In five minutes the trails, the gullies, the hills and moun-tftintops were alive with a creeping, ever-changing line of amoeba-like figures that swarmed down in a huge tide. The tide crossed the river, slobbered along the highway, summoned by the music.

  The Dark Race was not alone in the spell. Every Jovian in the city stood frozen, listening to the wondrous beauty of music.

  The marsquake moved through the hills with increasing noise. The music screamed higher and higher, faster and faster, insane, sending shock after shock through night air.

  Kerac stood near the back entrance of the utana den, Brondar at his side The marsquake ceased as the Dark Race approached, some psychic sense causing them to silence themselves.

  The whole city was inanimate except for the sudden rushing slobber of alien feet in the narrow alleys on the edge of town.

  Kerac waited, ready to escape at a moment’s notice.

  Nar, the proprietor of the smoke-den, was busy filling a flagon with utana, listening in a trance to the music and the sound from the hills. “Marsquake,’

  ’ he growled.

  The door to the smoke den slammed open. In the doorway loomed dark shapeless entities with green eyes. There was a period of electric unbelief. In that instant Kerac slipped out the back entrance quietly.

  Nar looked up from his flagons, his blue brow furrowed. MOa!” he cried angrily. “What is this?”

  Three tables overturned. Six blue hands reached for guns. Two men fainted. Twenty flagons hit the floor, rolling in crazy circles, spilling utana over the boards. Brondar pulled his electro-pistol and fired.

  The Dark Creatures came in to meet the bullets. Bullets do no good in black pulp. The electro-pistols had no effect. The creatures slobbered forward, unhurt They were hungry, famished.

  They took what they wanted.

  Kerac, running, turned off into a side alley and waited, catching his breath. Squatting down, panting and sweating with exertion, a great calmness blessed him. The agitation was gone, the fear was gone. He felt a little drunk with power. Next be would go to the other Jovian cities, in the vast blue depths of the valleys on the other side of Mars.

  Faintly, on a ripple of wind, came voices—an army of screams ripping through cool air. The screams climbed up over the city. Shots echoed. Thousands of them. Muffled footsteps pattered through the alley near him. Back against the wall Kerac realized his escape was cut off. Somehow he was not afraid. He had finished his work. There was no stopping the Dark Race now. They would carry on without him.

  Stumbling Jovians ran wailing past him. They met a wave pouring down the street. They stopped a little beyond where Kerac lay, and were embraced, crushed, silenced by a score of the Dark Things!

  Kerac leaned back, took his Pipe and laid it against his lips.

  Stars shone in his eyes, triumphant Life in this gigantic octopus city was dying. The tentacles were withering, one by one, the giant yellow eyes were winking, fading, going out, leaving blackness. Even the music was killed by the black tidal wave.

  Kerac carried on with the music until he felt the dark bodies pressing near him, the thick hungry fingers snatching at the Pipe, at his cloak, at his throat. •.

  COLUMBUS WAS A DOPE

  By Robert Heinlein

  Three times winner of the coveted Hugo Award, Robert Heinlein is widely regarded as a spokesman for the younger generation—a writer who displays in his work not only a deep understanding of the world’s problems but has his own very special interpretations to put on them. His early life was spent in the U.S. Navy—until he was invalided out—and this has proved a major influence on his work. But for all his success in recent years, Heinlein has constantly suffered from unsympathetic publishers, bad reviews and countless imitators “lifting” his ideas. Nevertheless his unique blend of humour (seen at its best in this choice early item), controversy and storytelling power make him one of the most revered of all modem writers.

  “I do like to wet down a sale,” the fat man said happily, raising his voice above the sighing of the air-conditioner. “Drink up, Professor, I’m two ahead of you.”

  He glanced up from their table as the elevator door opposite them opened. A man stepped out into the cool dark of the bar and stood blinking, as if he had just come from the desert glare outside.

  “Hey, Fred—Fred Nolan,” the fat man called out. “Come over!” He turned to his guest. “Man I met on the hop from flew York. Siddown, Fred. Shake hands with Professor Appleby, Chief Engineer of the Starship Pegasus—or will be when she’s built. I just sold the Professor an order of bum steel for his crate. Have a drink on it.”

  “Glad to, Mr. Barnes,” Nolan agreed. “I’ve met Dr. Appleby. On business—Climax Instrument Company.”

  “Huh?”

  “Climax is supplying us with precision equipment,” offered Appleby.

  Barnes looked surprised, then grinned. “That’s one on me. I took Fred for a government man, or one of you scientific johnnies. What’ll it be, Fred? Old-fashioned? The same Professor?”

  “Right But please don’t call me ‘Professor’. I’m not one and it ages me. I’m still young.”

  “I’ll say you are, uh—Doc, Pete! Two old-fashioneds and another double Manhattan! I guess I expected a comic book scientist, with a long white beard. But now that I’ve met you, I can’t figure out one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, at your age you bury yourself in this godforsaken place—”

  “We couldn’t build the Pegasus on Long .Island,” Appleby pointed out, “and this is the ideal spot for the take off.”

  “Yeah, sure, but that’s not it It’s—well, mind you, I sell steel. You want special alloys for a starship; I sell it to you. But just the same, now that business is out of the way, why do you want to do it? Why try to go to Proxima Centauri, or any other star?”

  Appleby looked amused. ‘It can’t be explained. Why do men try to climb Mount Everest? What took Peary to the North Pole? Why did Columbus get the Queen to hock her jewels? Nobody has ever been to Proxima Centauri—so we’re going.”

  Barnes turned to Nolan. “Do you get it, Fred?”

  Nolan shrugged. “I sell precision instruments. Some people raise chrysanthemums; some build starships. I sell instruments.”

  Barnes’ friendly face looked puzzled. “Well—” The bartender put down their drinks. “Say, Pete, tell me something. Would you go along on the Pegasus expedition if you could?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I like it here.”

  Dr. Appleby nodded. “There’s your answer, Barnes, in reverse. Some have the Columbus spirit and some haven’t”

  “It’s all very well to talk about Columbus,” Barnes persisted, “but he expected to come back. You guys don’t expect to. Sixty years—you told me it would take sixty years. Why, you may not even live to get there.”

  “No, but our children will. And our grandchildren will come back.”

  “But—Say, you’re not married?”

  “Certainly I am. Family men only on the expedition. It’s a two-to-three generation job. You know that” He hauled out a wallet. “There’s Mrs. Appleby, with Diane. Diane is three and a half.”

  “She’s a pretty baby,” Barnes said soberly and passed it on to Nolan, who smiled at it and handed it back to Appleby. Barnes went on “What happens to her?”

  “She goes with us, naturally. You wouldn’t want her put in an orphanage, would you?”

  “No, but—” Barnes tossed off the rest of his drink. “I don’t get it,” he admitted. “Who’ll have another drink?”

  “Not for me, thanks,” Appleby declined, finishing his more slowly and standing up. “I’m due home. Family man, you know.” He smiled.

  Barnes did not try to stop him. He said goodnight and watched Appleby leave.

  “My round,” said Nolan. “The same?”

  “Huh? Yeah, sure.” Barnes stood up. “Let’s get up to the bar, Fred, where we can drink properly. I need about six.”

  “Okay,” Nolan agreed, standing up. “What’s the trouble?” ’Trouble? Did you see that picture?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, how do you feel about it? I’m a salesman, too, Fred. I sell steel. It don’t matter what the customer wants to use it for; I sell it to him. I’d sell a man a rope to hang himself. But I do love kids. I can’t stand to think of that cute little kid going along on that—that crazy expedition!”

  “Why not? She’s better off with her parents. She’ll get as used to steel decks as most kids are to sidewalks.”

  “But look, Fred. You don’t have any silly idea they’ll make it, do you?”

  “They might.”

  “Well, they won’t. They don’t stand a chance. I know. I talked it over with our technical staff before I left the home office. Nine chances out of ten they’ll bum up on the take off. That’s the best that can happen to them. If they get out of the solar system, which ain’t likely, they’ll still never make it. They’ll never reach the stars.”

  Pete put another drink down in front of Barnes. He drained it and said:

  “Set up another one, Pete. They can’t It’s a theoretical impossibility. They’ll freeze—or they’ll roast—or they’ll starve. But they’ll never get there.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “No maybe about it They’re crazy. Hurry up with that drink, Pete. Have one yourself.”

  “Coming up. Don’t mind if I do, thanks.” Pete mixed the cocktail, drew a glass of beer, and joined them.

  “Pete, here, is a wise man,” Barnes said confidently. “You don’t catch him monkeying around with any trips to the stars. Columbus—Pfui! Columbus was a dope. He shoulda stayed in bed.”

  The bartender shook his head. “You got me wrong, Mr. Barnes. If it wasn’t for men like Columbus, we wouldn’t be here today—now, would we? I’m just not the explorer type. But I’m a believer. I got nothing against the Pegasus expedition.”

  “You don’t approve of them taking kids on it, do you?”

  “Well…there were kids on the Mayflower, so they tell me.

  “It’s not the same thing.” Barnes looked at Nolan, then back to the bartender. “If the Lord had intended us to go to the stars, he would have equipped us with jet propulsion. Fix me another drink, Pete.”

  “You’ve had about enough for a while, Mr. Barnes.”

  The troubled fat man seemed about to argue, thought better of it.

  “I’m going up to the Sky Room and find somebody that’ll dance with me,” he announced. “G’night” He swayed softly toward the elevator.

  Nolan watched him leave. “Poor old Barnes.” He shrugged. “I guess you and I are hard-hearted, Pete.”

  “No. I believe in progress, that’s all. I remember my old man wanted a law passed about flying machines, keep ’em from breaking their fool necks. Claimed nobody ever could fly, and the government should put a stop to it. He was wrong. I’m not the adventurous type myself but I’ve seen enough people to know they’ll try anything once, and that’s how progress is made.”

  “You don’t look old enough to remember when men couldn’t fly.”

  “I’ve been around a long time. Ten years in this one spot.”

  ’Ten years, eh? Don’t you ever get a hankering for a job that’ll let you breathe a little fresh air?”

  “Nope. I didn’t get any fresh air when I served drinks on Forty-second Street and I don’t miss it now. I like it here. Always something new going on here, first the atom laboratories and then the big observatory and now the Starship. But that’s not the real reason. I like it here. It’s my home. Watch this.”

  He picked up a brandy inhaler, a great fragile crystal globe, spun it and threw it, straight up, toward the ceiling. It rose slowly and gracefully, paused for a long reluctant wait at the top of its rise, then settled slowly, slowly, like a diver in a slow-motion movie. Pete watched it float past his nose, then reached out with thumb and forefinger, nipped it easily by the stem, and returned it to the rack.

  “See that,” he said. “One-sixth gravity. When I was tending bar on earth my bunions gave me the dickens all the time. Here I weigh only thirty-five pounds. I like it on the Moon.”

  CASTAWAY

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Discovering a story by Arthur C. Clarke which has not previously been anthologised or published in a collection of the author’s works is almost like looking for a needle in a haystack. For Mr. Clarke has never been a prodigious writer and each new story invariably quickly found its way between book covers. The secret behind this tale which appears here in volume form for the first time is that it was published in a small, ill-fated S.F. magazine called “Fantasy” under the pen-name of Charles Willis. Like his counterpart across the Atlantic, Isaac Asimov, Clarke has a deep interest in, and knowledge of science and some of his earliest writings just before the outbreak of World War II were on purely scientific topics such as the planets and space flight. In recent years, however, because of the scope of his work he has found magazines as varied as “Playboy”, “Vogue” and “Reader’s Digest” more than eager to publish him. In many ways he has played a major part in bringing dignity and authority to a genre too often dismissed as being merely the haunt of “rocket ships and bugeyed monsters”.

  “Most of the matter in the universe is at temperatures so high that no chemical compounds can exist, and the atoms themselves are stripped of all but their inner electron screens. Only on those incredibly rare bodies known as planets can the familiar elements and their combinations exist and, in all still rarer cases, give rise to the phenomenon known as life.”—Practically any astronomy book of the early 20th Century.

  The storm was still rising. He had long since ceased to struggle against it, although the ascending gas streams were carrying him into the bitterly cold regions ten thousand miles above his normal level. Dimly he was aware of his mistake: he should never have entered the area of disturbance, but the spot had developed so swiftly that there was now no chance of escape. The million-miles-an-hour wind had seized him as it rose from the depths and was carrying him up the great funnel it had tom in the photosphere—a tunnel already large enough to engulf a hundred worlds.

  It was very cold. Around him carbon vapour was condensing in clouds of incandescent dust, swiftly torn away by the raging winds. This was something he had never met before, 6ut the short-lived particles of solid matter left no sensation as they whipped through his body. Presently they were no more than glowing streamers far below, their furious movement foreshortened to a gentle undulation.

  He was now at a truly enormous height, and his velocity showed no signs of slackening. The horizon was almost fifty thousand miles away, and the whole of the great spot lay visible beneath. Although he possessed neither eyes nor organs of sight, the radiation patterns sweeping through his body built up a picture of the awesome scene below. Like a great wound through which the Sun’s life was ebbing into space, the vortex was now thousands of miles deep. From one edge a long tongue of flame was reaching out to form a half-completed bridge, defying the gales sweeping vertically past it. In a few hours, if it survived, it might span the abyss and divide the spot in twain. The fragments would drift apart, the fires of the photosphere would overwhelm them, and soon the great globe would be unblemished again.

  The Sun was still receding, and gradually into his slow, dim consciousness came the understanding that he could never return. The eruption that had hurled him into space had not given him sufficient velocity to escape forever, but a second giant force was beginning to exert its power. All his life he had been subjected to the fierce bombardment of solar radiation, pouring upon him from all directions. It was doing so no longer. The Sun now lay far beneath, and the force of its radiation was driving him out into space like a mighty wind. The great cloud of ions that was his body, more tenuous than air, was falling swiftly into the outer darkness.

  Now the Sun was a globe of fire shrinking far behind, and the great spot no more than a black stain near the centre of its disc. Ahead lay darkness, utterly unrelieved, for his senses were far too coarse ever to detect the feeble light of the stars or the pale gleam of the circling planets. The only source of light he could ever know was dwindling from him. In a desperate effort to conserve his energy, he drew his body together into a tight, spherical cloud. Now he was almost as dense as air, but the electrostatic repulsion between his billions of constituent ions was too great for further concentration When at last his strength weakened, they would disperse into space and no trace of his existence would remain.

  He never felt the increasing gravitational pull from far ahead, and was unconscious of his changing speed. But presently the first faint intimations of the approaching magnetic field reached his consciousness and stirred it into sluggish life. He strained his senses out into the darkness, but to a creature whose home was the photosphere of the Sun the light of all other bodies was billions of times too faint even to be glimpsed, and the steadily strengthening field through which he was falling was an enigma beyond the comprehension of his rudimentary mind.

  The tenuous outer fringes of the atmosphere checked his speed, and he fell slowly towards the invisible planet. Twice he felt a strange, tearing wrench as he passed through the ionosphere; then, no faster than a falling snowflake, he was drifting down through the cold, dense gas of the lower air. The descent took many hours and his strength was waning when he came to rest on a surface hard beyond anything he had ever imagined.

  The waters of the Atlantic were bathed with brilliant sunlight, but to him the darkness was absolute save for the faint gleam of the infinitely distant Sun. For aeons he lay, incapable of movement, while the fires of consciousness burned lower within him and the last remnants of his energy ebbed away into the inconceivable cold.

 

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