood and spoke to his two companions in blistering terms.

  His black eyes snapped and his darkly unshaven handsome young face worked as he spoke. The two biologists listened to him without reply at first. Gray's blond young countenance was indignant but Woodin, the older biologist, just listened impassively with his gray eyes level on Ross' angry face.

  When Ross stopped for breath, Woodin's calm voice struck in. "Are you finished?"

  Ross gulped as though about to resume his tirade, then abruptly got hold of himself. "Yes, I'm finished," he said sullenly.

  "Then listen to me," said Woodin, like a middle-aged father admonishing a sulky child.

  "You're working yourself up over nothing. Neither Gray nor I have made one complaint yet. Neither of us have once said that we disbelieve what you told us."

  "You haven't said you disbelieve, no!" Ross exclaimed with anger suddenly reflaring. "But don't you suppose I can tell what you're thinking?

  "You think I told you a fairy story about the things I saw from my plane, don't you? You think I dragged you two up here on a wild-goose chase, to look for incredible creatures that could never have existed. You believe that, don't you?"

  "Oh, damn these mosquitoes!" said Gray, slapping viciously at his neck and staring with unfriendly eyes at the aviator.

  Woodin took command. "We'll go over this after we've made camp. Jim, get out the duffle-bags. Ross, will you rustle firewood?"

  They both glared at him and at each other but grudgingly they obeyed. The tension eased for a while.

  By the time darkness fell on the little riverside clearing, the canoe was drawn up on the bank, their trim little balloon-silk tent had been erected, and a fire crackled in front of it. Gray fed the fire with fat knots of pine while Woodin cooked
over it coffee, hot cakes and the inevitable bacon.

  The firelight wavered feebly up toward the tall trunks of giant hemlocks that walled the little clearing on three sides. It lit up their three khaki-clad, stained figures and the irregular white block of the tent. It gleamed out there on the riffles of the McNorton, chuckling softly as it flowed on toward the Little Whale.

  They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to the chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome cheeping of insects.

  Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his bootheel and sat up.

  "All right," he said, "now we'll settle this argument we were having."

  Ross looked a little shamefaced. "I guess I got too hot about it," he said subduedly. Then added, "But all the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me."

  Woodin shook his head calmly.

  "No, we don't, Ross. When you told us that you'd seen creatures unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you."

  "If we hadn't, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here with you into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?"

  "I know, I know," said the aviator unsatisfiedly. "You think I saw something queer and you're taking a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after.

  "But you don't believe what I've told you about the looks of the things. You think that sounds too queer to be true, don't you?"

  For the first time Woodin hesitated in answering. "After all, Ross," he said indirectly, "one's eyes can play tricks when you're only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up."

  "Glimpsing them?" echoed Ross. "I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, yes, but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.

  "It was near here, too, just east of the forks of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking south in a hurry for I'd been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson's Bay. I wanted to place my-