Short Fiction - Fritz Leiber (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“Thank you, Grunfeld.” He caught the edge of the skull’s answering grin. “We are beginning to hit hydrogen,” the quiet voice went on. “Forward skin temperature’s up to 9 K.”

Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began to talk dreamily from his suit.

“They’re still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a little more now. Their ship’s one thing and they’re another. Their ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it knows to do is to kill us. They can’t stop it, they’re even less than passengers⁠ ⁠…”

The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up, carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.

The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of green⁠—bright green as it narrowed to a thread⁠—then for a few seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and semicircles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted interior cabin lights glowed on.

Jackson droned: “They and their ships come from very far away, from the edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the⁠ ⁠… discontinuum, where they don’t have stars but something else and where gravity is different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn’t want to⁠ ⁠…”

And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it⁠—the first faint thrill, less than a cobweb’s tug, of weight.

The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld’s suit had begun to revolve slowly on a vertical axis.

For a moment he glimpsed Jackson’s dark profile⁠—all five suits were revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn’t pull forward at high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.

The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld’s forehead. And now he was sure he felt weight⁠—maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was up. It was as if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.

A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it. He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the other ships⁠—the fleet’s feeble sting. Like a bee’s, just one, in dying.

The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld’s suit began to close on his face like layers of pliable ice.

Jackson called faintly, “Now I understand. Their ship⁠—” His voice was cut off.

Grunfeld’s ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.

But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now⁠ ⁠… now on Mars⁠ ⁠… now back on Earth⁠ ⁠…

The weight was stifling now, crushing⁠—a hill of invisible sand. Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had red fringe around it. It grew.

There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the ship’s jets roared, everything recovered, or didn’t.

The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out thought.

The universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery wind on numb humps and ridges⁠—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and in free-fall. His body didn’t feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages. Or did it?

He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward again? If they’d actually come through⁠—

There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after frictional heating?

There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?

He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin lights were broken.

The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top of his opening suit.

Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex upward, that must, he realized, be the dark side of Uranus.

Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and pulled himself past the captain’s to the spaceshield.

The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.

A pulsing, color-changing glow from somewhere showed him twisted stumps of the radio lattices. There was no sign of the mirror at all. It must have been torn away, or vaporized completely, in the fiery turbulence of decel.

New maxs showed on the board: Cabin Temperature 214 F, Skin Temperature 907 K, Gravs 87.

Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering brightly all colors against the