Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction May and June 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
This is the illustrated, shorter version of the EBook #24436
ANYTHING YOU CAN DO!
First of two parts. The Alien was _really_ alien--and Earth was faced with a strange problem indeed. They _had_ to have a superman. And there weren't any. So....
by Darrell T. Langart
ILLUSTRATED BY LEONE
* * * * *
I
Like some great silver-pink fish, the ship sang on through the eternalnight. There was no impression of swimming; the fish shape had neitherfins nor a tail. It was as though it were hovering in wait for a member ofsome smaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, so that it, inturn, could pounce and kill.
But still it moved.
Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have toldthat this fish was dying.
In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder--long, tapered, andoval in cross-section--but it showed none of the exterior markings onemight expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With oneexception, the smooth, silver-pink exterior was featureless.
That one exception was a long, purplish-black, roughened discolorationthat ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters oflength. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying.
Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the discoloration.Had he thought about it, he would have deduced the presence of the burn,but it was the least of his worries. The internal damage that had beendone to the ship was by far the more serious. It could, quite possibly,kill him.
The Nipe, of course, had no intention of dying. Not out here. Not so far,so very far, from his own people. Not out here, where his death would beso very improper.
He looked at the ball of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that sucha relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendouslyenergetic plasmoid that it could still do the damage it had done so farout. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normallyproduce such energetic swirls of magnetic force.
But the thing had been there, nonetheless, and the ship had hit it at highvelocity. Fortunately, the ship had only touched the edge of the swirlingcloud, otherwise the entire ship would have vanished in a puff ofincandescence. But it had done enough. The power plants that drove theship at ultralight velocities through the depths of interstellar space hadbeen so badly damaged that they could only be used in short bursts, andeach burst brought them nearer to the fusion point. Most of theinstruments were powerless; the Nipe was not even sure he could land thevessel. Any attempt to use the communicator to call home would have blownthe ship to atoms.
The Nipe did not want to die, but, if die he must, he did not want to diefoolishly.
It had taken a long time to drift in from the outer reaches of this sun'splanetary system, but using the power plants any more than absolutelynecessary would have been fool-hardy.
The Nipe missed the companionship his brother had given him for so long;his help would be invaluable now. But there had been no choice. There hadnot been enough supplies for two to survive the long fall inward towardthe distant sun. The Nipe, having discovered the fact first, had, out ofhis mercy and compassion, killed his brother while the other was notlooking. Then, having eaten his brother with all due ceremony, he hadsettled down to the long, lonely wait.
Beings of another race might have cursed the accident that had disabledthe ship, or regretted the necessity that one of them should die, but theNipe did neither, for, to him, the first notion would have been foolish,and the second incomprehensible.
But now, as the ship fell ever closer toward the yellow-white sun, hebegan to worry about his own fate. For a while, it had seemed almostcertain that he would survive long enough to build a communicator--forthe instruments had already told him and his brother that the system aheadwas inhabited by creatures of reasoning power, if not true intelligence,and it would almost certainly be possible to get the equipment he neededfor them. Now, though, it looked as if the ship would not survive alanding. He had had to steer it away from a great gas giant, which hadseriously endangered the power plants.
He did not want to die in space--wasted, forever undevoured. At least, hemust die on a planet, where there might be creatures with the compassionand wisdom to give his body the proper ingestion. The thought of feedinginferior creatures was repugnant, but it was better than rotting to feedmonocells or ectogenes, and far superior to wasting away in space.
Even thoughts such as these did not occupy his mind often or for verylong. Far, far better than any of them was the desire--and planning forsurvival.
* * * * *
The outer orbits of the gas giants had been passed at last, and the Nipefell on through the asteroid belt without approaching any of the largerpieces of rock-and-metal. That he and his brother had originally electedto come into this system along its orbital plane had been a mixedblessing; to have come in at a different angle would have avoided all thedebris--from planetary size on down--that is thickest in a star'sequatorial plane, but it would also have meant a greater chance ofmissing a suitable planet unless too much reliance were placed on thealready weakened power generators. As it was, the Nipe had been able touse the gravitational field of the gas giant to swing his ship toward theprecise spot where the third planet would be when the ship arrived in thethird orbit. Moreover, the third planet would be retreating from theNipe's line of flight, which would make the velocity difference that muchthe less.
For a while, the Nipe had toyed with the idea of using the mining basesthat the local life form had set up in the asteroid belt as bases for hisown operations, but he had decided against it. Movement would be muchfreer and much more productive on a planet than it would be in the Belt.
He would have preferred using the fourth planet for his base. Althoughmuch smaller, it had the same reddish, arid look as his own home planet,while the third world was three-quarters drowned in water. But there weretwo factors that weighed so heavily against that choice that they renderedit impossible. In the first place, by far the greater proportion of thelocal inhabitants' commerce was between the asteroids and the thirdplanet. Second, and much more important, the fourth world was at such apoint in her orbit that the energy required to land would destroy the shipbeyond any doubt.
It would have to be the third world.
As the ship fell inward, the Nipe watched his pitifully inadequateinstruments, doing his best to keep tabs on every one of thefeebly-powered ships that the local life form used to move through space.He did not want to be spotted now, and even though the odds were againstthese beings having any instrument highly developed enough to spot hiscraft, there was always the possibility that he might be observedoptically.
So he squatted there in the ship, a centipede-like thing about five feetin length and a little less than eighteen inches in diameter, with eightarticulated limbs spaced in pairs along his body, any one of which couldbe used as hand or foot. His head, which was long and snouted, displayedtwo pairs of violet eyes which kept a constant watch on the indicators andscreens of the few instruments that were still functioning aboard theship.
And he waited as the ship fell towards its rendezvous with the thirdplanet.
II
Wang Kulichenko pulled th
e collar of his uniform coat up closer around hisears and pulled the helmet and face-mask down a bit. It was only earlyOctober, but here in the tundra country the wind had a tendency to bechill and biting in the morning, even at this time of year. Within a weekor so, he'd have to start using the power pack on his horse toelectrically warm his protective clothing and the horse's wrappings, butthere was no necessity of that yet. He smiled a little as he always didwhen he thought of his grandfather's remarks about such "new-fanglednonsense".
"Your ancestors, son of my son," he would say, "conquered the tundra andlived upon it for thousands of years without the need of such womanishthings. Are there no men anymore? Are there none who can face nature aloneand unafraid without the aid of artifices that bring softness?"
But Wang Kulichenko noticed--though, out of politeness, he never pointedit out--that the old man never failed to take advantage of the electricwarmth of the house when the short days came and the snow blew across thecountry like fine white sand. And he never complained about the lights orthe