Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era

  “Thanks,” said the mournful voice from beneath the ice. “Of all the stupid, harebrained, needleheaded—”

  “No time for recriminations now,” Yatagawa said. “We’ll have to get you out of there in a hurry. I’m Yatagawa, the Andromeda’s Commander.”

  “Werner. Captain of the Calypso—and the biggest fool unhung.”

  “Please, Captain. Who could expect you to prognosticate such an unlikely event?”

  “You’re just being kind, Commander, but thanks anyway. I never dealt with one of these snowball planets before. I guess I should have known the ice wouldn’t stay melted more than an instant, but I never figured I’d get frozen in like this.”

  A bit more forcefully, Yatagawa said, “There is little time for discussion, Captain Werner.”

  “Just how little, Commander?”

  Yatagawa smiled sadly. “I estimate our thermal suits will short out within eight hours.”

  “Then we’ll have to move fast,” Werner said. His face, clearly visible despite the feet of clear ice that covered it, was red with embarrassment. “But—how?”

  Helmot said, “I’ve sent Sacher and Foymill back to the Andromeda for picks and shovels. We’ve got a lot of digging to do.”

  Yatagawa’s sad look remained. He said indulgently, “Dorvain, just how long do you think it will take twelve men to dig a hundred-foot hole in solid ice?”

  The Kollimuni was silent a moment. Then, in a hollow-sounding voice, he said, “It’ll take…days, maybe?”

  “Yes,” Yatagawa said.

  “You sure of that?” Werner asked.

  “We can always try it,” said Talbridge.

  “Very well,” the Commander said. Sacher and Foymill arrived bearing picks, and Yatagawa, stepping back, indicated that they should go to work.

  The picks rose and fell. Over the audio network linking the suits came the sound of rhythmical grunting. Yatagawa allowed the demonstration to continue for exactly two minutes.

  In that time, the two crewman had succeeded in digging a cavity four inches deep and six inches broad. A little heap of powdered ice lay to one side.

  Stooping, Yatagawa inserted a gloved hand to measure the depth. “At this rate,” he said, “it would take centuries.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” Helmot asked.

  “A very good question,” said Yatagawa. The Commander kicked the little heap of ice away, and shrugged. Even under the bulk of the thermal suit, the shrug was eloquent.

  Aboard the Calypso, Captain Werner and Communications Tech Mariksboorg regarded each other bleakly. A thin beam of light trickled through the blanket of ice, through the one fore-ship port, and into the cabin. It was light from the yellow Sol-type companion star; unfortunately, it afforded little warmth.

  “Minus three-thirty outside,” Werner said. “And we knew it.”

  “Easy, Captain.” Mariksboorg was sincerely worried that Werner’s contriteness would prove fatal. He wondered how Yatagawa, up there, might react had he done what Werner had. Certainly two thousand years ago Yatagawa would immediately have disemboweled himself. Hara-kiri was millennia obsolete, but Werner seemed to be considering it quite seriously.

  “Whoever heard of a spaceship getting icebound?” Werner demanded.

  “It’s over, Vroi. Forget about it!”

  “Easy enough, forgetting. But we’re still stuck here. And how can I forget, when I don’t even dare leave my cabin and face my own crewmen?”

  “The boys aren’t angry,” Mariksboorg insisted. “They’re all very sorry it happened.”

  “Sorry!” Werner wheeled and jabbed an index finger sharply in the Communications Tech’s direction. “What good is being sorry? This is serious, Diem. We’re trapped.”

  “We’ll get out,” Mariksboorg said soothingly.

  “Yeah? Listen: if we’re not out of here in eight hours, those twelve guys outside are going to freeze to death. Their ship’s got no air left, and there damned sure isn’t any on this accursed planet. Okay. So they die; too bad for them. But who’s going to get us out?”

  “Oh,” Mariksboorg said, in a small voice.

  “By my figuring we’ve got four days’ food. When Central Control asked us to make this pickup, they said they couldn’t get another ship here in less than a week. That’s not even counting the time it would take for another ship to find us once it got here—and we can’t help it much in that department.”

  Mariksboorg moistened his lips. “I guess we’d better get out,” he said. “Fast.”

  “Uh-huh. Faster, even.”

  From outside came the crackling voice of Commander Yatagawa. “We’ve attempted to dig you out. It can’t be done in time.”

  “Of course not,” Werner said. “Nothing’s going to work in time,” he added under his breath.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” Werner said.

  There came a pause. Then: “This is Dorvain Helmot, the Andromeda’s First Officer.”

  “Hello, Helmot.”

  “Our ship’s still in pretty good order,” Helmot said. “Unless you count the hole in the skin that let all the air out. Do you think we can make use of any of our equipment to get you free?”

  “Got a hydraulic drill?”

  “We have no digging equipment whatever,” Commander Yatagawa said crisply.

  Werner studied his fingertips for an instant. Above, anxious faces peered down at him—separated by a thin but durable plastic window and a thick and equally durable window of ice.

  “How about starting up your jets?” Talbridge suggested.

  “You could run them on lower power—just enough to melt the ice around you and free the ship.”

  Werner smiled. It was pleasant to find a bigger fool than himself on the planet. “If we start the jets, it’ll be like firing a pistol that’s plugged at the business end. You know what happens?”

  “The barrel would explode, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Werner said. “Only in this case, the barrel happens to be us. Besides,” he added, glad of the chance to show that he wasn’t an utter fool, “even if we did melt the ice, we’d have to have some way of pumping away the fluid around us before we could blast off. Do you have any sort of pump?”

  “A small one,” Helmot said. “It might do the job, but I doubt it.”

  “Couldn’t you,” Talbridge offered undismayedly, “heat the inside of the ship? You could get into thermal suits and turn the heating system way up. That ought to heat the hull and—”

  “No,” Werner said. “The hull wouldn’t heat.”

  “Hold it,” Commander Yatagawa interrupted suddenly. “How come? Suppose you could get the jets started, wouldn’t they heat up the tail, at least?”

  “No. How much do you know about jets?”

  “Not too much,” Yatagawa admitted. “I’m pretty much a warp-ship man.”

  “The hull’s a polymerized plastic,” Werner said. “It affords pretty near perfect inside-outside heat shielding. Keeps us from cooking when we pass through an atmosphere—and from freezing on places like this one.”

  “You mean even the jets are shielded, and the tail-assembly won’t heat up when you’re blasting, eh?”

  “That’s right,” Werner said.

  Up above, Yatagawa nodded inside his thermal suit. After a moment’s silence the Commander said, “We’ll be back in a little while, Werner. I think you’ve given me an idea.”

  “I hope so,” Werner said fervently.

  The shattered corpse of the hyperliner Andromeda lay on its side in a shallow depression on the ice. A furrowed gash ran the length of the ship, attesting to the force with which it had dropped to the ground.

  Twelve figures gathered about the ship, bulky in their cumbersome thermal suits, moving with jerky rapidity. All around, blue-white snow wastes spread to the horizon. Here and there an outcropping of rock gave evidence of the stone shelf that underlay the frozen atmosphere—and, a little farther away, an even stranger outc
ropping thrust from the ice: the dull-green snout of the Calypso.

  “Polymerized plastic hull,” Yatagawa repeated, half to himself. “That means—if no heat gets conducted from inside to outside—”

  “It ought to work the other way too,” Helmot completed.

  “Exactly.”

  Yatagawa mounted one fin of the wreck and clambered inside, followed by his First Officer. Together, they headed down the narrow companionway.

  Bodies lay scattered randomly in the hulk. The bacterialess frigidity of Valdon’s World ensured that they would remain preserved indefinitely: there was always time to bury them later. More urgent affairs beckoned now.

  Yatagawa tapped an unbroken helium tank. “Could we use this? Helium ought to be liquid in this temperature.”

  “You mean as a superconductor? Damned if I know how,” Helmot said.

  Yatagawa shrugged. “It was just an idea, anyway.”

  They kept going, past the passenger compartments, down the dropshaft to the drive room. To Yatagawa’s surprise, a tear quivered suddenly in his eye. He scowled irritatedly; a thermal suit did not come equipped with tear-wipers, and, furthermore, this sort of emotional display seemed excessive to him. Yet the sight of the maze of controls that once had governed his ship moved him.

  “Here we are,” he said somewhat harshly. He looked around. “Pity there’s no time to explore the place and figure out what went wrong.”

  “There’ll be time for that later,” Helmot said. “They’ll work it out during the inquiry.”

  “Of course.” Yatagawa shut his eyes for a second, thinking of the grueling inquiry that was sure to follow if he ever got off Valdon’s World. Then he picked up a heavy spool of copper wire and handed it to the Kollimuni.

  Helmot grabbed the spool and staggered with it back to the bulkhead door. Yatagawa, continuing to prowl through the shattered drive room, hauled forth another spool, and a third.

  “That’s three thousand feet,” he said. “That enough?”

  “Better get another one,” Helmot advised. “We won’t want to set up our generator too close to the Calypso.”

  “Right.”

  He reached into a storage hold and yanked forth another spool. “That should do it,” he said. He glanced at the chronometer set in the wrist of his thermal suit. “Seven hours left. We should just about make it. I hope Werner was right about his hull. If he wasn’t, he’ll be cooked for sure.”

  “Can you see what they’re doing?” Werner asked.

  Mariksboorg craned his neck to try to peer through the port. “They’re wrapping wire around the nose of the ship,” he said. “I guess they’re covering the entire exposed area with it.”

  Werner paced the cabin in gloom. The light of the yellow primary was fading, and time was moving along quickly. The men of the Andromeda had but a few hours in which to spring the trap.

  “Here we are,” he said bitterly. “We’re the rescuers, and they’re the rescued—and they’re breaking their necks to save us!”

  From outside came Yatagawa’s voice. “Werner?”

  “What are you guys up to?” Werner demanded.

  “We’ve wrapped a coil of wire around the snout of your ship,” Yatagawa said. “It’s hooked to an ultronic generator we’ve salvaged from the Andromeda. Can you see it from where you are?”

  “No. I can’t see anything.”

  “We’re a few thousand feet from the ship. The generator’s a medium-sized one, because the big one’s gone dead. But this one will do; it’ll give us ten million volts in a pinch. Not that we’ll need that much, of course.”

  “Hey, hold on, Yatagawa! What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to roast your hull. I figure if we generate enough heat in the wire, your hull will heat up and the ice’ll melt around you.”

  Werner gulped. “What about us? We’re inside.”

  “The heat won’t get above a thousand degrees. Your hull can handle that—and you won’t feel a thing, I hope. You have thermal suits?”

  “Yes,” Werner said hoarsely.

  “I’d suggest you put them on. Just in case, that is.”

  “Sure. Just in case.”

  “I’ll wait for your signal before we send the current through. Meantime—”

  Struck by a sudden idea, Werner asked, “What are you going to do with the melted ice? It’s only going to freeze again as soon as the current’s off. My hull’s not a heat-retainer.”

  “We’ve thought of that. We’ve dug up our small pump and some tubing. As the stuff liquefies, we’re going to siphon it off down the hill.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “We’ll get into the ship and leave,” Yatagawa said.

  “How? You won’t be able to get a bridge across the ice—and our airlock’s pretty far down the hull.”

  There was silence at the other end for a moment. “There must be some way.”

  Werner frowned thoughtfully. “We’re on bedrock right now, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s simple, then, but pretty screwball. Clear away about a thirty-foot diameter of ice and we should settle into an upright position on the rock below. We’ll blast off the usual way, then come back and swing into a narrow orbit about thirty feet off the ground, and drop ropes for you from our airlock. It’s a crazy way to make a pickup from a spaceship, but it’s worth a try. Otherwise, I’m afraid, there’ll be some trouble.”

  Commander Yatagawa stood by the hooded bulk of the ultronic generator, leaning affectionately against it, and stared at the gleaming red-brown wires stretching over the ice to the buried Calypso.

  The yellow sun was setting; its dying rays illuminated the useless bulk of the gray ghost which was its neighbor, hanging low on the horizon and blotting out a great chunk of sky.

  “We’re ready,” came the tense, tinny voice of Werner.

  “So are we,” Yatagawa said.

  He threw the switch. The generator throbbed, and began shooting current through the copper wire.

  Electrons flowed; power was dissipated; electrical energy was transformed into heat.

  The heat spread through the highly conductive plastic jacket of the Calypso. The Calypso’s hull began to grow warm.

  “How’s the weather in there?” Yatagawa asked.

  “We’re doing fine,” Werner said.

  “Glad to hear it. Your hull’s temperature is probably well above zero now, and getting hotter.”

  The hot wires had already melted thin lines through the ice to the ship. Vapor rose.

  “It’s starting to melt,” Helmot called.

  “Get the siphon working.”

  The pump they had found in the Andromeda’s hold and dragged with such effort over the ice began to come to life. It groaned under the burden, but started to function, hauling the newly melted water away from the warming surface of the spaceship and through the siphon, spurting it down the side of the hill, where it froze instantly into a spire of fantastic shape.

  “It’s working,” Yatagawa said, half to himself. “It’s really working.”

  Later—after the entire volume of water had been siphoned away, after the Calypso had grudgingly righted itself and settled on its landing fins on the rock shelf, standing strangely naked in a pit thirty feet across and a hundred deep, the rescue operation began.

  Still later—after the Calypso had blasted off amid much roar of jets and brief melting of additional ice, after the ship had levelled off and gone into its absurd orbit just above the frozen surface of Valdon’s World, after the twelve survivors of the Andromeda had shinnied up the ropes into the Calypso’s airlock, the two captains confronted each other.

  Commander Yatagawa, who had lost his ship—and Captain Werner, who had lost his face.

  Together, they peered out the viewport at the rapidly retreating brightness of Valdon’s World.

  “I think I see it,” Werner said.

  “That dot over there? Maybe that is where we were, aft
er all. That must be the pit.”

  “And that’s the wreck of the Andromeda,” Werner said. Suddenly, he began to laugh.

  “The joke?” Yatagawa inquired.

  “We’ve got to fill our reports on all this,” said Werner. “And I’ve got to notify Central Control that the rescue’s been effected.”

  “And what’s so funny about that?”

  Werner, red-faced, said: “Officially, I rescued you. Dammit, I’m going to get a medal for this!”

  SIX FRIGHTENED MEN

  (1956)

  And now we are back to William L. Hamling and my monthly task of supplying his magazines with a package of short stories at a guaranteed price of $500 per month. The story called “Six Frightened Men” went to him in the Garrett-Silverberg bundle of November, 1956, bearing the deplorably pulpy title of “Spawn of the Void.” (Since Hamling usually changed our titles anyway, I rarely devoted much effort to thinking them up.) I put the pseudonym of Erik Rodman on it, a name that I was starting to use in other magazines (though I seem to have spelled it “Eric” in those). Hamling changed the title, all right, calling the story “Six Frightened Men,” and though his title changes generally ran in the direction of greater pulpiness, this was, I think, an improvement over my original one, and I have maintained it here.

  As I noted earlier, Hamling also had a way of assigning bylines randomly to the stories of ours that he published, regardless of whatever might be on the manuscript when we sent it in. And so, when “Six Frightened Men” appeared in the June, 1957 issue of Imagination, it was published under the name of Randall Garrett, and so it has been listed by bibliographers ever since. But I wrote it, and now, nearly sixty years later, I reclaim it for my own.

  ——————

  You put your life on the line when you join the Exploratory Wing of the Space Corps. They tell you that when you sign up. The way they told it to me, it went like this:

  “You’ll be out there on alien worlds where no human being has ever set foot—worlds which may or may not have been inhabited by hostile alien creatures. You take your life in your hands every time you make a planetfall out there. Still interested?”