No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (27 page)

There was no miss this time … no futile chewing of wings. He saw splintered glass flying as the Brownings raked the cockpit of the ship below him.

It wasn’t until he was far above the field and headed west that he realized his brain had failed to tick. There had been no calculation, no aversion to taking chances, no grimness. It was like the old days when he and Bob and Grant had battled at Dunkerque. He had fought by pure instinct alone, had downed his plane almost in the treetops.

He touched his pockets, heard the crinkling of the map when his fingers touched it.

Intelligence would be glad to see that map and hear his story. Intelligence undoubtedly would do something about it … for Grant could not have been the only one, there must have been others. Probably those had been the ones Grant had been sneaking off to London to see. Maybe the girl the boys had kidded him about back in the mess might be one of them.

But Intelligence was close-mouthed and the squadron would never know. And that was best, for Grant was a hero … and right now Britain needed all the heroes it could get … alive or dead.

His own report? That wasn’t hard to figure out. He could see it now:

“Flight Lieutenant Richard Grant met his death heroically, attempting to ride a crippled ship to earth.”

THE END

The Space-Beasts

After being rejected by
Astounding Science Fiction
and
Amazing Stories
in 1939,
Astonishing Science Fiction
paid Clifford Simak $42.50 for “The Flame in Space” and published it in April 1940. Cliff’s journal shows that the sale was made after he sent it to Frederik Pohl, but it’s not clear whether Pohl was the editor of Astonishing or was acting as an agent—that issue of Astonishing did not list an editor’s name.

This is one of a number of Simak stories that features music in space; but its spiritual element makes it seem like more than a mere space opera.

—dww

Chapter One
The Flame in Space

It wasn’t possible … but there it was! A thing that hung in space on shimmering wings of supernal light. Wings that had about them that same elusive suggestion of life and motion as one sees in the slow crawl of a mighty river. Wings that were veined with red markings and flashed greenly in the rays of the distant Sun.

The body of the thing seemed to writhe with light and for a fleeting moment Captain Johnny Lodge caught sight of the incredible head … a head that was like nothing he had ever seen before. Ahead that had about it the look of unadulterated evil and primal cruelty.

He heard Karen Franklin, standing beside him, draw in her breath and hold it in her wonder.

“It’s a Space Beast,” said George Foster, assistant pilot. “It can’t be anything else.”

That was true. It couldn’t be anything else. But it violated all rules of life and science. It was something that shouldn’t have happened, a thing that was ruled out by the yardstick of science. Yet, there it was, straight ahead of them, pacing the
Karen,
one of the solar system’s finest rocket-ships, with seeming ease.

“It just seemed to come out of nowhere,” said George. “I think it must have passed the ship. Flew over us and then dipped down. I can’t imagine what those wings are for, because it travels on a rocket principle. See, there it blasts again.”

A wisp of whitish gas floated in space behind the winged beast and swiftly dissipated. The beast shot rapidly ahead, green wings glinting in the weak sunlight.

Karen Franklin moved closer to Captain Johnny Lodge. She looked up at him and there was something like fear in her deep blue eyes.

“That means,” she said, “that those stories about the Belt are true. The stories the meteor miners tell.”

Johnny nodded gravely. “They must be true,” he said. “At least part of them.”

He turned back to the vision port and watched the thing. A Space Beast! He had heard tales of Space Beasts, but had set them down as just one of those wild yarns which come from the far corners of the Solar System.

The Asteroid Belt was one of those far corners. Practically a No-Man’s Land. Dangerous to traverse, unfriendly to life, impossible to predict. Little was known about it, for space ships shunned it for good cause. The only ones who really did know it were the asteroid miners and they were a tribe almost apart from the rest of the men who ventured through the void.

The Space Beast was real. There was no denying that. Johnny rubbed his eyes and looked again. It was still there, dead ahead.

Protoplasm couldn’t live out there. It was too cold and there was no atmosphere. Protoplasm … that was the stumbling block. All known life was based on protoplasm, but did it necessarily follow that life must be based on protoplasm? Protoplasm, of itself, wasn’t life. Life was something else, a complex phenomenon of change and motion. Life was a secret thing, hard to come at. Scientists, pushing back the barriers to their knowledge, had come very close to it and yet it always managed to elude them. They had found and defined that misty borderline one side of which was life, the other side where life had not as yet occurred. That borderline was the determining point, the little hypothetical area where life took shape and form and motion. But just because in the so-far known Solar System it had always expressed itself in protoplasm, did it necessarily mean it must always express itself in protoplasm?

He watched the metallic glitter of an asteroid off their port. It was only a few miles distant and it would pass well over them, but the sight of the thing gave him the creeps. Those barren rocks reflected little light. Hard to see, they rushed through space on erratic orbits and at smashing speeds. At times one could locate them only by the blotting out of stars.

“Karen,” he said, “maybe we should turn back. It was foolish of us to try. Your Dad won’t blame us. I don’t like the look of things.” He swept his hand out toward the soaring Space Beast.

She shook her head, obstinately. “Dad would have come himself, long ago, if it hadn’t been for the accident. He’d be with us now if the doctors would let him take to space again.” She looked into Johnny’s face solemnly. “We mustn’t let him down,” she said.

“But rumors!” Johnny cried. “We’ve been chasing rumors. Rumors that have sent us to the far corners of the system. To Io and to Titan and even in close to the Sun seeking a mythical planet.”

“Johnny,” she asked, “you aren’t afraid, are you?”

He was silent for a time, but finally he said: “For you and for the boys back there.”

She didn’t answer, but turned back to the vision plate again, staring out into the velvet black of space, watching the Space Beast and the shimmer of nearby rocks, the debris of the Belt.

He growled in his throat, watching the Beast, his brain a mad whirl of thoughts.

Metal Seven had started the whole thing. Five years ago old Jim Franklin, one of the system’s most intrepid explorers and space adventurers, had found Metal Seven on Ganymede … just one little pocket of it, enough for half a dozen space ships. Search had failed to reveal more. Five years of hectic search throughout the system had not unearthed a single pound of the precious mineral.

Its value lay in its resistance to the radiations that poured through space. Space ships coated with a thin plating of Metal Seven acquired an effective radiation screen.

But few ships had such a screen … because Jim Franklin had found only enough for a few ships. The
Karen
had it, for the
Karen
was Franklin’s ship, named after his only daughter. A millionaire back on Mars had paid a million dollars for enough to plate his pleasure yacht. One big passenger line had bought enough of the original find to plate two ships, but one of these had been lost and only one remained. The Terrestrial government had acquired the rest of the metal and locked it in well guarded vaults against possible need or use.

The sale of the mineral had made Jim Franklin a rich man, but a large portion of the money had been invested in the search for more extensive deposits of Metal Seven.

Two years ago Franklin, on one of his rare returns to Earth from space, had visited a rocket factory to watch some tests. A rocket tube exploded. Three men were killed … Jim Franklin was saved only by a miracle of surgery. But he was Earth-bound, his body twisted and broken. His physicians had warned him that he would die if he ever took to space again.

So today his daughter, Karen Franklin, carried on the Franklin tradition and the Franklin search for Metal Seven. A search that had taken the sturdy little ship far in toward the Sun, that had landed it on the surface of unexplored Titan, had driven it, creaking and protesting against the tremendous drag of Jupiter’s gravity, down to little Io, until then unvisited by any rocket-ship. A search that was now taking it into the heart of the Asteroid Belt, following the trail pointed by the mad tale of a leering little man who had talked to Karen Franklin at the Martian port of Sandebar.

It might have been an accident … just that one little pocket of Metal Seven found on Ganymede. There might be no more in the solar system. Special conditions, some extraordinary set of circumstances might have deposited just enough for half a dozen ships.

But it didn’t seem right. Somewhere in the system, on some frigid rock of space, there must be more of Metal Seven, enough to protect every ship that plowed through space. A magic metal, screening out the vicious radiations that continually streamed through space without rhyme or reason, eliminating the menace of those deadly little swarms of radioactive meteors which swooped down out of nowhere to engulf a ship and leave it a drifting hulk filled with dead and dying.

Karen’s voice roused him from his thoughts, “Johnny, I thought I saw a light. Could that be possible? Would there be any lights out here?”

Johnny started, saying nothing, staring through the vision plate.

“There it goes!” cried George. “I saw it.”

“I saw it again, too,” said Karen. “Like a blue streak way ahead of us.”

A tremulous voice spoke from the doorway of the control room. “Is it a light you are seeing, Johnny?”

Johnny swung around and saw Old Ben Ramsey. He was clad in a bulky work suit and his twisted face and gnarled hands were grease-streaked.

“Yes, Ben,” said Johnny. “There’s something out ahead.”

Ben wagged his head. “Strange things I’ve heard about the Belt. Mighty strange things. The Flame That Burns in Space and the Space Beasts and the haunts that screech and laugh and dance in glee when a rock comes whizzing down and cracks a shell wide open.”

He dragged his slow way across the room, his feet scraping heartbreakingly, hunching and hobbling forward, a shamble rather than a walk.

Johnny watched him and dull pity flamed within his heart. Radiations had done that to Old Ben. The only man left alive after his ship hit a swarm of radioactive meteors. Metal Seven could have saved him … if there had been any Metal Seven then. Metal Seven, the wonder metal that screened out the death that moved between the planets.

“I saw it again!” yelled George. “Just a flash, like a blue light blinking.”

“It’s the Flame that burns in space,” Old Ben said, his bright eyes glowing with excitement. “I’ve heard wild tales about the Flame and Space Beasts, but I never really did believe them.”

“Start believing in them, then,” said Johnny grimly, “because there’s a Space Beast out there, too.”

Old Ben’s face twisted and he fumbled his greasy cap with misshapen, greasy hands. “You don’t say, Johnny?”

Johnny nodded. “That’s right, Ben.”

The old man stood silent for a moment, shuffling his feet.

“I forgot, Johnny. I came up to report. I loaded the fuel chambers and checked everything, like you told me to. Everything is ship-shape.”

“We’re going deeper into the Belt,” said Johnny. “Into a sector that is taboo to the miners. You couldn’t hire one of them to come in here. So be sure everything is ready for prompt action.”

Ben mumbled a reply, shuffling away. But at the door he stopped and turned around.

“You know that contraption I picked up at the sale in Sandebar?” he said. “That thing I bought sight unseen?”

Johnny nodded. It was one of the jokes of the ship. Old Ben had bought it in the famous Martian market, bought it because of the weird carvings on the box which enclosed it. Somehow or other, those carvings had intrigued the old man, touched some responsive chord of wonder deep in his soul. But the machine inside the box was even more weird … an assembly of discs and flaring pipes, an apparatus that had no conceivable purpose or function. Old Ben claimed it was a musical instrument of unknown origin and despite the friendly jibes and bickering of the other crew members he stuck to that theory.

“I was just thinking,” said Old Ben. “Maybe that danged thing plays by radiations.”

Johnny grinned. “Maybe it does at that.”

The old man turned and shuffled out.

CHAPTER TWO
Attack!

The ship careened and bucked as George blasted with port tubes to duck a wicked chunk of rock that suddenly loomed in their path. Johnny saw the needle-like spires as the asteroid swung below them, spires that would have sheared the ship as a knife cuts cheese.

There was no doubt now that the flash they had sighted actually was a light. They could see it, a streak of blue that arced briefly across the vision port, lending its surroundings a bluish tint.

“It’s an asteroid,” declared George, “and our little friend is heading right for it.”

What he had said was true. The Space Beast had gained on them but was still almost directly ahead, apparently moving in toward the distant light.

The
Karen
drove on with flaming tubes. The meteoric screens flared again and again, in short flashes and long ripples, as tiny debris of the Belt struck like speeding bullets and were blasted into harmless gas.

“Johnny,” asked George, “what are we going to do?”

“Keep going,” said Johnny. “Head for the blue light. We want to see what it is if we can. But be ready to sheer off and give it all you’ve got at the first sign of danger.”

He looked at Karen for confirmation of the decision. She nodded at him with a half-smile, her eyes bright … the kind of brightness that had shown in the eyes of old Jim Franklin when his fists knotted around the controls as his ship thundered down toward new terrain or nosed outward into unexplored space.

Hours later they were within a few miles of the asteroid. Minutes before the weird Space Beast had dived for the surface, was roosting on one of the rocky spires that hemmed in the little valley where the light flamed in blue intensity.

Speechless, Johnny stared down at the scene. The flame was not a flame at all. Not a flame in the sense that it burned. Rather it was a glowing crown that hovered over a massive pyramid.

But it was not the flame, nor the roosting Beast of Space, nor even the fact that here was an old tale come to life which held Johnny’s attention. It was the pyramid. For a pyramid is something which never occurs naturally. Nature has never achieved a straight line and a pyramid is all straight lines.

“It’s uncanny,” he whispered.

“Johnny,” came George’s hoarse whisper, “look over that highest peak. Just above it.”

Johnny lined his vision over the peak, saw something flash dully. A shimmering flash that looked like steel reflecting light.