Smith Home is the Spaceman and four more stories

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-98744-651-1
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 135 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

This is a great collection of action short stories by George O. Smith from The Golden Age of Science Fiction. Featured here: Home is the Spaceman, Latent Image, Quest to Centaurus, Problem in Solid , and Meddler's Moon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, George O.

Leseproben

"Latent Image"
John McBride stood on the roof garden of Satan's Hotel, looking across the River Styx at Sharon. To his left, the River Styx emptied into the Sulphur Sea, and in the evening sky to his right, the dancing flames lighted the cloud banks over Mephisto, where the uranium smelters worked on a nonstop plan. John McBride was in Hell. But Hell is a city on Pluto, where the planners had a free hand because no intelligent life had ever scarred the planet until man came with his machinery and his luxury and his seeking for metal. Uranium had been found in plenty on Pluto, and so man had created a livable planet from the coldest, most forbidding planet in the System. John McBride was in Hell, on Pluto, but his mind was dwelling in a little cube that rotated about a mythical spot halfway between Sol and Pluto; one of the many stations that created the space warp that focused Sol on Pluto with an angle of incidence equal to the incidence of Sol on Terra. Enid McBride was back there in that minute station, and John McBride wanted to be with her. But Dr. Caldwell, the resident doctor of the Plutonian Lens, said: "John, if you've got to go to Pluto, that's O.K. But you can't take Enid with you. That's strictly out, with a capital 'O,' get me?" "I suppose—" "I've been doctoring for many years, John. It's safe for you to run off for a week or so, but don't move Enid. Your kid won't be born for a month, yet, but if you subject her to the 4- or 5-G you need to get from here to Pluto, you'll have—not only the baby, but as nasty a mess as you've ever seen! Take it from me, fella, 4-G is worse than a fall if you keep it up for hours. No dice!" "O.K.," said John, unhappily. "She'll be all right?" "Sure," said Caldwell. "Besides, all you can do now is to sit around, bite your fingernails, and ask foolish questions. If I had my way, you'd be away when the youngster is born, that'd save you from a lot of useless worry." "That isn't fair." "I know you feel that way. Enid does too. But it is still sort of futile. You want the right to worry; go ahead and worry. After all, there are enough people around the Lens that know you are worrying. She'll be all right, I tell you!" "You'll let me know if anything turns up?" "That's a promise, John." So John McBride was standing on a roof garden in Hell, thinking how appropriate it was. He was in Hell, all right. Hell was a nice place to be, warm, pleasant, and happily balanced. But it was no place to be when your wife is nineteen hundred million miles away. Ah, well, another week of this and he would be racing homeward. Home! That was funny, to consider home, a place in space where gravity was furnished by an mechanogravitic warp, and where there were no windows to open, and where you lived in a cube of steel three thousand feet on a side, mostly filled with the items required for living plus the maze of equipment required to maintain the great lens that gave Pluto its sun. Home! It was a far cry from his boyhood home on Venus, where the greenery of the forest fought with the very walls. But home is where you like it, and McBride liked it. He wished that he were there, for he felt that Enid needed him. Then with that perversity of nature that people call fate, a bellhop approached him and handed him a spacegram. McBride tipped the boy and opened the envelope easily. He'd been getting 'grams by round numbers for several years, and this was no novelty. He was not aware of its importance until he opened the folded page and read: JOHN MC BRIDE
SATAN'S HOTEL
HELL, PLUTO HIT SKY FOR HOME. ENID IN NO GREAT DANGER FROM FALL, BUT HER RECOVERY WILL BE ASSISTED BY YOUR PRESENCE. CALDWELL. McBride read the words twice, and then looked around himself, wildly. Hit Sky was easy to say—but at 6-G it would take just over one hundred hours to make the passage. Four days minimum! McBride raced to the elevator, chewed his fingernails while the car rode him down the hundred and seven floors with that snail's pace caused by many stops. He shot out of the elevator door, caromed off the opposite wall into an ash tray which he upset and sent a small cascade of sand across the floor. McBride coasted to a stop before the hotel manager's desk and tossed the 'gram in front of him. The manager read and looked up in sympathy. McBride said: "Get me a reservation on the next sunward-bound ship. Emergency stop; they'll make the stopoff with an emergency." "Right." The manager spoke into the phone and then said: "And you'll be checking out?" "Yes. Have one of the boys collect my stuff and ship it out to Station 1." "O.K., McBride, we'll see that your stuff is taken care of. Ben!" he called out through the door, "hurry up on that reservation, and see that a car is ready to take Mr. McBride to Hellsport." "T'won't be necessary," said Ben with a glum face. "The Uranium Lady just took off fifteen minutes ago, and there isn't another ship scheduled out of Hellsport for five days." "Five days!" groaned McBride. "Anything flyable on this planet?" "Nothing that would take a run to the Lens," said Ben. "Sure?" "Almost positive. However, I'll put a request on the radio that may smoke out an unknown." "I'll buy the thing if they won't let me go any other way," said McBride. "We understand," said the hotel manager. McBride stamped up and down the hotel lobby for an hour. His luggage came down, all collected and prepared. He called Caldwell, and spoke to him for an hour, but Dr. Caldwell's protestations didn't help McBride. Enid had fallen from a chair while cleaning out a shelf, and was resting easily, no complications. Yes, there was some pain, enough to make Enid want her husband near. No danger, no, but it would be best if he were there. But McBride was still one hundred hours and nineteen hundred million miles away. John McBride didn't see the messenger boy bringing the message until he almost bumped into him. "Mr. McBride, here's your answer," said the lad, and he saw McBride rip the envelope open with a quick gesture to read the following: MC BRIDE: EXPERIMENTAL SPACESHIP HAYWIRE QUEEN AT YOUR COMMAND IF YOU CAN REPAIR ALPHATRON. MEET ME AT HELLSPORT. STEVE HAMMOND (SKYWAYS) McBride said to the messenger: "It's grabbing at straws, but get me a cab and I'll take a whirl at it." "Think you can do it?" asked the lad. "Don't know. I'm desperate. After all, it's a wild chance because if Steve Hammond and his gang haven't been able to repair it, how can I expect to?" "Give it a whirl anyway, sir," said the lad. "That I'll do," said McBride. "And now that cab!" The Haywire Queen stood above McBride as he met Steve Hammond. "What's your trouble, John?" asked Hammond. McBride explained. Then he asked: "What's yours?" Hammond smiled wryly. "That's a long, sad tale. We've been trying to increase the efficiency of the drive, you know. We've been hunting up and down the electrogravitic spectrum for a more efficient operating point. We found what we knew already; that we were using the most efficient part of the E-grav range. We went all the way from down low, where the stuff is just beginning to make itself detectable to up high where the equipment is slightly fragile and extremely experimental in construction. Then we took a run at the mec-grav, with absolutely no success other than to ruin a whole bank of relays; the mechanogravitic warp extended farther than we anticipated when we hit the mechanogravitic resonance of the drive bar, and hell sort of flew all over in great hunks. One of the interesting items was the closing of the E-grav field controls, and the resulting power drain over-loaded the alphatron. We limped in using a jury-rigged line from the lifeship's alphatron and made a something-slightly-less than a crash landing here on Pluto. "So now we're either stuck here until we get the new alphatron we ordered, or you can give us a few hints on household repairs." "What's your lifeship's output?" asked McBride, following Hammond into the spacelock. "About eleven hundred alphons." "You'll need about fourteen hundred to take off from Pluto," said John. "How's the big one?" "Deader than the proverbial dodo, whatever that was." "Dodo?" laughed McBride. "That was a mythical critter that went around dead, I think. It was so dead, even when alive, that when it really died, it was really dead." "You'd better stick to alphatrons," laughed Hammond. "Speaking of the equipment, have you tried to get a replacement on Pluto?" "Nothing didding. About our only chance is to haywire something together. But remember, we still have to make a landing, somewhere, and that means a safety factor is somewhat to be desired." "Not at all. If we can take off safely, we're in!" "Explain. As I was taught in school, anyone can fly a spaceship, but it takes a pilot to land one." "Sure, but remember you'll be stopping off at the Lens. We've got replacements there that will enable you to make space repairs and go on from there in safety." "Didn't think of that. Well, here's the mess!" McBride needed no close inspection to see that the alphatron was definitely defunct. A foul smell, faint, ephemerally pungent, permeated the room. It was the smell of burned synthetic coil dope and field-winding varnish which has been described as smelling something like a frying toupee. "Not only dead," was his cryptic remark, "but dead and sutteed!" "Fricasseed," corrected Hammond. "Anything we can do?" "Is the winding...