Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (26 page)

"I don't think that was very interesting," Laura told him. "No human interest in that beeping thing. And why did you only pull one switch a teensy-weensy bit?"

"That beeping thing," the Nut explained with the massive patience his kind were so likely to assume in conversation with normal humanity, "gives the square and the cube of two and three respectively, a fact likely to be constant and known in any space-time. I pulled only one switch just the one notch because, since we don't know which is a communicable frequency in the universe we are trying to reach, we want to run as little risk as possible of doing any harm. In a week, if there is no answer, we will try another frequency, then another, until we receive a reply."

"Why, if you'd have told me that before, I'd have been able to help you! You have a problem in communication here. That's
my
field," Laura beamed. "Now step aside, please, so that I can—"

As she strolled toward him, the Nut waved his arms wildly, his face contorting. "No!" he yelled. "You—"

Dr. Ballyhock snapped his fingers, and the unarmed guard moved rapidly. There was a snap and a flash of metallic thread. The Nut lay groaning on the floor near the thread-hole. His feet twitched.

"You must understand," the good doctor told him gently, "that science serves humanity, not vice versa. Laura Bisselrode is one of the most communicative faces and newsiest voices on the
TV Sunday Supplement
. She will not only bring that necessary ingredient of human interest into your experiment for her audience, but will probably solve your problem."

Physics Nut 6B306 turned his face the floor and howled.

"Now, first," Laura explained happily, "I'll open all these other switches. There's no point in not having network coverage when it's available. We might as well use
all
of these—uh, frequencies."

The man on the floor began beating his head against it.

"Then, instead of that nasty old beeping thing, I'd use my lovely, well trained voice, which is adored up and down the nation. Human interest, they used to tell us back in telecasting school, Steve, remember?"

"Right!" Steve affirmed. "Human interest before news interest!"

"Hello,
you
," the girl crooned roguishly into the mike. "This is Laura Bisselrode from the other end of the entropy gradient. We have a little universe just like your little universe, and we wonder if you'd mind dropping what you're doing for a moment and just tell us in a few simple words just how it feels to—"

She opened her mouth to scream, staggered, and dissolved into the writhing floor with the other humans in the building, with the equipment, with the building itself. All up and down the campus of Meg, Beth, & Hal Thurman University, buildings and students and faculty sank into the bubbling soil; all over the planet, mountains toppled, seas solidified and boiled away. The very air roiled and rattled in unmanageable chunks. And then, in that brief instant of communication, all was over, and the strangely altered earth was still; the completely lifeless world had assumed a stable form.

Girdling the planet now, like a realistic equator, was a peculiar wavy line which ran across the beds of what had been seas, which undulated past the base of what had been mountains. The wavy line was a message in a language and an orthography which had never before been seen in the universe—a message writ large indeed in the very molecules of matter. Its authors, you see, had been in a great hurry and had had to approximate a frequency.

Rough translation:

"Would you kindly stop doing your equivalent of
quoongling
? It is giving us our equivalent of severe headaches."

The tiny lifeboat seemed to hang suspended from its one working rear jet. Then it side-slipped and began to spin violently downwards to the sickly orange ground of the planet.

Inside the narrow cabin, Dr. Helena Naxos was hurled away from the patient she was tending and slammed into a solid bulkhead. The shock jolted the breath out of her. She shook her head and grabbed frantically at an overhead support as the cabin tilted again. Jake Donelli glared up from the viewscreen where the alien earth expanded at him and yelled across the control table:

"Great galaxies, Blaine, soft-jet! Soft-jet before we're pulped!"

The tall, balding archaeologist of what had once been the First Deneb Expedition waved tremulous hands at the switches before him.

"Which—which button do you press?" he quavered. "I f-forget how y-you soften those forward things."

"You don't press any—oh, wait a minute."

The spaceman tore the restraining straps away and bounded out of his seat. He seized the projecting edges of the table and made his way strainingly around it as the lifeboat spun faster in great swoops.

Dr. Archibald Blaine was squeezed against the back of his chair when Donelli reached him.

"I forgot the button," he mumbled.

"No button, Doc. I told you. You jerk this toggle—like so. You haul this switch over—like so. Then you turn the little red wheel around twice. Does it. Whew! Now things are smoother!"

Donelli let go of the table as the forward softening jets caught on and straightened the vessel into a flat glide. He walked back to the main control bank, followed by Blaine and the woman biologist.

"The sea?" Helena Naxos asked at last, lifting her eyes from the viewscreen. "That
is
the sea?"

"Nothing else but," Donelli told her. "We used up all but about a cupful of fuel trying to avoid falling into this system's sun—if you can call two planets a system! We're operating the cupful on the one main jet left unfused when the
Ionian Pinafore
blew up. Now we've overshot the continent and we're riding above the sea without a paddle. Good, huh? What'd he say the sea was made of?"

Dr. Douglas Ibn Yussuf propped himself on his uninjured elbow and called from his bunk:

"According to the spectroscopic tabulations you brought me an hour ago, the seas of this planet are almost pure hydrofluoric acid. There is a good deal of free fluorine in the atmosphere, although most of it is in the form of hydrofluoric acid vapor and similar combinations."

"Suppose you save some of that good news," Donelli suggested. "I know all about hydrofluoric acid being able to eat through almost anything and its grandmother. Tell me this: how long will the Grojen shielding on the hull stand up under it? An estimate, Doc."

With puckered brow, the Egyptian scientist considered. "If not replaced, say anywhere—oh, anywhere from five terrestrial days to a week. Not more."

"Fine!" the pale spaceman said happily. "We'll all be dead long before that." His eyes watched the viewscreen.

"Not if we find fuel for the converter and tanks," Blaine reminded him sternly. "And we know there's contra-uranium on this world—a little, at any rate. The spectroscope showed it. That's why we headed here after the disaster."

"So we know there's fuel here—good old compact Q. Okay, if we landed on one of the continents maybe we'd have scratched a miracle on the chest and found some Q before the converter conked out. Then we could have repaired the other jets and tried to get back to a traffic lane, powered up the transmitter and radioed for help, done all sorts of nice things. But now that we're going to do our fall on the first island I see, what chance do you think we have?"

Blaine looked angrily at his two colleagues and then back at the small, squat spaceman with whom destiny and a defective storage tank aboard the
Ionian Pinafore
had thrown them.

"But that's ridiculous!" he said. "Landing on an island will reduce our chances of finding contra-uranium from an improbability to an impossibility! It's rare enough in the universe, and after we've been fortunate enough to find a planet containing it, Jake, I demand—"

"You demand nothing, Doc," Donelli told him, shoving belligerently up against his lean academic frame. "You demand nothing. Back on the expedition ship maybe the three of you were big-time operators with your degrees and all, and I was just Jake—broken from A.B. to Ordinary Spaceman for drunkenness when we lifted from Io. But here, I'm the only man-jack with a lifeboat certificate and the laws of space put me in supreme command. Watch your language, Doc: I don't like to be called Jake by the likes of you. You call me Donelli from here on in, and every once in a while, you call me Mr. Donelli."

There was a pause in the cabin while the archaeologist's cheeks puffed out and his frustrated eyes tried to pluck a reply from the overhead.

"Mr. Donelli," Helena Naxos called suddenly. "Would that be your island?" She gestured to the viewscreen where an infinitesimal blot upon the sea was growing. She smoothed her black hair nervously.

Donelli stared hard. "Yeah. It'll do. Suppose you handle the forward jets—uh, Dr. Naxos. You saw me explaining them to Blaine. I wouldn't trust that guy with a falling baseball on Jupiter. 'I forgot which button,'" he mimicked.

She took her place on the opposite side of the control table as Blaine, with tightened facial muscles, went over to Ibn Yussuf's bunk and whispered angrily to the injured man.

"You see," Donelli explained as he moved a lever a microscopic distance, "I don't want to hit an island any more than you folks do, Dr. Naxos. But we can't afford to use up any more fuel crossing an ocean as big as this. We may be able to make another continent, yes, but we'll have about fifteen minutes of breathing time left. This way, the converter should run for another two, three days, giving us a chance to look around and maybe get some help from the natives."

"If there are any." She watched a dial needle throb hesitantly to a red mark. "We saw no cities on the telescanner. Although, as a biologist, I confess I'd like to investigate a creature with a fluorine respiration. By the way, Mr. Donelli, if you will allow me to call you Jake, you may call me Helena."

"Fair enough—hey, you watching that dial? Start softening jets. That's right. Now over to half. Hold it. Hold it! Here we go! Grab something, everybody! Dr. Yussuf—lie flat—flat!"

He flipped the lever over all the way, slammed a switch shut and reached frantically for the two hand grips on the control table.

An emery wheel seemed to reach up and scrape the bottom of the hull. The emery wheel scraped harder and the whole ship groaned. The scrape spread along the entire bottom half of the lifeboat, rose to an unbearably high scream in sympathy to which every molecule in their bodies trembled. Then it stopped and a vicious force snapped their bodies sideways.

—|—

Donelli unstrapped himself. "I've seen chief mates who did worse on the soft jets—Helena," was the comment. "So here we are on good old—What's the name of this planet, anyway?"

"Nothing, so far as I know." She hurried over to Dr. Ibn Yussuf, who lay groaning in the cast which protected the ribs and arm broken in the first explosion of the
Ionian Pinafore
. "When we passed the system on our way to Deneb a week ago, Captain Hauberk named the sun Maximilian—after the assistant secretary-general of the Terran Council? That would make this planet nothing more than Maximilian II, a small satellite of a very small star."

"What a deal," Donelli grumbled. "The last time I had to haul air out of a wreck, I found myself in the middle of the Antares-Solarian War. Now I get crazy in the head and ship out on an expedition to a part of space where humanity's just thinking of moving in. I pick a captain who's so busy buttering up to scientists and government officials that he doesn't bother to check storage tanks, let alone lifeboats. I haul air with three people—no offense, Helena—who can't tell a blast from the Hole in Cygnus and they get so cluttered up trying to seal the airlocks that, when the secondary explosion pops off from the ship, it catches us within range and blows most of our jets and most of our Q. Then, to top it off, I have to set down on a planet that isn't even on the maps and start looking for the quart or two of Q that may be on the surface."

Helena Naxos eased the scientist's cast to a more comfortable position and chuckled.

"Sad, isn't it? But ours was the only boat that got away at that. We were lucky."

Donelli began climbing into a spacesuit. "We weren't lucky," he disagreed. "We just happened to have a good spaceman aboard. Me. I'll scout around our island and see if I can find any characters to talk to. Our only hope is to get help from the folks here, if any. Sit tight till I get back and don't touch any equipment you don't understand."

"Want me to come with you—er, Donelli?" Dr. Blaine moved to the spacesuit rack. "If you meet anything dangerous—"

"I'll make out better alone. I've got a supersonic in this suit. And Doc—you might forget which button. Great galaxies!"

Shaking his helmeted head, Donelli started the airlock machinery.

The orange ground was brittle underfoot, he found, and flaked off as he walked. Despite the yellow atmosphere, he could see the complete outline of the island from the hill near the ship. It was a small enough patch of ground pointing reluctantly out of an irritated sea of hydrofluoric acid.

Most of it was bare, little dots of black moss breaking the heaving monotony of orange. Between the ship and the sea was a grove of larger vegetation: great purple flowers on vivid scarlet stems that held them a trembling thirty feet in the stagnant air.

Interesting, but not as interesting as fuel.

He had noticed a small cave yawning in the side of the hill when he climbed it. Sliding down, now, he observed its lower lip was a good bit from the ground. He started to enter, checked himself abruptly.

There was something moving inside.

With his metal-sheathed finger, he clicked on the searchlight embedded in his helmet, and with the other hand, he tugged the supersonic pistol from its clamps in the side of his suit and waited for its automatic adjustment to the atmosphere of the planet. At last it throbbed slightly, and he knew it was in working condition.

They needed favors from the inhabitants, but he didn't intend to do any careless dying, either.

Just inside the cave entrance, the beam of his light showed a score of tiny maggotlike creatures crawling and feeding upon two thin blankets of flesh. Whatever the animals they were eating had been, they were no longer recognizable.