The Third Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  “If some effort had been made to take the boy to Oostpoort from here, instead of calling on us to send a car, Den Hoorn could have been crossed before the crack opened,” he pointed out.

  “An effort was made,” replied Sanchez quietly. “Perhaps you do not fully realize our position here. We have no engines except the stationary generators that give us current for our air-conditioning and our utilities. They are powered by the windmills. We do not have gasoline engines for vehicles, so our vehicles are operated by hand.”

  “You push them?” demanded Jan incredulously.

  “No. You’ve seen pictures of the pump-cars that once were used on terrestrial railroads? Ours are powered like that, but we cannot operate them when the Venerian wind is blowing. By the time I diagnosed the Venus Shadow in Diego, the wind was coming up, and we had no way to get him to Oostpoort.”

  “Mmm,” grunted Jan. He shifted uncomfortably and looked at the pair in the corner. The blonde head was bent over the boy protectingly, and over his mother’s shoulder Diego’s black eyes returned Jan’s glance.

  “If the disease has just started, the boy could wait for the next Earth ship, couldn’t he?” asked Jan.

  “I said I had just diagnosed it, not that it had just started,señor,” corrected Sanchez. “As you know, the trip to Earth takes 145 days and it can be started only when the two planets are at the right position in their orbits. Have you ever seen anyone die of the Venus Shadow?”

  “Yes, I have,” replied Jan in a low voice. He had seen two people die of it, and it had not been pleasant.

  Medical men thought it was a deficiency disease, but they had not traced down the deficiency responsible. Treatment by vitamins, diet, antibiotics, infrared and ultraviolet rays, all were useless. The only thing that could arrest and cure the disease was removal from the dry, cloud-hung surface of Venus and return to a moist, sunny climate on Earth.

  Without that treatment, once the typical mottled texture of the skin appeared, the flesh rapidly deteriorated and fell away in chunks. The victim remained unfevered and agonizingly conscious until the degeneration reached a vital spot.

  “If you have,” said Sanchez, “you must realize that Diego cannot wait for a later ship, if his life is to be saved. He must get to Earth at once.”

  * * * *

  Jan puffed at the Heerenbaai-Tabak and cogitated. The place was aptly named. It was a ratty community. The boy was a dark-skinned little Spaniard—of Mexican origin, perhaps. But he was a boy, and a human being.

  A thought occurred to him. From what he had seen and heard, the entire economy of Rathole could not support the tremendous expense of sending the boy across the millions of miles to Earth by spaceship.

  “Who’s paying his passage?” he asked. “The Dutch Central Venus Company isn’t exactly a charitable institution.”

  “Your Señor Dekker said that would be taken care of,” replied Sanchez.

  Jan relit his pipe silently, making a mental resolution that Dekker wouldn’t take care of it alone. Salaries for Venerian service were high, and many of the men at Oostpoort would contribute readily to such a cause.

  “Who is Diego’s father?” he asked.

  “He was Ramón Murillo, a very good mechanic,” answered Sanchez, with a sliding sidelong glance at Jan’s face. “He has been dead for three years.”

  Jan grunted.

  “The copters at Oostpoort can’t buck this wind,” he said thoughtfully, “or I’d have come in one of those in the first place instead of trying to cross Den Hoorn by land. But if you have any sort of aircraft here, it might make it downwind—if it isn’t wrecked on takeoff.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Sanchez.

  “Too bad. There’s nothing we can do, then. The nearest settlement west of here is more than a thousand kilometers away, and I happen to know they have no planes, either. Just copters. So that’s no help.”

  “Wait,” said Sanchez, lifting the scalpel and tilting his head. “I believe there is something, though we cannot use it. This was once an American naval base, and the people here were civilian employes who refused to move north with it. There was a flying machine they used for short-range work, and one was left behind—probably with a little help from the people of the settlement. But.…”

  “What kind of machine? Copter or plane?”

  “They call it a flying platform. It carries two men, I believe. But, señor.…”

  “I know them. I’ve operated them, before I left Earth. Man, you don’t expect me to try to fly one of those little things in this wind? They’re tricky as they can be, and the passengers are absolutely unprotected!”

  “Señor, I have asked you to do nothing.”

  “No, you haven’t,” muttered Jan. “But you know I’ll do it.”

  Sanchez looked into his face, smiling faintly and a little sadly.

  “I was sure you would be willing,” he said. He turned and spoke in Spanish to Mrs. Murillo.

  The woman rose to her feet and came to them. As Jan arose, she looked up at him, tears in her eyes.

  “Gracias,” she murmured. “Un millón de gracias.”

  She lifted his hands in hers and kissed them.

  Jan disengaged himself gently, embarrassed. But it occurred to him, looking down on the bowed head of the beautiful young widow, that he might make some flying trips back over here in his leisure time. Language barriers were not impassable, and feminine companionship might cure his neurotic, history-born distaste for Spaniards, for more than one reason.

  Sanchez was tugging at his elbow.

  “Señor, I have been trying to tell you,” he said. “It is generous and good of you, and I wantedSeñora Murillo to know what a brave man you are. But have you forgotten that we have no gasoline engines here? There is no fuel for the flying platform.”

  * * * *

  The platform was in a warehouse which, like the rest of the structures in Rathole, was a half-buried dome. The platform’s ring-shaped base was less than a meter thick, standing on four metal legs. On top of it, in the center, was a railed circle that would hold two men, but would crowd them. Two small gasoline engines sat on each side of this railed circle and between them on a third side was the fuel tank. The passengers entered it on the fourth side.

  The machine was dusty and spotted with rust, Jan, surrounded by Sanchez, Diego and a dozen men, inspected it thoughtfully. The letters USN*SES were painted in white on the platform itself, and each engine bore the label “Hiller.”

  Jan peered over the edge of the platform at the twin-ducted fans in their plastic shrouds. They appeared in good shape. Each was powered by one of the engines, transmitted to it by heavy rubber belts.

  Jan sighed. It was an unhappy situation. As far as he could determine, without making tests, the engines were in perfect condition. Two perfectly good engines, and no fuel for them.

  “You’re sure there’s no gasoline, anywhere in Rathole?” he asked Sanchez.

  Sanchez smiled ruefully, as he had once before, at Jan’s appellation for the community. The inhabitants’ term for it was simply “La Ciudad Nuestra”—“Our Town.” But he made no protest. He turned to one of the other men and talked rapidly for a few moments in Spanish.

  “None, señor,” he said, turning back to Jan. “The Americans, of course, kept much of it when they were here, but the few things we take to Oostpoort to trade could not buy precious gasoline. We have electricity in plenty if you can power the platform with it.”

  Jan thought that over, trying to find a way.

  “No, it wouldn’t work,” he said. “We could rig batteries on the platform and electric motors to turn the propellers. But batteries big enough to power it all the way to Oostpoort would be so heavy the machine couldn’t lift them off the ground. If there were some way to carry a power line all the way to Oostpoort, or to broadcast the power to it.…But it’s a light-load machine, and must have an engine that gives it the necessary power from very little weight.”

  Wild scheme
s ran through his head. If they were on water, instead of land, he could rig up a sail. He could still rig up a sail, for a groundcar, except for the chasm out on Den Hoorn.

  The groundcar! Jan straightened and snapped his fingers.

  “Doctor!” he explained. “Send a couple of men to drain the rest of the fuel from my groundcar. And let’s get this platform above ground and tie it down until we can get it started.”

  Sanchez gave rapid orders in Spanish. Two of the men left at a run, carrying five-gallon cans with them.

  Three others picked up the platform and carried it up a ramp and outside. As soon as they reached ground level, the wind hit them. They dropped the platform to the ground, where it shuddered and swayed momentarily, and two of the men fell successfully on their stomachs. The wind caught the third and somersaulted him half a dozen times before he skidded to a stop on his back with outstretched arms and legs. He turned over cautiously and crawled back to them.

  Jan, his head just above ground level, surveyed the terrain. There was flat ground to the east, clear in a fairly broad alley for at least half a kilometer before any of the domes protruded up into it.

  “This is as good a spot for takeoff as we’ll find,” he said to Sanchez.

  The men put three heavy ropes on the platform’s windward rail and secured it by them to the heavy chain that ran by the dome. The platform quivered and shuddered in the heavy wind, but its base was too low for it to overturn.

  Shortly the two men returned with the fuel from the groundcar, struggling along the chain. Jan got above ground in a crouch, clinging to the rail of the platform, and helped them fill the fuel tank with it. He primed the carburetors and spun the engines.

  Nothing happened.

  He turned the engines over again. One of them coughed, and a cloud of blue smoke burst from its exhaust, but they did not catch.

  “What is the matter, señor?” asked Sanchez from the dome entrance.

  “I don’t know,” replied Jan. “Maybe it’s that the engines haven’t been used in so long. I’m afraid I’m not a good enough mechanic to tell.”

  “Some of these men were good mechanics when the navy was here,” said Sanchez. “Wait.”

  He turned and spoke to someone in the dome. One of the men of Rathole came to Jan’s side and tried the engines. They refused to catch. The man made carburetor adjustments and tried again. No success.

  He sniffed, took the cap from the fuel tank and stuck a finger inside. He withdrew it, wet and oily, and examined it. He turned and spoke to Sanchez.

  “He says that your groundcar must have a diesel engine,” Sanchez interpreted to Jan. “Is that correct?”

  “Why, yes, that’s true.”

  “He says the fuel will not work then, señor. He says it is low-grade fuel and the platform must have high octane gasoline.”

  Jan threw up his hands and went back into the dome.

  “I should have known that,” he said unhappily. “I would have known if I had thought of it.”

  “What is to be done, then?” asked Sanchez.

  “There’s nothing that can be done,” answered Jan. “They may as well put the fuel back in my groundcar.”

  Sanchez called orders to the men at the platform. While they worked, Jan stared out at the furiously spinning windmills that dotted Rathole.

  “There’s nothing that can be done,” he repeated. “We can’t make the trip overland because of the chasm out there in Den Hoorn, and we can’t fly the platform because we have no power for it.”

  Windmills. Again Jan could imagine the flat land around them as his native Holland, with the Zuider Zee sparkling to the west where here the desert stretched under darkling clouds.

  * * * *

  Jan looked at his watch. A little more than two hours before the G-boat’s blastoff time, and it couldn’t wait for them. It was nearly eight hours since he had left Oostpoort, and the afternoon was getting noticeably darker.

  Jan was sorry. He had done his best, but Venus had beaten him.

  He looked around for Diego. The boy was not in the dome. He was outside, crouched in the lee of the dome, playing with some sticks.

  Diego must know of his ailment, and why he had to go to Oostpoort. If Jan was any judge of character, Sanchez would have told him that. Whether Diego knew it was a life-or-death matter for him to be aboard theVanderdecken when it blasted off for Earth, Jan did not know. But the boy was around eight years old and he was bright, and he must realize the seriousness involved in a decision to send him all the way to Earth.

  Jan felt ashamed of the exuberant foolishness which had led him to spout ancient historyand claim descent from William of Orange. It had been a hobby, and artificial topic for conversation that amused him and his companions, a defense against the monotony of Venus that had begun to affect his personality perhaps a bit more than he realized. He did not dislike Spaniards; he had no reason to dislike them. They were all humans—the Spanish, the Dutch, the Germans, the Americans, even the Russians—fighting a hostile planet together. He could not understand a word Diego said when the boy spoke to him, but he liked Diego and wished desperately he could do something.

  Outside, the windmills of Rathole spun merrily.

  There was power, the power that lighted and air-conditioned Rathole, power in the air all around them. If he could only use it! But to turn the platform on its side and let the wind spin the propellers was pointless.

  He turned to Sanchez.

  “Ask the men if there are any spare parts for the platform,” he said. “Some of those legs it stands on, transmission belts, spare propellers.”

  Sanchez asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Many spare parts, but no fuel.”

  Jan smiled a tight smile.

  “Tell them to take the engines out,” he said. “Since we have no fuel, we may as well have no engines.”

  * * * *

  Pieter Heemskerk stood by the ramp to the stubby G-boat and checked his watch. It was X minus fifteen—fifteen minutes before blastoff time.

  Heemskerk wore a spacesuit. Everything was ready, except climbing aboard, closing the airlock and pressing the firing pin.

  What on Venus could have happened to Van Artevelde? The last radio message they had received, more than an hour ago, had said he and the patient took off successfully in an aircraft. What sort of aircraft could he be flying that would require an hour to cover eighty kilometers, with the wind?

  Heemskerk could only draw the conclusion that the aircraft had been wrecked somewhere in Den Hoorn. As a matter of fact, he knew that preparations were being made now to send a couple of groundcars out to search for it.

  This, of course, would be too late to help the patient Van Artevelde was bringing, but Heemskerk had no personal interest in the patient. His worry was all for his friend. The two of them had enjoyed chess and good beer together on his last three trips to Venus, and Heemskerk hoped very sincerely that the big blond man wasn’t hurt.

  He glanced at his watch again. X minus twelve. In two minutes, it would be time for him to walk up the ramp into the G-boat. In seven minutes the backward count before blastoff would start over the area loudspeakers.

  Heemskerk shook his head sadly. And Van Artevelde had promised to come back triumphant, with a broom at his masthead!

  It was a high thin whine borne on the wind, carrying even through the walls of his spacehelmet, that attracted Heemskerk’s attention and caused him to pause with his foot on the ramp. Around him, the rocket mechanics were staring up at the sky, trying to pinpoint the noise.

  Heemskerk looked westward. At first he could see nothing, then there was a moving dot above the mountain, against the indigo umbrella of clouds. It grew, it swooped, it approached and became a strange little flying disc with two people standing on it and something sticking up from its deck in front of them.

  A broom?

  No. The platform hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling fr
antically with whatever it was that stuck up on it—a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly and the platform slid to the ground with a rush. It hit with a clatter and its two passengers tumbled prone to the ground.

  “Jan!” boomed Heemskerk, forcing his voice through the helmet diaphragm and rushing over to his friend. “I was afraid you were lost!”

  Jan struggled to his feet and leaned down to help the boy up.

  “Here’s your patient, Pieter,” he said. “Hope you have a spacesuit in his size.”

  “I can find one. And we’ll have to hurry for blastoff. But, first, what happened? Even that damned thing ought to get here from Rathole faster than that.”

  “Had no fuel,” replied Jan briefly. “My engines were all right, but I had no power to run them. So I had to pull the engines and rig up a power source.”

  Heemskerk stared at the platform. On its railing was rigged a tripod of battered metal pipes, atop which a big four-blade propeller spun slowly in what wind was left after it came over the western mountain. Over the edges of the platform, running from the two propellers in its base, hung a series of tattered transmission belts.

  “Power source?” repeated Heemskerk. “That?”

  “Certainly,” replied Jan with dignity. “The power source any good Dutchman turns to in an emergency: a windmill!”

  STAR MOTHER, by Robert F. Young

  That night her son was the first star.

  She stood motionless in the garden, one hand pressed against her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy, where he had worked as a young man; and she wondered whether he was thinking of those fields now, whether he was thinking of her standing alone in the April night with her memories; whether he was thinking of the verandahed house behind her, with its empty rooms and silent halls, that once upon a time had been his birthplace.

  Higher still and higher he rose in the southern sky, and then, when he had reached his zenith, he dropped swiftly down past the dark edge of the Earth and disappeared from sight. A boy grown up too soon, riding round and round the world on a celestial carousel, encased in an airtight metal capsule in an airtight metal chariot…