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Title: Three Spacemen Left to Die!
Author: Russ Winterbotham
Release Date: September 29, 2021 [eBook #66416]
Language: English
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE SPACEMEN LEFT TO DIE! ***
Disease contaminated their ship; any
moment one of them might become infected and
spray lethal sparks to the others. There was
no cure--except prevention. And that meant--
Three Spacemen Left To Die!
By Russ Winterbotham
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
September 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Commander Al Andrews had closed and locked the energy-proof,
neutralizing bulkheads against the creeping red glow that infected
one quadrant of his circular space ship. Now he stood in the Control
Center, in the mid-section of the revolving wagon-wheel ship, looking
at Oakey Matthews.
There had been times aboard this ship when a whole crew had been
comfortable in months-long trips through space. But now there were
only three men, three men fleeing from death and it was no longer
comfortable here, because death was breathing down the neck of at least
one of them.
Oakey was intent on the instruments in front of him. Oakey was young,
with a face that glowed with velvet skin. Even in space Oakey shaved
every day, shined his shoes and pressed his uniform. Al was sloppy,
bearded and ungroomed. But Al had lived most of his 50 years in space.
Oakey looked up toward Al. His young eyes searched the hard leathery
face of his commander. He saw the grim set to Al's jaw and the hard
lines around the older man's eyes. Al was cold. Nerveless as a piece of
rope.
"How's Joe?" Oakey asked.
Al shook his head. "Last stages," he said. The commander went to a
tier of built-in drawers across the room from the control panel. His
arm reached out, pulled on the third drawer from the bottom. From this
drawer he took an old-fashioned revolver and a box of shells. Not
ordinary shells. The bullets were plastic, strong enough to pierce
flesh, too soft to rupture the walls of the space ship.
"Don't do it, Al," Oakey said, watching the commander.
Al shook his head. He slipped bullets into the cylinder.
"We're the last earthmen, let's not die killing each other," pleaded
the young man. "This thing will catch us all before long. Let's stop
fighting it. Joe's our pal. Let him live."
"We're the last earthmen and we're going down fighting," said Al.
"We've fought. For ten years we've fought. Now we're in space, Al.
So far from the sun we can't tell it from any other star. There's no
earth women here. Even if we live a few years longer, the strain of
earth-blood dies with us. We're licked, Al. Let's surrender gracefully."
"We're earthmen," said Al. "We fight."
"The last earthmen. There's nothing left to fight for--"
"Except life," said Al. "Now listen, Oakey. I'm still commander. I
know what I'm doing and you take orders from me--or it's mutiny. Yeah,
I know the Quinnies have covered the earth. From the Arctic to the
tropics men died shooting sparks like fireworks. But the earth isn't
the only planet in the Galaxy where men exist. You didn't take that
first trip this ship made, did you, boy?"
Oakey laughed. "That was ten years ago. I was a kid in high school
then."
* * * * *
Al flipped the cylinder closed and made sure the gun was ready to use.
"We went to another system," he said. "A fluke, maybe. Or maybe the Old
Man planned it. He believed in interstellar travel by dimensional short
cuts. I was third mate, like you. I fingered the controls and he gave
me the figures. Something like a double right-angle repeated twice.
I was dizzy as hell when I finally put old Wagon Wheel on a straight
course, but after I blinked my eyes a couple of times and looked out
through a porthole, I knew that the Old Man was right. There was the
cutest little green planet, and the nicest, warmest fourth-magnitude
sun you ever saw." He smiled and the hard lines disappeared for a
moment. "Where are we now?"
"Sixty-three, seven, ninety-one. At 1300. I can work it down to twelve
decimals, sir, if you want--"
"Never mind. Just watch the instruments. The chronometer lines will
tell you when."
Al stuffed the revolver under his belt in the front of his trousers.
"We're going back to that planet, Oakey. A pretty little place, soft
and warm as a tropical isle. And there were nice looking people
there--human beings like us." Al closed his eyes. "Such women. Nice
round shoulders. Soft brown eyes you could spend a lifetime looking
into. There was one...."
Al paused while his fingers seemed to caress the butt of the pistol.
"She called herself something like Dwea.... I taught her to speak
English a little." The commander shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe you'll
find a girl there, Oakey. Maybe I'll see mine again. That was ten
years ago." He chuckled. "She's probably got a husband and six kids
now."
Al took a step toward the doorway marked C, one of four, each leading
to a quadrant of the wagon wheel.
"Please, sir," said Oakey. "Don't--"
Al pulled open the door. "Time's getting short and we can't take the
Quinnies to that planet with us." A sweep of centrifugal force caught
him as he opened the door. His big, hairy hand caught the rung of a
ladder beside the door. "Joe went on that trip. He and I were the only
ones of the crew that didn't catch the Quinnies the minute we landed
back on earth. We ducked out again, shipping with a new commander with
a new crew on old Wagon Wheel again. We went to Ganymede."
"Yeah," said Oakey. "I was cabin boy on that trip. My first space
flight. Maybe that's how I escaped the Quinnies too." Oakey glanced at
the chronometer. "We've still got fifty-five minutes. Why don't you
wait twenty minutes or so?"
Al heaved a sigh and swung onto the ladder, letting himself down, which
was outward, toward the rim of the wheel. "I might have trouble," he
said.
* * * * *
Al put his hands against the bulkhead door. It was cool enough. The
Death Glow wasn't seeping into the ship. The Glow itself wasn't the
contagious part. It was the sparks that shot from men's bodies. The
early stages of the disease were the dangerous ones, for then the
sparks were often too small to be seen. In the later stages a man
suffering from Quinnies gave off his own warning and could be avoided.
Al took a small intercom phone from a box beside the doorway. He spoke
into it. "Joe."
A voice came back. "Yeah. That you, commander?"
"Yes, Joe. How do you feel?"
"Like hell, I guess. Funny though, there's no pain. Just annoying. Like
the hiccups. And I'm getting weaker."
"You're in the last stages."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I've heard of guys that lived fourteen months
shooting sparks worse than I'm doing right now."
"I'm coming in, Joe."
"Give me a break, Al. I won't come near you or Oakey. I'll stay here.
There's food, water ... everything I need. Just let me live till it
starts to hurt. Maybe I'll ask you to come in then."
"There isn't time, Joe. Besides, it'll be easier this way. You're
dying. You're shooting sparks from your hair roots. Something might
happen and Oakey and I would come down with the Quinnies. We are the
only earthmen left now, Joe."
"Don't be too sure." Joe's voice was harsh, like the hissing of sparks.
"You might have the Quinnies and not know it."
"You're not in pain?"
"Hell no. I told you I wasn't. But I'm lit up like the Fourth of July,
Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day and the Chinese New Year."
"Your brain's a dynamo of energy, Joe. It's shooting Quinnies in all
directions through every nerve fibre of your body."
"Are you trying to make it easier, or something?"
"I'm trying to make you understand. I've got to kill you. I'm not doing
it because I want to. You're my best friend, Joe. We've had a lot of
swell times together. But I've got to kill you--Oakey and I have to
land on the Green Planet and we're not taking the Quinnies there with
us."
"You're doing me a favor, huh? Some favor. Better make sure you haven't
got the Quinnies yourself before you try to make like God."
"I'd know if I had 'em," said Al. "I'm coming in, Joe."
"I'll kill you first," said Joe. "As a favor to myself."
Al shot back the bolt. "Don't try it, Joe."
The commander pulled on the door. It swung open a couple of feet. A
bolt of red fire swept through the opening. But Al had expected this
and he was safe behind the neutralizing door. Then Al stepped into
the opening. He didn't need light, for Joe was a red glow against the
quadrant wall.
Joe stood with his feet wide apart, with an aura of fire around his
body. Flaming sparks seemed to lick the air to form an outline of a
human being.
Joe raised his finger toward the commander and Al didn't wait. He
squeezed the pistol's trigger and then stepped back behind the door as
flame lashed toward him again. The report of the gun echoed.
"You murderers!" Joe groaned. His body hit the floor with a thud.
Al waited, then opened the door again. Joe lay on the floor. No sparks
came from his body now. He looked like a sleeping man.
Outside, the cherry red glow of the quadrant ebbed till the sides were
black as space.
* * * * *
Al put the gun back in the drawer in the control room. He closed it and
then sank into a chair beside Oakey. The young man said nothing, but
kept his eyes glued on the control panel.
Finally Al spoke. "Ever take the test, Oakey?"
"No."
"Neither did I. Scared I might have it, I guess. But I kept telling
myself that I might catch the Quinnies from the instruments they used
to test you. Anyhow, I know the symptoms. I'd show symptoms if I had
the Quinnies, wouldn't I?"
"Dunno. Joe knew the symptoms. He must have had it for a long time
before he began shooting sparks." Oakey paused for a moment. "We've
probably been exposed, Al."
"Yeah, we've been exposed a thousand times," the commander said.
"Everybody on this ship except Joe and I died from the Quinnies after
we returned from that voyage ten years ago. Everybody else I sailed
space with died too--except you. There's some kind of immunity. Maybe
we've got it. You and I."
"The Quinnies isn't like measles or small pox, Al. Germs and viruses
don't cause it. Something goes wrong with life itself."
"Maybe we should know something about life," Al grinned. "But after
centuries of finding out about everything else, we don't know what life
is. All biologists can tell us is that we're molecules strung together
to make cells that produce some sort of energy."
"If we knew the cause of life...."
"We don't know the cause of anything ... we get to one cause and wonder
what caused it. We never know the first cause, and if we found it we'd
ask what caused it. Everything goes around in circles. There's the
carbon-nitrogen-hydrogen cycle that makes the sun hot--elements change
and get back to where they started, losing just a little energy. That
energy goes out into space, loses velocity and becomes matter, matter
forms suns. Maybe life is part of the merry-go-round. Maybe energy
makes matter, life results from matter; life produces a little energy."
"We're generators, huh?"
"Not exactly. Did you ever study a dynamo, Oakey? It doesn't make
energy, it converts one form into another form, the stuff we call
electricity. But it seems to do it intelligently. Supposing your
generator makes a kilowatt of power and you're lighting a string of
light bulbs with it. There's ten bulbs, each using 100 watts of power,
but some economical so-and-so comes along and turns out five of them.
You'd expect the generator to get all fouled up, or maybe burn out some
wires, but it goes along at the same speed and makes just 500 watts of
power, no more, no less. Dynamos are like that, they never waste their
output."
"Is that life?"
"In a way it is," said Al. "Like I said, we're not generators, but life
may be just a process of making a little energy. We make just enough
to keep the merry-go-round going. Then something goes wrong. We start
making more than we should. We get overcharged, like a battery. The
energy has to go somewhere, so we start shooting sparks."
* * * * *
Oakey laughed. "Your theories by-pass some of nature's laws and they
would make a logician take to a sick bed, but they sound good." He
turned his eyes on the chronometer a moment. "What fouls up the safety
valve, as long as we're mixing metaphors?"
"Maybe we've got more than life," said Al. "We've got emotions,
consciousness and a lot of things that life in general doesn't have.
But you and I can control our emotions. We're cold-blooded. I just shot
a friend, your friend too and you let me do it. Our cold-blooded common
sense told us it was the thing to do. We have to stomp out the Quinnies
before we land on the Green Planet. If you get the disease, I'll kill
you, just like I killed Joe. If I get it, you'll kill me--"
"No, commander. I won't."
"Then I'll kill myself and save you the trouble. But maybe we won't get
it. Maybe we're immune for one reason or another."
"We're not alike either in temperament or physically. I'm young, Al.
You're older. You're a hell of a lot colder-blooded than I am. Hell,
I've got emotions. I couldn't do what you did. Organically we're
different, too. My cells may be the same, but they're conditioned
differently. I'm allergic to certain kinds of cheese--"
"So are lots of people. I could establish an allergy to the same things
you can't take. That shows our chemistry _is_ the same."
Oakey glanced at the instruments again. "Better take over, sir. There's
only four minutes left."
Al strapped himself into his seat. Oakey already had adjusted his
harness and now the two men adjusted their bodies to fit the contours
of the chairs that would lessen the punishment of sudden acceleration.
The commander gripped the lever that would kick atomic fuel into the
rocket chambers.
"One minute," said Oakey.
Al injected the fuel and then placed his finger over the firing button.
"Thirty seconds ... twenty ... ten ... five, four, three, two--"
Both men tensed.
"--one ... ZERO!"
Their bodies strained as the ship lurched. Oakey counted the seconds
with his hand, for he could not talk now. Al squeezed the control
button again. This was repeated again. And again. Then Al cut the
rockets. The pressure on their bodies eased. Both men relaxed.
Al unstrapped himself and swung his legs to the floor. He walked toward
the porthole. He had to walk carefully, for the centrifugal pitch made
the feat like balancing on a turn-table.
He reached up and adjusted the flaps. Into the room streamed warm
sunlight. A glowing orb swung into view as the ship turned on its axis.
A moment later they saw another disc, a bright green disc, a planet
hanging in space.
"We're there!" whispered Oakey.
Al said nothing. His eyes were not on the planet, but on his hand,
raised a fraction of an inch from the flap control on the metal wall of
the ship. Writhing like a snake from his fingertips to the wall, was a
tiny red spark!
* * * * *
Oakey turned his eyes from the porthole to the silent commander. He saw
the ribbon of flame. His body grew tense. Slowly his hands fingered the
buckles on the straps of his G-harness. He unfastened them and sprang
to his feet. Al didn't try to stop him as Oakey swung across the
turn-table room toward the tier of drawers.
"Make it quick, Oakey," said Al.
Oakey opened the drawer, took out the gun and thrust it into his pocket.
"Shoot me, Oakey. You've got to. We can't take the Quinnies to that
planet!"
"I won't."
"It's mutiny. Give me the gun; I'll kill myself."
"There's no such thing as mutiny any more, Al. We're just two men in
space. The last earthmen alive. The problem will solve itself."
"Oakey, we're not going to land on the planet alive."
"Be yourself. We've made a good fight. We lost. Let's die with a solid
piece of ground under our legs. What if we do infect a planet with a
plague. There's a thousand planets just like it in the universe. Every
man on them will die, if not today, then in a few years from now. What
difference does it make? Why should we try to keep the merry-go-round
going?"
"Because ... there's a reason. We don't know what it is, but we've got
to live and we've got to die. But we've got to preserve life every
second we can."
"Is that why you want me to kill you? To preserve life?"
"One life doesn't matter." Al pointed to the porthole. "It's a whole
world of living human beings ... people like us."
"We don't owe them anything."
Al pushed himself away from the wall, toward Oakey across the room by
the tier of drawers. But the reflexes of youth were on Oakey's side.
The young man's punch caught Al flush on the jaw and the bearded
commander went down.
* * * * *
When Al opened his eyes, Oakey was decelerating the circular ship into
a spiral that would set it down on the planet.
Al raised himself on his arms and pulled himself toward the control
panel. "You can't do this, Oakey. You're killing a world."
"What's that world to us?"
Al looked at the metal floor plates under his body. The cherry glow
was flooding from his body into the plates. Al was gone farther than
he thought. For months he must have been harboring the disease, just
as Joe had been ill a long time before realizing it. Al's natural
resistance, perhaps strengthened by long years of exposure to the
radiations of space, must have held back the final stages until the
tide had burst through in an overwhelming flood. Even when Al killed
Joe, Al was near the last stages himself.
Al remembered Joe's last bid for survival. Joe was much like Oakey. Joe
had hated to die, he wanted to live to have soil under his feet again.
But the disease had to be wiped out. And Joe had fought with his last
weapon, the energy ebbing from his body.
The energy....
Grim lines appeared deep around Al's eyes. He raised his hand from the
floor. His brain throbbed. Yes, his brain was a battery of energy now,
the energy of life. And the purpose of life was to preserve life, a
single second, or a thousand million years. Not one life, but the race.
That was the aim of life.
"Oakey." Al's voice hissed.
Oakey turned from the instrument panel. His eyes focussed on the cherry
red floor with Al in the center of the glow.
Sparks came from Al's mouth as he spoke again. "Before I shot Joe, I
tried to make him understand. I had to kill him, and I've got to kill
you whether you've got the disease or not. It's the way with things.
Our individual lives don't mean a plugged nickel, but a whole race
does. We can't take the Quinnies to the green planet."
"I told you, they're not people like us," said Oakey. "They just look
like us. Some fish look like snakes. Some mammals look like fish. But
they're not fish."
"But they are like us. I know," said Al. "An atom of iron on Sirius is
the same as an atom of iron on the sun. Why can't two human cells be
the same, even if they're light-years apart?"
"You're just guessing."
"I told you, I know."
"You think you know. You met a girl once. Maybe she had a nice figure
and pretty eyes. Your glands got fooled."
"She was just like an earth-girl, only prettier. That's why--"
"Maybe she was pretty, but that was ten years ago. You're not handsome
any more and neither is she. She's probably got six kids, you said so
yourself."
"Yes, Oakey, maybe six, maybe only one kid. One that has earth blood
in him. My kid, Oakey. There's still one more earthman alive in the
universe. That's why I'm doing this to you."
Al let the energy flow out through his fingertips. A cherry red bolt
struck Oakey right in the face.
* * * * *
On the green planet, a matron and her son were looking up into the
stars. The boy cried out in delight: "A shooting star, mommy," he said.
"Make a wish."
Trailing red sparks, the meteor seemed to veer off suddenly and speed
away again into space.
"I wished that your father would return from the skies," said the
woman. "For a moment, I thought maybe he had."
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE SPACEMEN LEFT TO DIE! ***
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