Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era

  Her control broke. She burst into sobs and huddled in my arms. Finally she said, “I—hated him. He was out of his mind.”

  “Try not to think about it,” I told her. “Try to forget him. It’s all over. There’s just us now.”

  “I know,” she said.

  I looked up at the sky, which was dark with the Invaders. It was a frightening sight—but I no longer feared them. The Gateway was closed, and Abel Harwood dead, so far as we were concerned. I didn’t want to think of what might be happening to him in whatever universe he was in.

  There would be a lot of work to do. I would have to find the authorities, if any were left, and show them how to build my generator. Then would begin the long, slow war of eradication against the remaining Invaders.

  Laura was still sobbing. “Don’t worry,” I said soothingly. “It’s all over now.”

  We had won.

  QUICK FREEZE

  (1956)

  Of course, Hamling wasn’t my only market in that busy couple of years. I was indefatigably turning out stories all up and down the field, now for the high-paying and demanding Astounding and Galaxy at the top and now for one of the formula-fiction magazines at the other end. One of the editors I did a great deal of work for was Robert W. Lowndes of Future Science Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly, and The Original Science Fiction Stories, who occupied an anomalous position as a science-fiction editor, compelled by a parsimonious publisher to pay very little for his material but led by his own cultivated tastes in science fiction to seek out high-quality material that would appeal to a sophisticated audience.

  Lowndes had been a prominent figure in the science-fiction world since the 1930s, first as reader and critic, then as a short-story writer of considerable ability, and, since 1941, the editor of Columbia Publications’ chain of pulp magazines. He was responsible for a wide assortment of titles—sports pulps, western pulps, detective pulps, and so on—but he edited those with his left hand, so to speak, while pouring his greatest energies into his s-f magazines.

  The skimpy editorial budgets he was forced to live within meant, of course, that Lowndes had to settle, mainly, for the top-paying editors’ rejects. Since neither Campbell nor Gold nor Boucher could buy every story that their best contributors turned out, Lowndes did succeed in snapping up some estimable material by the likes of Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, and L. Sprague de Camp that had failed to make the grade higher up, and because he was a genial man with wide social connections in the field, such writers as James Blish, Damon Knight, and Frederik Pohl gave him first look at new stories, primarily out of friendship, despite the low rate of payment. His magazines, therefore, were widely admired, and most readers were unaware of the intricate improvisations by which Lowndes was able to fill them with stories worth reading.

  Randall Garrett introduced me to him in the summer of 1955, and even though there was a difference of nearly twenty years in our ages, he and I struck up an immediate rapport. For one thing, he had already bought one of my earliest stories, “The Silent Colony,” which he had published the year before. For another, he sensed that I was one of those science-fiction prodigies, like his old friends Isaac Asimov and Cyril Kornbluth of fifteen years before, who even though barely out of his teens could be relied upon for a steady stream of publishable stories and was too productive to be able to confine his output to the three top magazines alone. And also we had many interests in common—classical music, cats, and the collecting of old science fiction magazines. After my marriage in the summer of 1956, my wife and I became frequent weekend guests at Lowndes’ small but pleasant country home about an hour’s drive north of New York City; I explored his huge record collection, we argued amiably about our favorite stories and books, and I played with his cats (and took a kitten home for Christmas that year).

  He began to publish my stories regularly right from the beginning. The May, 1956 issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories (which we all referred to simply as “The Original”) ran “The Desiccator.” The same month Science Fiction Quarterly used a Garrett-Silverberg collaboration, “No Future in This.” I was back in The Original’s July issue, in the September issue of Future, in Science Fiction Quarterly with Garrett again in November, and so on and so on.

  Most of these were paid for at rock-bottom prices, and made economic sense for me only because I was capable of writing so quickly, a 5000-word story in a single morning, a novelet in a day or two. And a dollar went a long way in those days when my handsome Manhattan apartment cost me something like $150 a month in rent, so that $50 or sometimes $75 for a morning’s work was actually quite generous. But Lowndes was occasionally permitted to commission a few stories at higher rates—Asimov got the extraordinary rate of four cents a word from him for a couple of stories—and I got the benefit of that from time to time when the magazine needed a special favor. For example, it was a common custom in those days for magazines to buy a cover painting from an artist and then find a writer to turn out a story that included the depicted scene. (It was also the custom for the chosen writer to dream up the most far-fetched narrative situation he could for the illustration he was working with.) Knowing that I could be depended on to meet deadlines, Lowndes began to ask me to do these cover stories. In November, 1956 the artist Ed Emshwiller came into Lowndes’ office with a sketch for a cover showing a spaceship buried up to its nose in ice on some alien planet, while two spacesuit-clad spacemen desperately tried to free it with pickaxes. I happened to be in the office that day, and the Emshwiller sketch drew a chuckle from me—whereupon Bob Lowndes asked me to write a story about the cover that would result from it.

  So I went home and wrote “Quick Freeze,” for which Lowndes paid me a bonus rate, and paid rather more quickly than was the custom for his magazines. It ran in the May, 1957 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly, a magazine that had the distinction of being the last of the old-fashioned large pulp format science-fiction magazines. (It struggled along for another year before distribution problems swept it away.) “Quick Freeze” was popular with Lowndes’ readers and I wrote a good many more cover stories for him in the next few years, usually after a consultation with Ed Emshwiller, who was very good at coming up with clever cover-worthy ideas that I could turn into lively fiction. I doubt that very many readers suspected that the covers had come first and the stories afterward.

  ——————

  According to the ship’s mass detectors, Valdon’s Star lay dead ahead. In the fore cabin of the Calypso, Communications Tech Diem Mariksboorg tried to shut his ears to the angry, insistent shrill distress pulse coming from the Empire hyperliner that lay wrecked on Valdon’s Star’s lone planet.

  Spectrometer analysis confirmed it. “We’re here,” he said. He turned to the Calypso’s captain, Vroi Werner, who was running possible orbits through the computer. “You ready for the pickup, Vroi?”

  Werner nodded. “I figure we’ll make a jet landing, using a standard orbit, and grab the survivors quick as we can.”

  “And no salvage.”

  “Just people,” Werner said. He picked up the sheaf of notes Mariksboorg had transcribed from the distress message, read them again, and laid them down. “There are twelve survivors. With a little shoe-horning, Diem, we can just about get twelve more aboard the Calypso.”

  Mariksboorg peered at the growing bright image in the viewscreen, frowning moodily. “We’d be back snug on Gorbrough now if we hadn’t taken this cockeyed route. Whoever heard of a jetship making an emergency pickup?”

  “We happened to be right where we were needed at just the right time,” Werner said stiffly. “There’s a time element involved in this, Diem. It turns out to be more efficient to use an inefficient old jet-powered tub to make the pickup than the shiniest new warp-ship…for the efficient reason that we’re already here.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the chastened tech replied.

  Valdon’s Star was actually a triple system, consisting of a small, Sol-type main-sequence
sun; a gray ghost companion, bulky and lifeless, a monstrous rarefied cinder and nothing more—and one unnamed planet, orbiting around the gray companion.

  The Empire hyperliner Andromeda had been bound for the Deneb system out of Terra when something—a fused ultrone in the main generator, perhaps, or a cadmium damper inserted askew—went out of kilter, upsetting the delicate balance of the hyperdrive, restoring the liner to normal space, and depositing it abruptly on the frozen surface of Valdon’s Star’s one world.

  A wrecked hyperliner is a thoroughly helpless object; the Bohling Hyperdrive is too complex for any journeyman engineer to repair, or even understand; with a conked-out drive, a hyperliner becomes—permanently—just so much junk.

  To compensate for this, Galactic law requires that two automatic-break circuits be built into the cybernetic governors of all hyperdrive ships, in case of drive failure. The first is an instantaneous molecular disruptor that can and will volatilize the ship’s every milligram of mass immediately upon emergence from hyperspace within critical range of what is defined as a Stress Area—which is to say, the interior of a planet, or, more alarmingly, the interior of a sun, where a sudden materialization could precipitate a nova.

  A Bohling-drive ship gone sour can materialize anywhere at all—but if it returned to space at some point already occupied by matter, the result would be spectacular. Just thirty-seven feet saved the Andromeda from a Circuit One volatilization: the thirty-seven feet it was above the surface of Valdon’s World at the moment of materialization.

  From this height, it dropped to the ground, cracking open like a split log. Twelve of the fifty-eight within survived, getting into their thermal suits before the ship’s atmosphere could rush from their bulkheaded compartment.

  Circuit Two then went automatically into effect: a distress-pulse, audible over a range of twenty light-years, fanned on a wide-band thirty-megacycle carrier to any and all craft in the vicinity. In this case, the wide range proved excessive.

  The Calypso, an eight-man cargo ship, was en route on a minus-C orbit between two of the local stars, and it happened to be only a half-hour’s journey from Valdon’s World when the distress-pulse exploded all over that segment of space. No other ship was within a light-year of the scene of the accident.

  Central Control instantly checked with the Calypso, and eleven seconds later Captain Werner and his ship were willy-nilly bound for Valdon’s World on a top-emergency rescue mission.

  Which was how the Calypso, its tail-jets blazing with atomic fury, came to roar down on the blue-white airless ball of ice and frozen methane that was Valdon’s World. The operation had to be carried out with utmost rapidity. Captain Werner had never landed on a methane planet before, but this was no time for maidenly shyness.

  Thermocouple readings showed a mean temperature of minus 330 degrees F.; an abnormal albedo of 0.8 was recorded, and explained when spectroanalysis revealed a surface consisting of a frozen methane-ammonia atmosphere, covered with an ice-carbon dioxide overlay. A sonic probe from turnover point indicated a heavy rock shelf beneath the frozen atmosphere.

  Aboard the Calypso, the crew of eight prepared efficiently for the landing and readied the cabins for the twelve newcomers who would be jammed aboard. Captain Werner studied the fuel banks, running hasty computations that assured him that the ship would still be stocked with sufficient fuel to handle the altered mass.

  At eight minutes before planetfall, everything was checked out. Werner slumped back in his deceleration cradle, smiled grimly, flicked a glance at Mariksboorg.

  “Here we come,” Mariksboorg murmured, as the Calypso swung downward and the mirror-bright surface of Valdon’s World rose to meet the jetcraft.

  “Here they come,” muttered Hideki Yatagawa, Commander of the former Terran hyperliner Andromeda. He folded his arms around his stomach and stamped his feet in mock reaction to the planet’s numbing cold. Actually, it was somewhat more than mockery: the thermal suit kept him at a cozy 68 degrees F. despite the minus 330 degrees around him—but the thermal suits would register “Overload” in eight or nine hours, and within seconds after that happened Commander Yatagawa would be dead, his blood frozen to thin red pencils in his veins.

  “Is that the rescue ship?” asked Dorvain Helmot, of Kollimun, former First Officer of the late Andromeda and sole non-Terran among the survivors. “By Klesh, it’s a jet!”

  “They probably were closer to us than any warp-driven vessels when the distress signal went out,” suggested Colin Talbridge, British ambassador-designate to the Free World of Deneb VII. “There’s some sort of time element in this, isn’t there?”

  “There is,” Yatagawa said. “These suits can’t fight this sort of temperature indefinitely.”

  “It’s a good thing the rescuers are here, then,” said Talbridge.

  The Commander turned away. “Yes,” he said in a muffled voice. “But they’re not here yet.”

  “Look at those jets!” Dorvain Helmot exclaimed in frank admiration. Jetships were all but obsolete in the Kollimun system; Helmot was accustomed to dealing with fuelless warp-ships, and the torrent of flame pouring from the tail of the Calypso aroused in him a connoisseur’s love of the antique and the outmoded.

  “Indeed,” Commander Yatagawa remarked sourly. “Look at those jets. Look at them!”

  Those jets, at the moment, were bathing the planet below with fire. Hot tongues of flame licked down, beating against the thick carpet of ice and frozen CO2 that, along with a heavy swath of methane and ammonia, made up the surface of Valdon’s World.

  Yatagawa watched, arms folded, as the Calypso came down.

  “I wonder if they’ve bothered with thermocouple readings,” he said softly as the spaceship dropped.

  “What do you mean?” Talbridge asked.

  The rest of the Andromeda survivors were rushing from the wrecked ship now, running out on the icy plateau where Yatagawa, Helmot, and Talbridge had been standing. Quietly, Yatagawa said to Talbridge: “You don’t think they’re going to be able to rescue us, do you?”

  “Why not? Are you keeping something back from us, Commander?”

  “I’m merely postponing the inevitable. The people on that ship think they’re coming down to rescue us—but I’m afraid it may have to be the other way round.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watch,” Yatagawa said.

  The Calypso’s jets continued to blast down. The ship would be landing on an upswept, ice-covered shelf perhaps a mile from the wrecked hyperliner. Already, the approaching jetwash had begun to melt the ice beneath; a dark spreading stain over the gleaming surface indicated the area being weakened.

  Talbridge gasped. “You mean they’re not going to be able to land?”

  “It’s much worse than that,” Yatagawa said with a calmness that belied his words. “They’ll make a perfect landing. But I wonder how deep the ice is over there.”

  “Won’t the jets melt it?”

  “The jets will vaporize the ice in the direct blast, and liquefy whatever’s tangential to the area. Only—”

  The Calypso hung for a moment on the bright pillar of its jetwash, then lowered itself to ground. Talbridge saw the tailfins hang, for a fraction of an instant, an inch above the swirling cloud of vapor.

  Then the Calypso, cutting its jets, entered the pit the jets had blasted. The slim sleek vessel came to rest finally on the rock shelf beneath the ice-sheath.

  “Look!” Talbridge yelled.

  There was no need for Yatagawa to look. He had seen it coming since the jet had made its appearance—and had known there was no way to prevent it from happening.

  In a temperature of minus 330 degrees, melted ice refreezes instantly upon melting, give or take a few microseconds. A few microseconds had been all that was necessary. No sooner had the Calypso settled in its pit than an unexpected vise of frozen liquid clamped back around it. The water created by the jets had refrozen the instant the jets had been cut off.

  Perhaps
the crew of the Calypso had expected the water to stay liquid indefinitely; perhaps they had fully expected to set down in a small lake. Perhaps they had thought their jets would not melt the ice sheet. Perhaps—and this seemed most likely to Yatagawa and Talbridge and the other horrified onlookers from the Andromeda—they had not thought at all.

  It hardly mattered now. Conjectures were unimportant; facts remained. And the fact was that the hundred-foot length of the Calypso was now almost entirely under ice, frozen in an unbreakable grip, having slid into the temporary lake as easily as a blade into clay…a clay that hardened instantly. Only the snout of the rescue ship was visible above the flat icy wastes, sticking out like a periscope from an ocean’s waves.

  Talbridge gasped. Yatagawa merely frowned unhappily. None of the twelve could evaluate the immediate situation too clearly, but all could see one indisputable verity: the rescue ship was trapped.

  Yatagawa, moving quickly on his short, wiry legs, got there first. He paused, testing the ice, before approaching the ship itself.

  The ice held; it was solid. Very solid. The short-lived lake had refrozen into a clear sheet of ice that nestled snug against the ship. The ice displaced by the bulk of the Calypso fanned out around it in all directions.

  Yatagawa climbed out over the ice and looked down. Visible just a few feet below the transparent surface was a single port, and staring upward out of the window was the face of a sad-looking jetman.

  Yatagawa waved to him; the man waved back, then tapped the port with an expression of gloomy desperation on his face. A second man appeared behind him, and the two peered upward through the ice like animals in a cage.

  Yatagawa gestured at the throat of his thermal suit, indicating the suit-radio. After a few moments of that one of the men inside caught the idea and donned a pickup.

  “Welcome to our shores,” the Commander said dryly, when contact was established. “It was a beautiful landing.”