Amazing Stories: Giant 35th Anniversary Issue (Amazing Stories Classics) Read online

  I wasn't really alive yet. I was like a child half out of the womb, but not yet breathing or making any sound or making any movement. I was waiting for the slap on the back to give me strength and directed purpose.

  "Hurry it up, hurry it up! Skip!" directed the munitions-lieutenant, standing by my opened air-locks that day so many years ago. Sunlight baked my metal as men hustled in and out with small rubber-tired trucks bearing the tetron space explosives. "We've got a war to meet!" cried the lieutenant.

  The men hurried.

  There was some fancy bit of business about a christening going on simultaneously with this scurrying about in my cargo cubicles. Some mayor from sonic city crashed a bottle of foaming liquor on my prow. A few reporters flicked their cameras and a small crowd put up their hands, waved them a fraction and put them down again, as if they realized how stupid it really was, wasting that fine champagne.

  IT was then and there I saw the captain, Metal bless him, for the first time. He came running across the field. The Master of my Fate, the Captain of my Soul. I liked him right off. He was short and whipped out of wrinkled hard brown leather, with green, implacable diamond eyes set in that hard leather, and a slit of white uneven teeth to show to anybody who disobeyed. He stomped into the airlock and set his clipping boots down and I knew I had my master. Small tight knuckle bones and wrists told that, and the way he made fists and the quick, smooth manner in which he cracked out the orders of the day:

  "Snap it!" he said. "Get rid of that damned mayor out there! Clear apron! Seal the locks, clamp ports and we'll push the hell out of here!"

  Yes, I liked him. His name was Lamb; ironic for a man lacking lamb-like qualities. Captain Lamb, who threw his voice around inside me and made me like the steel edge to it. It was a voice like silk-covered brass knucks. It flowed like water, but burned like acid.

  They rapped me tight. They expelled the mayor and his splintered champagne bottle, which by now seemed childish. Sirens shouted across the base apron. The crew did things to my alimentary canal. Twenty-seven of them.

  Captain Lamb shouted.

  That was the slap on the back that brought me my first breath, my first sound, my first movement. Lamb pounded me into living.

  I threw out wings of fire and powder and air. The captain was yelling, snuggled in his crash-hammock, zippered up to his sharp chin; men were swaying, sweating in all their suspensory control hammocks. Quite suddenly I wasn't just metal lying in the sun any more. I was the damnedest biggest bird that ever sang into the sky. Maybe my voice wasn't anything but thunder, but it was still singing to me. I sang loud and I sang long.

  This was the first time I had been outside the hangar and the base to see the world.

  I was surprised to find that it was round.

  As adolescence is to man, his days from thirteen to eighteen when overnight his viewpoints are radically reformed, so it was with my first plunge into space. Life was thrown at me in one solid piece. All of the life I would ever know was given to me without apprenticeship, suckling or consideration. I had growing pains. There were stresses, forces attacking me from all sides simultaneously, feelings, impressions I had never considered possible. The solid understandable gravity of Earth was suddenly taken away and the competition of space gravities each tried their luck with me.

  The moon, and after the moon a thousand dark meteors crashing by, silent. Tides of space itself, indescribable, and the urge of stars and planets. And then a thing called momentum when my jets were cut and I moved without breathing or trying to move.

  Captain Lamb sat in the control room, cracking his knuckles. "She's a. good ship. A fine ship. We'll pound the holy marrow out of those Martians."

  The young man by the name of Conrad sat beside the captain at the duo-control. "We'd better," he said anxiously. "There's a girl waiting in York Port for us to come back."

  The captain scowled. "Both of you? You and Hillary?"

  Conrad laughed. "The two of us. Both on the same war-rocket, going to the fray. At least I can keep my eye on that drunkard this way. I'll know he's not down in York Port scudding along on my acceleration..."

  Captain Lamb usually said all his words quick, fast, like lines of mercury. "Space is a funny place to talk about love. Funny place to talk about anything. It's like laughing out loud in a big cathedral, or trying to make a waltz out of a hymn."

  "Lo, the sentimentalist," remarked Conrad.

  Lamb jerked. He scowled at himself. "Lo, the damned fool," he said, and got up to measure the control room with his little strides.

  They were part of me. Lamb, Conrad and the crew. Like blood pulsing in the arteries of a warm body, like leucocytes and bacteria and the fluid that sustains them—air locomoting through my chambers into my heart, my driving engines, feeding my livened appetites, never knowing that they were only units of energy like corpuscles giving a greater mass—myself—nourishment, life, and drive.

  Like any body—there were microbes. Destroying elements. Disease, as well as the sentinel leucocytes.

  We had one job to do. I knew of this. To fend off the ever increasing attacks against earth's Phobos-Deimos citadels. I felt tension spreading, growing as each day went by. There was too much cigarette smoking, lip biting, swearing among the crew-members. Big things lay ahead.

  The microbes within my body were in a small dosage; but virulent because they moved free, unchecked, unsuspected. Their names were Anton Larion and Leigh Belloc. I refer to them as bacteria simply because, like microscopic forms in a large body, their function was to poison and destroy me. And the best way to render me inactive would be the destruction of part of my red-blood. That meant Captain Lamb. Or part of his technical war-staff. Larion and Belloc planned for their poisoning, quietly, carefully.

  Self-preservation is an eternal, all-encompassing thing. You find it in metal as you find it in amoebas; you find it in metal as you find it in men. My body would be attacked. From outside I feared nothing. From inside 1 was uncertain. Coming from an unexpected quarter that attack might kill me so very soon after my birth. I didn't approve of the idea.

  I went through space toward Mars. I couldn't speak. I could only feel voice-vibrations throughout my length. The voices of Hillary and Conrad arguing about their woman named Alice in York Port, and the captain snapping at the heels of his crew when we hit the asteroid-skirt, and then the subtle undercurrent of poison stirring in the midst of this—Larion and Belloc—their voices touched my hull:

  "You're familiar with the plan, Belloc; I don't want you turning silly at the crisis."

  "I know what to do. Don't worry. What the hell."

  "All right, I'm just explaining. Now—as far as killing Captain Lamb, that's out. We're only two against twenty-four others. I want to be alive to collect that money we're guaranteed, for this—work."

  "Logically, then—the engines...."

  "I'm in favor of it, if you are. This is a war-rocket; spare parts, excess cargo, all that's eliminated for speed. Timebombs should work miracles with the main jet-engines. And when it happens we can be out and away in space in plenty of time?"

  "When?"

  "During the next shift of crew relief. There's a certain amount of inescapable confusion then. Half the crew's too tired to worry, the other half is just turning out, groggy."

  "Sounds okay. Huh. It seems a damn shame though, in a way."

  "What?"

  "Nice new rocket, never tested before. Revolutionary design. I never enjoyed working on engines before, until I got my station with this jaloppy. She's sweet. Those engines—sweet as the guts of a flower. And it all goes to hell before it has a chance to prove itself."

  "You'll get paid for it. What else do you want?"

  "Yeah, I'll get paid, won't I? Yeah."

  "Shut up, then. Come on."

  The routine circulation of crew-blood through the arteries of the ship took Larion and Belloc below to their stations in the fuel and engine cubicles. The poison was in my heart, waiting.

&
nbsp; What went on inside my metal is not to be described. There are no similes, comparatives for the hard, imprisoned, frustrated vibrations that surge through tongueless durasteel. The rest of the blood in me was still good, still untouched and untainted and tireless.

  "Captain." A salute.

  "Belloc." Lamb returned the salute. "Larion."

  "Captain."

  "Going below?" said the captain.

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'll be down in-" Lamb eyed his wrist watch. "Make it thirty minutes. We'll check the auxiliaries together, Belloc."

  "Right, sir."

  "Go on down, then."

  Belloc and Larion descended.

  LAMB walked quickly into the computation cube and struck up a rapid word exchange with young Ayres. Ayres, who looked like he was barely out of blushing and floppy hair and semantics school, and still not shaving as often as the others. His pink face glowed when the captain was around. They got on like grandfather and grandson.

  They probed charts together. When they finished, Lamb walked off the yardage in the computation room, scowling, examining his boots. Ayres computated.

  Lamb paused, looked out the visual-port concernedly. After a moment he said, "When I was a very little kid I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and I thought I'd seen everything there was to see—" A pause. "And now I've got my first captaincy, and—" he patted the hull of my body quietly "—a fine first rate lady of a ship." Quick, to Ayres: "What are you, Ayres?"

  Startled, Ayres blinked. "Me, sir?"

  The captain stood with his strong, small back to Ayres, inspecting the stars as if they were a celestial regiment under his personal say-so. "Yes. I mean religion," he explained.

  "Oh." Ayres pulled his right earlobe with finger and thumb, musing. "I was a first class agnostic. Graduated, or should I say demoted? From an Atheist academy."

  The captain kept looking at the stars. "You use the word 'was,' Ayres. You emphasize that word."

  Ayres half-smiled. "Sure. I mean—yes, sir. But this is my first trip, sir, so that changes things."

  "Does it?"

  "Yes it does, sir."

  The captain rocked casually on his heels. "How's that, Ayres?"

  "You know the tale as well as I, sir. It's an old tale. And a good one, I might add. To put it one way: 'A Baptist is an atheist who took a trip to the Moon.' "

  "That holds true for Methodists, Episcopalians and Holy Rollers, doesn't it?"

  "It does, sir."

  The captain made a noise that sounded like laughter. "We're all the same. Every damned one of us, Ayres. Hard-shelled God-fighters, good and true, when we're home in Brooklyn and Waushawkee. Take away land and gravity, though, and we're babes, undiapered and crying in a long dark night. Hell, there's not a man rocketing today who isn't religious, Ayres!"

  "Are you religious, Captain?"

  Lamb closed his mouth, looked out the port straight ahead. He raised one small-boned hand, spreading it in a measured movement. "It's always the same, Ayres. The first trip converts us. The very first trip. All you have to do is stand here for fifteen minutes or half an hour looking at space, feeling how insignificant you are flying around like a gnat in the middle of it, looking at those damned wonderful stars, and first thing you know you're down on your knees, crying your eyes out, with a hot stomach, a wild head and a humble attitude forever after."

  Lamb pulled back from himself suddenly, snapped around, stalked to a down-ladder, grabbed a rung and glared at Ayres. "And so," he pointed out, "you'll notice that I never look at the stars too long! I've a ship to run—no time for it. And in case you believe all I tell you—go to hell! I should demerit you for questioning a superior!"

  Lamb dropped down the rungs like a weight.

  Ayres sat there a moment, trying to computate. After a while he looked up at the star-port. His eyes dilated very dark and wide. He stood up. He walked across the computation room and stood there, staring out. He looked like he was listening to music. His lips moved.

  "What did the Cap say? Stand here fifteen minutes or half an hour? Why, hell—" He bent his knees until they touched the deck. "I got the Cap's time beat all hollow:"

  Good blood. Good leucocyte. Good Ayres.

  Mars come up ahead, the first really intense gravity I had felt since leaving Earth and moon behind. It came up like a ruddy drop of dried blood on the void. Mass is the sexual drive of space, and gravity the intensified yearning of that mass, the gravitic libido of one tremendous body for the love, the following of any and all smaller bodies who transgress its void boundaries. I have heard the simple men within me speak of a planet as one speaks of a queen bee. The ultimate gravity toward which all smaller gravities and bodies yearn. Merciless harlot, mating with all, leading all on to destruction. Queen bee followed by the swarms. And now I was part of a swarm, the first of many yet to follow, answering the urge of one gravity, refusing another.

  But still the poison was in me. And no way possible for Captain Lamb's crew to know of it. Time ticked on my console-chronometers and swung by, imperceptibly majestic in the moves of stars.

  Captain Lamb went down to the engine rooms, examined my heart and my auxiliaries. Bitingly, he commented and instructed, interspersing that with vituperative barks. Then he hopped up the rungs to the galley for something to eat.

  Belloc and Larion stayed below. "First now, Belloc, you checked the life-boats?"

  "I did. Number Three boat's ready. I fixed it an hour ago."

  "Good. Now...."

  THE Slop put out a bowl of soup for Captain Lamb. Lamb pursed his lips to a spoon of it, and smacked them in appreciation. "Slop?"

  "Yes, sir?" Slop wiped greasy hands on a large towel.

  "Did you invent the gravity soup-bowl and gravity spoon?"

  Slop looked at his feet. "I did, sir."

  "An admirable invention, Slop. I recall the day when all rocket liquids were swilled by suction from a nippled bottle. Made me feel like a god-damned baby doing it."

  Slop chuckled deep, as he returned to cleaning the mess-plates. "Ship gravity wasn't strong enough to hold soup down, so I thunk up the gravity spoon in my spare time. It helped."

  The captain ate in silence. After a moment he said, "I must be getting old, Slop. I think I'm sick."

  "Captain!"

  Lamb waved his spoon, irritated. "Oh, nothing as bad as all that. I mean I'm getting soft-headed. Today, I feel—how should I put it? Dammit to hell, it's hard finding words. Why did you come along on this war-rocket, Slop?"

  Slop twisted his towel tight. "I had a little job to do with some Martians who killed my parents three years ago."

  "Yes," said the captain.

  Belloc and Larion were down below.

  Slop looked at his chief. At the tight little brown face that could have been thirty-five as easily as forty or fifty.

  Lamb glared up at him, quick. Slop gulped. "Pardon me."

  "Uh?"

  "I was just wondering..."

  "About...?"

  Belloc. Larion. Belloc down below. Larion climbing rungs, on his way to get the time-bombs. Mars looming ahead. Time getting shorter, shorter.

  In a dozen parts of my body things were going on at an oblivious, unsuspecting norm. Computators, gunners, engineers, pilots performed their duties as Lamb and Slop talked casual talk in the galley. While Larion muscled it up the rungs toward his secreted time-explosives.

  Slop said, "About why you became captain on a war-rocket, yourself, sir?"

  "Me?" Lamb snorted, filled his mouth half a dozen times before answering very slowly. "Five years ago I was in a Blue Canal liquor dive on Mars. I met a Martian girl there..."

  "Oh, yes..."

  "Yes, nothing, you biscuit-burner! Damn but she was sweet. With a temper like a very fine cat-animal, and morals to match. Hair like glossy black spider-silk, eyes like that deep cold blue canal water. I wanted to bring her back to Earth with me. The war came, I was recalled and—"

  "And someday," finished
Slop, "when you've helped get the war over, you'll go looking for her. And being at Deimos-Phobos Base, maybe you can sneak down and kidnap her sometime."

  Lamb ate awhile, making motions. "Pretty childish, isn't it?"

  "No, I guess it's all right if she's still waiting."

  "She is—if I know Yrela, she is."

  Ayres in Computation.

  Mars off in space, blood-red and growing.

  Lamb in the galley.

  Hillary and Conrad in control room One!

  And down below, where all of my power grew and expanded and burst out into space, I felt the vibration of Belloc. And coming up the ladder to the supply room—Larion.

  Larion passed through the galley. "Sir."

  Lamb nodded without looking up from his meal.

  Larion proceeded up to Computation, passed through Computation, whistling, and lingered in Supply AC.

  Space vibrated with my message.

  My guns were being trimmed, oiled and ready. Ammunition passed up long powered tracks from Locker Five to Blister Fourteen. Scarlet ammunition. Men sweated and showed their teeth and swore. Belloc waited down below, his face twitching its nerves, in the engine room. The captain ate his meal. I drove through space. Ayres computated. Belloc waited. Captain, eating. Space. Larion. Time-bombs, Captain. Belloc. Guns. Waiting. Waiting. Driving.

  The metal of my structure was sickened, stressing, striving inward, trying to shout, trying to tell all that I knew in my positive-negative poles, in my sub-atomic awareness, in my neutronic vibrations.

  But the blood of my body moved with a mind of its own, pulsing from chamber to chamber in their sweating, greasy togs, with their waiting, tightened faces. Pulsing nervously. Pulsing, pulsing, pulsing, not knowing that soon poison might spread through every and all of my compartments.

  And there was a girl named Alice waiting in York Port. And the memory of two parents dead. And on Mars a cool-eyed Martian dancing girl, still dancing, perhaps, with silver bells on her thumbs, tinkling. Mars was close. I made an angry jolt and swerve in space. I leaped with metal frustration!