Collected Short Fiction, page 201
He took walks every day, through still-wooded New Brewster, and would wave and smile to the children, who would wave and smile back. Occasionally he would stop, chat with a sulking child, then move on, tall, erect, walking with a jaunty stride.
He was never known to set foot in either of New Brewster’s two churches. Once Lora Harker, a mainstay of the New Brewster Presbyterian Church, took him to task for this at a dull dinner party given by the Weedes.
But Mr. Hallinan smiled mildly and said, “Some of us feel the need. Others do not.”
And that ended the discussion.
Towards the end of November a few members of the community experienced an abrupt reversal of their feelings about Mr. Hallinan—weary, perhaps, of his constant empathy for their woes. The change in spirit was spearheaded by Dudley Heyer, Carl Weede, and several of the other men.
“I’m getting not to trust that guy,” Heyer said. He knocked dottle vehemently from his pipe. “Always hanging around soaking up gossip, pulling out dirt—and what the hell for? What does he get out of it?”
“Maybe he’s practicing to be a saint,” Carl Weede remarked quietly. “Self-abnegation. The Buddhist Eightfold Path.”
“The women all swear by him,” said Leslie Erwin. “Lys hasn’t been the same since he came here.”
“I’ll say she hasn’t,” said Aiken Muir wryly, and all of the men, even Erwin, laughed, getting the sharp thrust.
“All I know is I’m tired of having a father-confessor in our midst,” Heyer said. “I think he’s got a motive back of all his goody-goody warmness. When he’s through pumping us he’s going to write a book that’ll put New Brewster on the map but good.”
“You always suspect people of writing books,” Muir said. “Oh, that mine enemy would write a book . . . !”
“Well, whatever his motives I’m getting annoyed. And that’s why he hasn’t been invited to the party we’re giving on Monday night.” Heyer glared at Fred Moncrieff as if expecting some dispute. “I’ve spoken to my wife about it, and she agrees. Just this once, dear Mr. Hallinan stays home.”
It was strangely cold at the Heyers’ party that Monday night. The usual people were there, all but Mr. Hallinan. The party was not a success. Some, unaware that Mr. Hallinan had not been invited, waited expectantly for the chance to talk to him, and managed to leave early when they discovered he was not to be there.
“We should have invited him,” Ruth Heyer said after the last guest had left.
Heyer shook his head. “No. I’m glad we didn’t.”
“But that poor man, all alone on the hill while the bunch of us were here, cut off from us. You don’t think he’ll get insulted, do you? I mean, and cut us off from now on?”
“I don’t care,” Heyer said, scowling.
His attitude of mistrust towards Mr. Hallinan spread through the community. First the Muirs, then the Harkers, failed to invite him to gatherings of theirs. He still took his usual afternoon walks, and those who met him observed a slightly strained expression on his face, though he still smiled gently and chatted easily enough, and made no bitter comments.
And on December 3, Wednesday, Roy Heyer, age 10, and Philip Moncrieff, age 9, set upon Lonny Dewitt, age 9, just outside the New Brewster Public School, just before Mr. Hallinan turned down the school lane on his stroll.
Lonny was a strange, silent boy, the despair of his parents and the bane of his classmates. He kept to himself, said little, nudged into corners and stayed there. People clucked their tongues when they saw him in the street.
Roy Heyer and Philip Moncrieff made up their minds they were going to make Lonny Dewitt say something, or else.
It was or else. They pummeled him and kicked him for a few minutes; then, seeing Mr. Hallinan approaching, they ran, leaving Lonny weeping silently on the flagstone steps outside the empty school.
Lonny looked up as the tall man drew near.
“They’ve been hitting you, haven’t they? I see them running away now.”
Lonny continued to cry. He was thinking, There’s something funny about this man. But he wants to help me. He wants to be kind to me.
“You’re Lonny Dewitt, I think. Why are you crying? Come, Lonny, stop crying! They didn’t hurt you that much.”
They didn’t, Lonny said silently. I like to cry.
Mr. Hallinan was smiling cheerfully. “Tell me all about it. Something’s bothering you, isn’t it? Something big, that makes you feel all lumpy and sad inside. Tell me about it, Lonny, and maybe it’ll go away.” He took the boy’s small cold hands in his own, and squeezed them.
“Don’t want to talk,” Lonny said.
“But I’m a friend. I want to help you.”
Lonny peered close and saw suddenly that the tall man told the truth. He wanted to help Lonny. More than that: he had to help Lonny. Desperately. He was pleading. “Tell me what’s troubling you,” Mr. Hallinan said again.
OK, Lonny thought. I’ll tell you.
And he lifted the floodgates. Nine years of repression and torment came rolling out in one roaring burst.
I’m alone and they hate me because I do things in my head and they never understood and they think I’m queer and they hate me I see them looking funny at me and they think funny things about me because I want to talk to them with my mind and they can only hear words and I hate them hate them hate hate hate—
Lonny stopped suddenly. He had let it all out, and now he felt better, cleansed of the poison he’d been carrying in him for years. But Mr. Hallinan looked funny. He was pale and white-faced, and he was staggering.
In alarm, Lonny extended his mind to the tall man. And got:
Too much. Much too much. Should never have gone near the boy. But the older ones wouldn’t let me.
Irony: the compulsive empath overloaded and burned out by a compulsive sender who’d been bottled up.
. . . like grabbing a high-voltage wire . . .
. . . he was a sender, I was a receiver, but he was too strong . . .
And four last bitter words: I . . . was . . . a . . . leech . . .
“Please, Mr. Hallinan,” Lonny said out loud. “Don’t get sick. I want to tell you some more. Please, Mr. Hallinan.”
Silence.
Lonny picked up a final lingering wordlessness, and knew he had found and lost the first one like himself. Mr. Hallinan’s eyes closed and he fell forward on his face in the street. Lonny realized that it was over, that he and the people of New Brewster would never talk to Mr. Hallinan again. But just to make sure he bent and took Mr. Hallinan’s limp wrist.
He let go quickly. The wrist was like a lump of ice. Cold—burningly cold. Lonny stared at the dead man for a moment or two.
“Why, it’s dear Mr. Hallinan,” a female voice said. “Is he—”
And feeling the loneliness return, Lonny began to cry softly again.
Quick Freeze
It seemed simple enough; the jet-powered Calypso would land on this icebound planet and pick up the passengers and crew of the wrecked hyperliner. However, Captain Werner had forgotten a few elementary matters in the excitement.
ACCORDING to the ship’s mass detectors, Valdon’s Star lay dead ahead. In the fore cabin of the Calypso, Communications Tech Diem Mariksboorg tried to shut his ears to the angry, insistent shrill distress pulse coming from the Empire hyperliner that lay wrecked on Valdon’s Star’s lone planet.
Spectrometer analysis confirmed it. “We’re here,” he said. He turned to the Calypso’s captain, Vroi Werner, who was running possible orbits through the computer. “You ready for the pickup, Vroi?”
Werner nodded. “I figure we’ll make a jet landing, using a standard orbit, and grab the survivors quick as we can.”
“And no salvage.”
“Just people,” Werner said. He picked up the sheaf of notes Mariksboorg had transcribed from the distress message, read them again, and laid them down. “There are twelve survivors. With a little shoehorning, Diem, we can just about get twelve more aboard the Calypso.”
Mariksboorg peered at the growing bright image in the viewscreen, frowning moodily. “We’d be back snug on Gorbrough now if we hadn’t taken this cockeyed route. Whoever heard of a jetship making an emergency pickup?”
“We happened to be right where we were needed at just the right time,” Werner said stiffly. “There’s a time element involved in this, Diem. It turns out to be more efficient to use an inefficient old jet-powered tub to make the pickup than the shiniest new warp-ship . . . for the efficient reason that we’re already here.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the chastened tech replied.
VALDON’S Star was actually a triple system, consisting of a small, Sol-type main-sequence sun; a gray ghost companion, bulky and lifeless, a monstrous rarefied cinder and nothing more—and one unnamed planet, orbiting around the gray companion.
The Empire hyperliner Andromeda had been bound for the Deneb system out of Terra when something—a fused ultrone in the main generator, perhaps, or a cadmium damper inserted askew—went out of kilter, upsetting the delicate balance of the hyperdrive, restoring the liner to normal space, and depositing it abruptly on the frozen surface of Valdon’s Star’s one world.
A wrecked hyperliner is a thoroughly helpless object; the Bohling Hyperdrive is too complex for any journeyman engineer to repair, or even understand; with a conked-out drive, a hyperliner becomes—permanently—just so much junk.
To compensate for this, Galactic law requires that two automaticbreak circuits be built into the cybernetic governors of all hyperdrive ships, in case of drive failure. The first is an instantaneous molecular disruptor that can and will volatilize the ship’s every milligram of mass immediately upon emergence from hyperspace within critical range of what is defined as a Stress Area—which is to say, the interior of a planet, or, more alarmingly, the interior of a sun, where a sudden materialization could precipitate a nova.
A Bohling-drive ship gone sour can materialize anywhere at all—but if it returned to space at some point already occupied by matter, the result would be spectacular. Just thirty-seven feet saved the Andromeda from a Circuit One volatilization: the thirty-seven feet it was above the surface of Valdon’s World at the moment of materialization.
From this height, it dropped to the ground, cracking open like a split log. Twelve of the fifty-eight within survived, getting into their thermal suits before the ship’s atmosphere could rush from their bulkheaded compartment.
CIRCUIT Two then went automatically into effect: a distress-pulse, audible over a range of twenty light-years, fanned on a wide-band thirty-megacycle carrier to any and all craft in the vicinity. In this case, the wide range proved excessive.
The Calypso, an eight-man cargo ship, was en route on a minus-C orbit between two of the local stars, and it happened to be only a halfhour’s journey from Valdon’s World when the distress-pulse exploded all over that segment of space. No other ship was within a light-year of the scene of the accident.
Central Control instantly checked with the Calypso, and eleven seconds later Captain Werner and his ship were willy-nilly bound for Valdon’s World on a top-emergency rescue mission.
Which was how the Calypso, its tail-jets blazing with atomic fury, came to roar down on the blue-white airless ball of ice and frozen methane that was Valdon’s World. The operation had to be carried out with utmost rapidity. Captain Werner had never landed on a methane planet before, but this was no time for maidenly shyness.
Thermocouple readings showed a mean temperature of minus 330 degrees F.; an abnormal albedo of 0.8 was recorded, and explained when spectroanalysis revealed a surface consisting of a frozen methaneammonia atmosphere, covered with an ice-carbon dioxide overlay. A sonic probe from turnover point indicated a heavy rock shelf beneath the frozen atmosphere.
Aboard the Calypso, the crew of eight prepared efficiently for the landing and readied the cabins for the twelve newcomers who would be jammed aboard. Captain Werner studied the fuel banks, running hasty computations that assured him that the ship would still be stocked with sufficient fuel to handle the altered mass.
At eight minutes before planetfall, everything was checked out. Werner slumped back in his deceleration cradle, smiled grimly, flicked a glance at Mariksboorg.
“Here we come,” Mariksboorg murmured, as the Calypso swung downward and the mirror-bright surface of Valdon’s World rose to meet the jetcraft.
“HERE THEY come,” muttered Hideki Yatagawa, Commander of the former Terran hyperliner Andromeda. He folded his arms around his stomach and stamped his feet in mock reaction to the planet’s numbing cold. Actually, it was somewhat more than mockery: the thermal suit kept him at a cozy 68 degrees F. despite the minus 330 degrees around him—but the thermal suits would register “Overload” in eight or nine hours, and within seconds after that happened Commander Yatagawa would be dead, his blood frozen to thin red pencils in his veins.
“Is that the rescue ship?” asked Dorvain Helmot, of Kollimun, former First Officer of the late Andromeda and sole non-Terran among the survivors. “By Klesh, it’s a jet!”
“They probably were closer to us than any warp-driven vessels when the distress signal went out,” suggested Colin Talbridge, British ambassador-designate to the Free World of Deneb VII. “There’s some sort of time element in this, isn’t there?”
“There is,” Yatagawa said. “These suits can’t fight this sort of temperature indefinitely.”
“It’s a good thing the rescuers are here, then,” said Talbridge.
The Commander turned away. “Yes,” he said in a muffled voice. “But they’re not here yet.”
“Look at those jets!” Dorvain Helmot exclaimed in frank admiration. Jetships were all but obsolete in the Kollimun system; Helmot was accustomed to dealing with fuelless warp-ships, and the torrent of flame pouring from the tail of the Calypso aroused in him a connoisseur’s love of the antique and the outmoded.
“Indeed,” Commander Yatagawa remarked sourly. “Look at those jets. Look at them!”
THOSE JETS, at the moment, were bathing the planet below with fire. Hot tongues of flame licked down, beating against the thick carpet of ice and frozen CO2 that, along with a heavy swath of methane and ammonia, made up the surface of Valdon’s World.
Yatagawa watched, arms folded, as the Calypso came down.
“I wonder if they’ve bothered with thermocouple readings,” he said softly as the spaceship dropped.
“What do you mean?” Talbridge asked.
The rest of the Andromeda survivors were rushing from the wrecked ship now, running out on the icy plateau where Yatagawa, Helmot, and Talbridge had been standing. Quietly, Yatagawa said to Talbridge: “You don’t think they’re going to be able to rescue us, do you?”
“Why not? Are you keeping something back from us, Commander?”
“I’m merely postponing the inevitable. The people on that ship think they’re coming down to rescue us—but I’m afraid it may have to be the other way round.”
“What do you mean?”
“Watch,” Yatagawa said.
The Calypso’s jets continued to blast down. The ship would be landing on an upswept, ice-covered shelf perhaps a mile from the wrecked hyperliner. Already, the approaching jetwash had begun to melt the ice beneath; a dark spreading stain over the gleaming surface indicated the area being weakened.
Talbridge gasped. “You mean they’re not going to be able to land?”
“It’s much worse than that,” Yatagawa said with a calmness that belied his words. “They’ll make a perfect landing. But I wonder how deep the ice is over there.”
“Won’t the jets melt it?”
“The jets will vaporize the ice in the direct blast, and liquefy whatever’s tangential to the area. Only—”
The Calypso hung for a moment on the bright pillar of its jetwash, then lowered itself to ground. Talbridge saw the tailfins hang, for a fraction of an instant, an inch above the swirling cloud of vapor.
Then theCalypso, cutting its jets, entered the pit the jets had blasted. The slim sleek vessel came to rest finally on the rock shelf beneath the ice-sheath.
“Look!” Talbridge yelled.
There was no need for Yatagawa to look. He had seen it coming since the jet had made its appearance—and had known there was no way to prevent it from happening.
In a temperature of minus 330 degrees, melted ice refreezes instantly upon melting, give or take a few microseconds. A few microseconds had been all that was necessary. No sooner had the Calypso settled in its pit than an unexpected vise of frozen liquid clamped back around it. The water created by the jets had refrozen the instant the jets had been cut off.
Perhaps the crew of the Calypso had expected the water to stay liquid indefinitely; perhaps they had fully expected to set down in a small lake. Perhaps they had thought their jets would not melt the ice sheet. Perhaps—and this seemed most likely to Yatagawa and Talbridge and the other horrified onlookers from the Andromeda—they had not thought at all.
It hardly mattered now. Conjectures were unimportant; facts remained. And the fact was that the hundred-foot length of the Calypso was now almost entirely under ice, frozen in an unbreakable grip, having slid into the temporary lake as easily as a blade into clay . . . a clay that hardened instantly. Only the snout of the rescue ship was visible above the flat icy wastes, sticking out like a periscope from an ocean’s waves.
Talbridge gasped. Yatagawa merely frowned unhappily. None of the twelve could evaluate the immediate situation too clearly, but all could see one indisputable verity: the rescue ship was trapped.
YATAGAWA, moving quickly on his short, wiry legs, got there first. He paused, testing the ice, before approaching the ship itself.
The ice held; it was solid. Very solid. The short-lived lake had refrozen into a clear sheet of ice that nestled snug against the ship. The ice displaced by the bulk of the Calypso fanned out around it in all directions.
Yatagawa climbed out over the ice and looked down. Visible just a few feet below the transparent surface was a single port, and staring upward out of the window was the face of a sad-looking jetman.
