The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack(r) Read online

  I saw the horror on Val’s face, and I knew she felt the same way I did.

  “Do you really think you can succeed?” I taunted him. “Really think you can kill every Earthman on Mars? Of all the insane, cockeyed—”

  Val’s quick, worried head-shake cut me off. But Ledman had felt my words, all right.

  “Yes! I’ll get even with every one of you for taking away my legs! If we hadn’t meddled with the atom in the first place, I’d be as tall and powerful as you, today—instead of a useless cripple in a wheelchair.”

  “You’re sick, Gregory Ledman,” Val said quietly. “You’ve conceived an impossible scheme of revenge and now you’re taking it out on innocent people who’ve done nothing, nothing at all to you. That’s not sane!”

  His eyes blazed. “Who are you to talk of sanity?”

  Uneasily I caught Val’s glance from a corner of my eye. Sweat was rolling down her smooth forehead faster than the auto-wiper could swab it away.

  “Why don’t you do something? What are you waiting for, Ron?”

  “Easy, baby,” I said. I knew what our ace in the hole was. But I had to get Ledman within reach of me first.

  “Enough,” he said. “I’m going to turn you loose outside, right after—”

  “Get sick!” I hissed to Val, low. She began immediately to cough violently, emitting harsh, choking sobs. “Can’t breathe!” She began to yell, writhing in her bonds.

  That did it. Ledman hadn’t much humanity left in him, but there was a little. He lowered the blaster a bit and wheeled one-hand over to see what was wrong with Val. She continued to retch and moan most horribly. It almost convinced me. I saw Val’s pale, frightened face turn to me.

  He approached and peered down at her. He opened his mouth to say something, and at that moment I snapped my leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord with a snicking rasp, and kicked his wheelchair over.

  The blaster went off, burning a hole through the Dome roof. The automatic sealers glued-in instantly. Ledman went sprawling helplessly out into the middle of the floor, the wheelchair upended next to him, its wheels slowly revolving in the air. The blaster flew from his hands at the impact of landing and spun out near me. In one quick motion I rolled over and covered it with my body.

  Ledman clawed his way to me with tremendous effort and tried wildly to pry the blaster out from under me, but without success. I twisted a bit, reached out with my free leg, and booted him across the floor. He fetched up against the wall of the Dome and lay there.

  Val rolled over to me.

  “Now if I could get free of this stuff,” I said, “I could get him covered before he comes to. But how?”

  “Teamwork,” Val said. She swivelled around on the floor until her head was near my boot. “Push my oxymask off with your foot, if you can.”

  I searched for the clamp and tried to flip it. No luck, with my heavy, clumsy boot. I tried again, and this time it snapped open. I got the tip of my boot in and pried upward. The oxymask came off, slowly, scraping a jagged red scratch up the side of Val’s neck as it came.

  “There,” she breathed. “That’s that.”

  I looked uneasily at Ledman. He was groaning and beginning to stir.

  Val rolled on the floor and her face lay near my right arm. I saw what she had in mind. She began to nibble the vile-tasting tangle-cord, running her teeth up and down it until it started to give. She continued unfailingly.

  Finally one strand snapped. Then another. At last I had enough use of my hand to reach out and grasp the blaster. Then I pulled myself across the floor to Ledman, removed the tanglegun, and melted the remaining tangle-cord off.

  My muscles were stiff and bunched, and rising made me wince. I turned and freed Val. Then I turned and faced Ledman.

  “I suppose you’ll kill me now,” he said.

  “No. That’s the difference between sane people and insane,” I told him. “I’m not going to kill you at all. I’m going to see to it that you’re sent back to Earth.”

  “No!” he shouted. “No! Anything but back there. I don’t want to face them again—not after what they did to me—”

  “Not so loud,” I broke in. “They’ll help you on Earth. They’ll take all the hatred and sickness out of you, and turn you into a useful member of society again.”

  “I hate Earthmen,” he spat out. “I hate all of them.”

  “I know,” I said sarcastically. “You’re just all full of hate. You hated us so much that you couldn’t bear to hang around on Earth for as much as a year after the Sadlerville Blast. You had to take right off for Mars without a moment’s delay, didn’t you? You hated Earth so much you had to leave.”

  “Why are you telling all this to me?”

  “Because if you’d stayed long enough, you’d have used some of your pension money to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic legs, and then you wouldn’t need this wheelchair.”

  Ledman scowled, and then his face went belligerent again. “They told me I was paralyzed below the waist. That I’d never walk again, even with prosthetic legs, because I had no muscles to fit them to.”

  “You left Earth too quickly,” Val said.

  “It was the only way,” he protested. “I had to get off—”

  “She’s right,” I told him. “The atom can take away, but it can give as well. Soon after you left they developed atomic-powered prosthetics—amazing things, virtually robot legs. All the survivors of the Sadlerville Blast were given the necessary replacement limbs free of charge. All except you. You were so sick you had to get away from the world you despised and come here.”

  “You’re lying,” he said. “It’s not true!”

  “Oh, but it is,” Val smiled.

  I saw him wilt visibly, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him, a pathetic legless figure propped up against the wall of the Dome at blaster-point. But then I remembered he’d killed twelve Geigs—or more—and would have added Val to the number had he had the chance.

  * * * *

  “You’re a very sick man, Ledman,” I said. “All this time you could have been happy, useful on Earth, instead of being holed up here nursing your hatred. You might have been useful, on Earth. But you decided to channel everything out as revenge.”

  “I still don’t believe it—those legs. I might have walked again. No—no, it’s all a lie. They told me I’d never walk,” he said, weakly but stubbornly still.

  I could see his whole structure of hate starting to topple, and I decided to give it the final push.

  “Haven’t you wondered how I managed to break the tangle-cord when I kicked you over?”

  “Yes—human legs aren’t strong enough to break tangle-cord that way.”

  “Of course not,” I said. I gave Val the blaster and slipped out of my oxysuit. “Look,” I said. I pointed to my smooth, gleaming metal legs. The almost soundless purr of their motors was the only noise in the room. “I was in the Sadlerville Blast, too,” I said. “But I didn’t go crazy with hate when I lost my legs.”

  Ledman was sobbing.

  “Okay, Ledman,” I said. Val got him into his suit, and brought him the fishbowl helmet. “Get your helmet on and let’s go. Between the psychs and the prosthetics men, you’ll be a new man inside of a year.”

  “But I’m a murderer!”

  “That’s right. And you’ll be sentenced to psych adjustment. When they’re finished, Gregory Ledman the killer will be as dead as if they’d electrocuted you, but there’ll be a new—and sane—Gregory Ledman.” I turned to Val.

  “Got the geigers, honey?”

  For the first time since Ledman had caught us, I remembered how tired Val had been out on the desert. I realized now that I had been driving her mercilessly—me, with my chromium legs and atomic-powered muscles. No wonder she was ready to fol
d! And I’d been too dense to see how unfair I had been.

  She lifted the geiger harnesses, and I put Ledman back in his wheelchair.

  Val slipped her oxymask back on and fastened it shut.

  “Let’s get back to the Dome in a hurry,” I said. “We’ll turn Ledman over to the authorities. Then we can catch the next ship for Earth.”

  “Go back? Go back? If you think I’m backing down now and quitting you can find yourself another wife! After we dump this guy I’m sacking in for twenty hours, and then we’re going back out there to finish that search-pattern. Earth needs uranium, honey, and I know you’d never be happy quitting in the middle like that.” She smiled. “I can’t wait to get out there and start listening for those tell-tale clicks.”

  I gave a joyful whoop and swung her around. When I put her down, she squeezed my hand, hard.

  “Let’s get moving, fellow hero,” she said.

  I pressed the stud for the airlock, smiling.

  THE IRON STAR

  Originally published in Amazing Stories, January 1988.

  The alien ship came drifting up from behind the far side of the neutron star just as I was going on watch. It looked a little like a miniature neutron star itself: a perfect sphere, metallic, dark. But neutron stars don’t have six perky little out-thrust legs and the alien craft did.

  While I paused in front of the screen the alien floated diagonally upward, cutting a swathe of darkness across the brilliantly starry sky like a fast-moving black hole. It even occulted the real black hole that lay thirty light-minutes away.

  I stared at the strange vessel, fascinated and annoyed, wishing I had never seen it, wishing it would softly and suddenly vanish away. This mission was sufficiently complicated already. We hadn’t needed an alien ship to appear on the scene. For five days now we had circled the neutron star in seesaw orbit with the aliens, a hundred eighty degrees apart. They hadn’t said anything to us and we didn’t know how to say anything to them. I didn’t feel good about that. I like things direct, succinct, known.

  Lina Sorabji, busy enhancing sonar transparencies over at our improvised archaeology station, looked up from her work and caught me scowling. Lina is a slender, dark woman from Madras whose ancestors were priests and scholars when mine were hunting bison on the Great Plains. She said, “You shouldn’t let it get to you like that, Tom.”

  “You know what it feels like, every time I see it cross the screen? It’s like having a little speck wandering around on the visual field of your eye. Irritating, frustrating, maddening—and absolutely impossible to get rid of.”

  “You want to get rid of it?”

  I shrugged. “Isn’t this job tough enough? Attempting to scoop a sample from the core of a neutron star? Do we really have to have an alien spaceship looking over our shoulders while we work?”

  “Maybe it’s not a spaceship at all,” Lina said cheerily. “Maybe it’s just some kind of giant spacebug.”

  I suppose she was trying to amuse me. I wasn’t amused. This was going to win me a place in the history of space exploration, sure: Chief Executive Officer of the first expedition from Earth ever to encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life. Terrific. But that wasn’t what IBM/Toshiba had hired me to do. And I’m more interested in completing assignments than in making history. You don’t get paid for making history.

  Basically the aliens were a distraction from our real work, just as last month’s discovery of a dead civilization on a nearby solar system had been, the one whose photographs Lina Sorabji now was studying. This was supposed to be a business venture involving the experimental use of new technology, not an archaeological mission or an exercise in interspecies diplomacy. And I knew that there was a ship from the Exxon/Hyundai combine loose somewhere in hyperspace right now working on the same task we’d been sent out to handle. If they brought it off first, IBM/Toshiba would suffer a very severe loss of face, which is considered very bad on the corporate level. What’s bad for IBM/Toshiba would be exceedingly bad for me. For all of us.

  I glowered at the screen. Then the orbit of the Ben-wah Maru carried us down and away and the alien disappeared from my line of sight. But not for long, I knew.

  As I keyed up the log reports from my sleep period I said to Lina, “You have anything new today?” She had spent the past three weeks analysing the dead-world data. You never know what the parent companies will see as potentially profitable.

  “I’m down to hundred-meter penetration now. There’s a system of broad tunnels wormholing the entire planet. Some kind of pneumatic transportation network, is my guess. Here, have a look.”

  A holoprint sprang into vivid life in the air between us. It was a sonar scan that we had taken from ten thousand kilometers out, reaching a short distance below the surface of the dead world. I saw odd-angled tunnels lined with gleaming luminescent tiles that still pulsed with dazzling colors, centuries after the cataclysm that had destroyed all life there. Amazing decorative patterns of bright lines were plainly visible along the tunnel walls, lines that swirled and overlapped and entwined and beckoned my eye into some adjoining dimension.

  Trains of sleek snub-nosed vehicles were scattered like caterpillars everywhere in the tunnels. In them and around them lay skeletons, thousands of them, millions, a whole continent full of commuters slaughtered as they waited at the station for the morning express. Lina touched the fine scan and gave me a close look: biped creatures, broad skulls tapering sharply at the sides, long apelike arms, seven-fingered hands with what seemed like an opposable thumb at each end, pelvises enlarged into peculiar bony crests jutting far out from their hips. It wasn’t the first time a hyperspace exploring vessel had come across relics of extinct extraterrestrial races, even a fossil or two. But these weren’t fossils. These beings had died only a few hundred years ago. And they had all died at the same time.

  I shook my head somberly. “Those are some tunnels. They might have been able to convert them into pretty fair radiation shelters, is my guess. If only they’d had a little warning of what was coming.”

  “They never knew what hit them.”

  “No,” I said. “They never knew a thing. A supernova brewing right next door and they must not have been able to tell what was getting ready to happen.”

  Lina called up another print, and another, then another. During our brief fly-by last month our sensors had captured an amazing panoramic view of this magnificent lost civilization: wide streets, spacious parks, splendid public buildings, imposing private houses, the works. Bizarre architecture, all unlikely angles and jutting crests like its creators, but unquestionably grand, noble, impressive. There had been keen intelligence at work here, and high artistry. Everything was intact and in a remarkable state of preservation, if you make allowances for the natural inroads that time and weather and I suppose the occasional earthquake will bring over three or four hundred years. Obviously this had been a wealthy, powerful society, stable and confident.

  And between one instant and the next it had all been stopped dead in its tracks, wiped out, extinguished, annihilated. Perhaps they had had a fraction of a second to realize that the end of the world had come, but no more than that. I saw what surely were family groups huddling together, skeletons clumped in threes or fours or fives. I saw what I took to be couples with their seven-fingered hands still clasped in a final exchange of love. I saw some kneeling in a weird elbows-down position that might have been one of—who can say? Prayer? Despair? Acceptance?

  A sun had exploded and this great world had died. I shuddered, not for the first time, thinking of it.

  It hadn’t even been their own sun. What had blown up was this one, forty light-years away from them, the one that was now the neutron star about which we orbited and which once had been a main-sequence sun maybe three or four times as big as Earth’s. Or else it had been the other one in this binary system, thirty light
-minutes from the first, the blazing young giant companion star of which nothing remained except the black hole nearby. At the moment we had no way of knowing which of these two stars had gone supernova first. Whichever one it was, though, had sent a furious burst of radiation heading outward, a lethal flux of cosmic rays capable of destroying most or perhaps all life-forms within a sphere a hundred light-years in diameter.

  The planet of the underground tunnels and the noble temples had simply been in the way. One of these two suns had come to the moment when all the fuel in its core had been consumed: hydrogen had been fused into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into neon, oxygen, sulphur, silicon, until at last a core of pure iron lay at its heart. There is no atomic nucleus more strongly bound than iron. The star had reached the point where its release of energy through fusion had to cease; and with the end of energy production the star no longer could withstand the gravitational pressure of its own vast mass. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the core underwent a catastrophic collapse. Its matter was compressed—beyond the point of equilibrium. And rebounded. And sent forth an intense shock wave that went rushing through the star’s outer layers at a speed of 15,000 kilometers a second.

  Which ripped the fabric of the star apart, generating an explosion releasing more energy than a billion suns.

  The shock wave would have continued outward and outward across space, carrying debris from the exploded star with it, and interstellar gas that the debris had swept up. A fierce sleet of radiation would have been riding on that wave, too: cosmic rays, X-rays, radio waves, gamma rays, everything, all up and down the spectrum. If the sun that had gone supernova had had planets close by, they would have been vaporized immediately. Outlying worlds of that system might merely have been fried.