Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories Read online

  SPACEMAN'S LUCK

  & Other Stories

  by George O. Smith

  Tom's eBooks May 2021 (c, ebook) - 87,900 words

  Introduction, Tom Dean, (in) *

  The Undamned, (nv) Astounding Jan. 1947 - 14392

  A Dog’s Life, (ss) Thrilling Wonder Stories April 1948 - 3258

  The Mobius Trail, (nv) Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec. 1948 - 16892

  Spaceman's Luck, (ss) Science Fiction Adventures Feb. 1953 - 1818

  Stop, Look and Dig, (ss) Space Science Fiction March 1953 - 6172

  Instinct, (ss) Astounding March 1959 - 4441

  The Undetected, (nv) Galaxy Dec. 1959 - 10249

  The Troublemakers, (na) Galaxy April 1960 - 17683

  Amateur in Chancery, (ss) Galaxy Oct. 1961 - 4897

  Counter Foil, (nv) Analog April 1964 - 8104

  Contents:-

  Introduction

  The Undamned,

  A Dog's Life,

  The Mobius Trail,

  Spaceman's Luck,

  Stop, Look and Dig,

  Instinct,

  The Undetected,

  The Troublemakers,

  Amateur in Chancery,

  Counter Foil,

  Introduction

  Here are some stories from George O. Smith, who had a very successful career as a science fiction writer.

  This collection avoids overlap with two earlier collections, The Complete Venus Equilateral, and Worlds of George O.

  And now, back to work.

  Tom Dean

  May 2021

  The Undamned,

  by George O. Smith

  Astounding Jan. 1947

  Novelette - 14392 words

  Generally speaking, bomb defusing squads have short, and not very merry lives. But the Martians had cooked up a fuse that couldn’t be defused, no matter how skilled, quick-thinking, or clear-headed the defusing expert!

  Plutonium was an equaliser. Nations learned the art of being polite, just as individuals had learned. To lash out with Plutonium wildly would be inviting national disaster, and to behave in an antisocial manner would get any nation the combined haired of the rest of the world—equally a national disaster.

  This was surface politeness. Beneath, the work went on to find an adequate defense, for now that all nations were equal, the first capable of defending itself was to be winner. Ultimately, atomic death was licked. Nicely licked but only at the expenditure of more power than it took to develop the atomic weapon itself. It was, however, developed. And that nation then lashed out—to find that other nations of less belligerency had also licked the problem.

  The war—fizzled. For the wall shield that killed the effectiveness of the atomic bomb found no difficulty in stopping a lesser weapon.

  All war—fizzled. And nations looked at one another and formed the Terran Union. Then the Terran Union looked to the stars for a new world to conquer. They found Mars ready and waiting.

  The Terran Union colonized Mars and exploited the Red Planet as men have always done with a new frontier. The next hundred years wrought their changes and the Martian Combine fell away from the Terran Union because of the distance, the differences of opinion, and because of slight mutational changes.

  There were interplanetary wars. The First was fought to eliminate the fact of governing Mars from Terra, the Second was fought to stop interplanetary piracy and to force both planets to respect the integrity of the other. The Third Interplanetary War was started because of sheer greed.

  During the Third Interplanetary War, atomic bombing sprung up, died, and then continued on a very strange nuisance value basis. It became complex, and upon the 1327th Day of the Third Interplanetary War, interplanetary robombing assumed a most dangerous aspect. The swift action of a small group averted disaster, and from that day on, the course of the Third Interplanetary War was assured.—I. A. Seldenov’s History of Sol, Vol. IV.

  The call bell tinged gently in a code that pierced sleep.

  Colonel Ralph Lindsay reached out sleepily and nudged a button at his bedside. Equally sleepily, he donned trousers over his pajamas, slipped his feet into scuffs, and carefully headed for the door. The open door swung a shaft of light across the bed, and Lindsay opened his eyes wide enough to determine whether Jenna were still asleep.

  Satisfied, Lindsay went down the corridor of the ship blinking at the ever-present light. He let himself into the scanning room and dropped into his chair. He picked up the phone and said: “Lindsay speaking, answering 3379X.”

  “General Haynes, Ralph. They got one through.”

  “How?” asked Lindsay, coming awake.

  “Super velocity job. The finders were behind by a quarter radian, at least.”

  “Jeepers,” grunted Lindsay.

  “Say it again,” returned the general. “We thought we were bad when we let one out of five hundred slip through to you. This, remember, was one out of one. Period. If they use ’em in quantity—and I see no reason why the devils won’t—I can see a good record all shot to pieces.”

  “Where’s it headed?”

  “According to the course-calc, it should be hitting Mojave most any minute.”

  “Well, I’d better get on it,” said Lindsay. “May I contact you later?”

  “Do so, by all means,” said the general, signing off. “We can’t permit things like this to happen. I won’t hang my head in shame at one per cent missed, but when one hundred per cent o£ a shipment runs through, I’m scared.”

  Lindsay mumbled an agreement and then clicked the switch to another line. That would be quicker than juggling the hook for communications central. The new line came in immediately and Lindsay dialled a number.

  It rang.

  Lindsay waited.

  And a sleepy voice answered: “Roberts.”

  “Lindsay, Jim. We’ve another one. Haynes just called. Heading for Mojave, should be arriving pretty soon.”

  “Haynes just called and it is due to land?” demanded Roberts. His voice seemed to come awake and alert instantly. “High speed, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m shucking into clothing and I’ll be in the scanning room of your ship in a few minutes.”

  Roberts hung up, making a remark about finding things in your own back yard. It was true, reflected Lindsay. The spaceport outside of the scanning room greenhouse lay darkly quiet. A few flickers of distant lights were caused by motion of men between them and him, and on the horizon he could see the soldierlike columns of the vertical boundary marker lights piercing the sky. Lindsay fumbled in a pocket, and swore because his cigarettes were in his battle shirt on the chair beside the bed, and he was still dressed in pajama top and trousers over the pajama bottoms. He wondered whether he could steal in and get cigarettes, or whether he’d better wake Jenna anyway, and wondered where she kept them in the ship—somehow he never really knew because there was always a package available when he wanted one. He wondered—

  And the door opened and Jenna entered with a bright smile. “Cigarette, darling?” she asked. Over her nightgown she wore Ralph’s battle shirt. She was holding the lighter to two of them held simultaneously between her very red lips.

  He would have forgiven her anything for that. And the fact that instead of being dull with sleep, Jenna looked fresh and bright gave the woman an added charm. “Ghastly time to be up and around,” she observed with a smile. She handed him one of the cigarettes and glanced at the clock. “Oh-two-hundred,” she said idly. “Pacific War Time. Thirteen hundred and twenty-seventh day of. What’s up, Ralph?”

  Lindsay puffed deeply and let the smoke trickle out with his words. “Another one—high speed job.”

 
; Jenna nodded. “Roberts?”

  “He’s coming right over.”

  “I’ve coffee brewing. It hasn’t landed yet?”

  “Not yet, but we’re expecting it any minute.”

  “We’ll have time for coffee.”

  “We’ll take time for coffee,” said Ralph. “Roberts will do a better job for a bit of stimulant and something warm."

  Jenna yawned and laughed at herself. Ralph turned as blue streamers cast flickerings on the walls. Outside in the dark, ships of Terra’s fleet were taking off, trailing their flares into the twinkling sky above them. They were getting out of range of the robomb blast; clearing the vast Mojave Spaceport. The marker lights winked off as the last ship left the port, and the sudden roar of the skytrain crescendoed and then died as the personnel of Mojave left in haste. Only the decontamination ship remained on the port.

  Seconds later, a pale actinic glow suffused the area. The walls of the buildings glowed with it as the wall shields hugged the buildings and anchored them to the solid crust of the planet. In the ship a counting-rate meter climbed up the scale and a radiation identifier winked, indicating that it was very hard gamma that triggered the counter. The internal meter showed no danger inside of the ship; it was far enough from the nearest building on the port.

  The door opened again and Jim Roberts walked in. “Give it to me,” he said crisply, nodding cheerfully at Jenna.

  Ralph’s wife nodded back and then left to get the coffee. When she returned, Ralph had explained to Captain Roberts fully.

  “The devil,” muttered Roberts. “Looks rough.”

  “We’ve been expecting the high-speed stuff, though,” said Jenna, pouring coffee into three cups.

  Lindsay opened his mouth to speak. “You’ve—” he started, but he was interrupted by a ground-shaking rumble. Out of the dark California sky a juggernaut fell, its braking blast lighting up the area. The shrill of its passage came then, a lowering shrill that started up in the ear-splitting register and running down the scale like a dying siren until it was lost in a moan. The earth shook again as the monster hit the sands of the desert. It sent them high in a mighty impact crater, plowed its short furrow, and then at the bottom of its inverted cone it nuzzled into the ground and—started to tick.

  Lindsay’s jaw closed and he continued: “—been predicting it for a long time, Jenna.” Then he laughed shortly and with just a bit of mirth. “I won’t even let a Martian robomb interfere with what I intend to say.” He became serious again. “No, Jenna, I think you’re the only one who has been insisting that there will be a high speed job coming along.”

  Roberts nodded. “The boys at the driver labs claimed it couldn’t be done.”

  Jenna smiled. It was an elfin smile that brought out the unearthly beauty of the woman. “That’s because I’m Martian,” she said simply. “I know how their minds work.”

  “That you do,” assented Roberts, sipping his coffee. “No one but a Martian could have unpacked the Gooney.”

  Lindsay’s face paled slightly. Reference to the first and only fuse that Jenna had ever dissected brought goose pimples to him. Up to that particular time, the Martians had never included killing charges in the fuses themselves. Once the thing was out of the robomb, the fuse could not harm any one. But this diabolical jigsaw puzzle was different. And Jenna had handed the three pellets to Ralph and then fled. Lindsay followed her drawings, and they all knew that no one but a Martian could ever have been able to follow the mechanical labyrinth of that fuse in safety. Yet they all knew that she’d been safe where not one of them would have been, for if she’d not asked, amusedly, for permission, the Gooney would have taken them, one by one. The Gooney had been dissected and the robomb it came with had been fitted with a Terran fuse and shipped back. All hoped it would give Mars as much worry as it had caused Terra.

  “I’ve tried detonating it, and naturally, no dice,” said Roberts.

  “Better defuse it, then. You’ve hit it with everything?”

  “Everything but another atomic.”

  “That’s asking too much,” said Lindsay. “They’re packed to the limit with atomics now, and doubling the power—brrrrr.”

  “Well,” said Roberts with a slight smile, “my gear is in the battle buggy. Outside.”

  “O.K.,” said Lindsay. “We’ll move back to a clearer area and set the recorders going. It’s cold, for Haynes’ outfit didn’t so much as heat it on the way in. High speed job for fair, and probably loaded with mercurite.”

  The ship sat down again far enough from the buildings so that the green actinic light from the force fields did not rise to dangerous levels. The pale glow gave enough light to make the television cameras usable without any other artificial means, though the shapeless blob that was the battle buggy and Jim Roberts was hard to keep from losing with the unaided eye.

  Roberts’ voice came over the communicator. “O.K.? I’m about to go after that devil.”

  “Go ahead, Jim,” said Lindsay. A few beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.

  Jenna frowned. “It must be sheer hell to be like him.”

  Lindsay nodded, held a finger up to his lips. Jenna nodded, too, having been warned that the recorder was on, and also that Roberts could hear every word.

  “I’m within one hundred feet of the crater, Lindsay. My first approach will be with the standard radiation detectors and the initial tools.” This was well-known to all, but stated for recording purposes. “I have stopped the battle wagon at this distance. I am picking up my kit. I am stepping to the ground, now, and—”

  He was interrupted by the kaplunking sound in the speaker. It was a cross, in sound, between plucking a screen door spring and dropping a boulder into a placid lagoon. A blinding flash of light burst against the dark sky, an expanding ball of flame raced skyward and died in a faintly luminous cloud that boiled upwards to a terrific height. Immediately afterwards, the ground shook madly. The counting rate meter chattered and screeched as it overloaded and the radiation identifier winked furiously on all pilot lights, indicating all kinds of possible radiation. The pale actinic glow on the walls of the squat buildings flamed bright, wavered, flickered, paled again, and went out for good. The area and the ship was pelted with a fine rain of dirt, pebbles, and fused glass.

  The roar of the sound came, then, a thundering tortured blast that tore at the planeted ship, whistling through the minute scratches from previous blasts, and producing a thrumming sound.

  Quiet came once more, and only the faint buzz of the counting rate meter audio broke the silence.

  Then a slight sob from Jenna.

  And Colonel Ralph Lindsay took a deep, indrawn breath that shuddered his large frame.

  He shook himself, and turned to his wife. “Get hold of yourself,” he said harshly.

  Jenna nodded, tossed away two tears, blinked her eyes and sat down weakly. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “I must.”

  “They all get it, sooner or later,” gritted Lindsay. “That’s . . . that’s—”

  “Shut up, Ralph,” ordered his wife. “You’ll be blubbering next. Save it for when you can. We’ve got work to do.”

  Lindsay looked at her, and as he looked, he calmed. “It’s rather tough,” he said. “There’s been several . . . many. But few within sight. Well, he’s gone and there’s nothing we can do to bring him back.”

  “What makes it particularly tough is that Jim Roberts was the only one in the crew that was halfway stable, mentally,” said Jenna. “The only one who was not carrying a mental load.”

  Lindsay nodded. “A case of having specialized mechanical ability and putting it to use in the best way. But Jenna . . . I’m . . . you’re—?”

  Jenna smiled. “We aren’t,” she agreed. She stood up and leaned against him lightly, and then moved into the circle of his arm. “But remember that neither of us is active in decontamination work. General Haynes needed a stable man to direct the group, one that would correlate the information and keep it.
Not one that he’d have to replace every few weeks. Losing Jim is tough. Better it have been one of the others; Lacy, who lost Jus family and the will to live at the same instant of blast; Grant, who is just a plain thrill-seeker and sportsman; Garrard, who does anything and everything without looking ahead because he is convinced that the Book of Fate has his every minute move printed in letters of fire; Harris, who saw his brother die and who now has a psychopathic hatred against the things but has no great dislike for the Martians who fashioned them. He hates our robombs as much as he hates theirs. Well—”

  She was interrupted by the phone. Lindsay answered. It was General Haynes.

  “Who?”

  “Roberts.”

  “Bad?”

  “As soon as the dust clears away we’ll know. The force fields are usually good, and they kept out the radiation from the buildings. As soon as the surface activity dies out, Mojave will be workable again. We’re leaving as soon as we can.”

  “Better mobilize your big men,” said Haynes. “The second just hissed past us. Looks like a long siege. That one was mercurite, wasn’t it?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Thought so. We saw the blast from here in space. Know what that means?”

  Lindsay nodded and said: “It means they think they have an untouchable fuse. Otherwise they’d not bother sending the high-powered stuff over.”

  “Right. They’d not make us a present.”

  “Also, there is something about that fuse. Something, something. Look, sir, robombing is a fine art. There is but one defense against it—and that is for those who want to live to get out of the neighborhood. That’s what the skytrains are for. That’s why you send us immediate word when you have their course predicted. The secondary defense is not really a defense as it is a preservative measure. The force fields go up to protect man’s work, and when the blast conies, it really destroys nothing. Then, after a given time, the people return and go to work in safety because the force fields kept the insides of the building from either destruction or radioactivity.