Avenue of Escape

(1942)

Astounding Science Fiction, November 1942

By Hal Clement

The sergeant swaggered into the dugout, carefully indifferent to the stares of Corporal Snodgrass, Buck Private Kendall, and the captain's orderly. He dropped into a seat at the packing-case table, and the orderly automatically began to deal.

"F'r gosh sakes, sarge, how did you make it?" asked the corporal, picking up his hand. "We thought we'd have to get a new fourth. Ken said you were in a shell hole up front, with a Jap machine gun pecking at you every time you poked your head out. We figgered you'd last till dark, and then they'd crawl out and drop a grenade on you."

The sergeant glared at his cards and then at the orderly. "I have told you children time and again that a clever man—a man, say, intelligent enough to reach the rank of mess sergeant, where all his work is done for him—can find a way out of anything," he remarked, discarding four cards. "If Ken, instead of merely reporting the presence of that machine gun, had gone to the trouble to drop a grenade on it with that trench mortar I developed, I would have been spared the effort of thinking my own way out of trouble; but he was always a thoughtless youngster."

Several hands were played in silence, the men knowing better than to ask questions. As they expected, the sergeant finally unbent.

"It is also like you young squirts to refuse to profit by the ingenuity of yer betters. I suppose it's my duty to explain my methods, in the event of your ever occupying a similar position. As you said, I was in that shell hole, which was the only cover in the neighborhood. My support, consisting of you, had departed rearward under the wing of a handy smoke pot, not leaving room for your superior officer in the cloud. As you know, I have always been opposed to the use of machine guns, and the specimen covering my shelter did nothing to change my opinion. Maybe I can persuade the army to my way of thinking, after this.

"There was only one of the guns in the nest, which was two hundred yards away. Knowing that you were retreating along their line of fire, I thoughtfully refrained from attracting their attention until I was sure you were safe—that was why I didn't follow you just then. When the smoke cleared away so that I could walk without trippin' on things, I came back."

"Huh? Did you have a tank with you?" asked the corporal.

"I did not, son. I have told you many a time machine guns are useless weapons. Consider, please. That gun fired about fifteen h'indred shots a minute, with a muzzle velocity of about four thousand feet per second. A little arithmetic, of which even you should be capable, shows that there is a space of one hundred and sixty feet between bullets—enough for any normal man. I walked back."

The End

Rest of Probability Zero "Calling all Liars!"

from November 1942 Astounding Science Fiction

EUREKA!

Malcolm Jameson

Professor Gleason said, "All right," and, hung up the phone. "The Mad Scientist is on the way over," he told his lab director, Max Sunderberg. "Says he has made a great discovery."

"Uh-huh," said Sunderberg, adjusting the flame under a retort. "He often does. Did you ever hear what drove him mad?"

"There are several accounts. Which version do you know?"

"The one about the hole tongs. He always raves when you mention them. They work perfectly, but nobody will finance them. It broke his heart."

Sunderberg stepped to the sink and began washing his hands. "M. S. got interested in holes when he was just a little shaver. He started collecting them—worm holes first, then woodpecker holes. He invented a gadget he called the hole extractor. You insert it in the hole, expand it a little, then give it a twist. When you pull it out the hole comes out with it. His attic is full of cases of those holes."

"What on earth does a wall-less hole look like?"

"Nothing. That's what makes M. S. mad. Nobody can 'see 'em. An unincased hole is just a bunch of air. Well, he improved his device until he hit on a big heavy-duty hole puller. He thought it would be a good idea to buy up used oil wells, lift out the holes an sell 'em."

"How did he propose to handle holes a mile or more long?"

"Oh, he never meant to use 'em again for oil wells. He was going to saw 'em up into short lengths and sell 'em for post holes—"

There was a knock at the door. Gleason opened it. There stood the Mad Scientist with a two-gallon water bottle in one hand. It seemed to be nearly full.

"Here it is," said the M. S. proudly, and promptly proceeded to decant the contents of his bottle into a handy beaker.

"Here is what?"

"You'll see," the M. S. said. He began helping himself to various chemicals about the laboratory. He dropped in a big lump of sulphur. It dissolved instantly. Iron, gold, platinum, rubber, a brickbat—all went the same way. The M. S. kept on. At the end of the hour he had demonstrated that his mixture would dissolve anything put into it.

"I begin to see," said Sunder-berg, with a strange gleam in his eye. "But tell me, will it dissolve glass?"

"Oh, sure," said the M. S. He grabbed up a handful of pipettes and broke them like macaroni. They disappeared in the liquid like sugar does in hot water. He tossed in a quartz crystal, a handful of sand, and a glass cube that was weighting down some papers. They went, too.

"It dissolves anything. It is the universal solvent."

"Marvelous!" gasped the two sane scientists.

THE SLEEP THAT SLAUGHTERED

Harry Warner, Jr.

Wilkins and I decided to walk home from the funeral, since it was a sunny, brisk November afternoon.

"He was a very dignified-looking corpse, wasn't he?" Wilkins asked me.

"Yes . . . yes, he was," I replied. "But . . . well, didn't the body look just the least bit—purplish?"

My friend Wilkins gave me a searching stare. "You noticed it, then? If you did, others probably will be talking about it. A shame. The family employed the very best morticians—"

"But why did he have such an unusual complexion? He died from natural causes, I understand."

Wilkins was silent for a moment. Then he said:

"Well, we're good friends, and I think I can trust you not to let this go any further. He did die, I should say, from 'natural' cause. But the circumstances were peculiar, and our late friend was such a fine fellow when alive that those who know the truth don't like to talk about it.

"The late Cackleworthy J. Splunk, as you know, was a great scientist in his retiring way. Just recently he was experimenting on something that might have altered the life of you, me, and everyone else. Alas, the experiments proved fatal to him.

"Splunk, poor fellow, was so confident! His great idea came when he walked in his sleep one night. Unconscious of what he was doing, he somnambulated halfway down the block to a friend's home, and woke up there—he hardly could believe that he had done such a thing.

"That started him to thinking. Most of the brain relaxes while we sleep, he knew, but enough of it remains active to make us occasionally dream, and more rarely perform habitual acts like walking and talking in our sleep. Why not, he thought, put that to practical use?

"Splunk had great will power, and wonderful control over his body. First of all, he taught himself to sleep with his eyes open. He told me, just a few days before his death, that fish do it, so why not humans? Ah, a great man we've lost!

"Next, when he had thoroughly mastered that first step, he tried something new. He went to bed, leaving on the light, and propping up a newspaper before him. He went to sleep—eyes open, of course. When he woke, next morning, he remembered every item on the front page of that paper. He'd managed to read it, and understand it, while asleep!

"That was the beginning. He saw the limitless possibilities of his discovery. As you know, our dreams happen in a lightninglike way. Scientists have proved that dreams which seem hours in length to the sleeper, actually pass through his mind in a fraction of a second. Haven't you often dreamed a sequence ended by a pistol shot or landslide and awakened to hear a chair fall or a door slam somewhere in the house?

"Cackleworthy saw his chance to step up man's efficiency, immeasurably. He could do uninteresting, routine tasks not requiring great muscular activity while asleep, and accomplish days of work in a few hours' sleep! And it actually worked!

"He would have announced his discovery next week, had he lived. But three nights ago, it happened. He was asleep, and dreaming, making the time profitable by reading Gibbons' `Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' But he finished it after he had been asleep only ten or fifteen minutes, and didn't want to waste the rest of the night.

He decided to slip down to the corner drugstore for some magazines. He lived in a second-floor apartment, you know, and the building had an automatic elevator. Splunk, still asleep and dreaming, got into the elevator which happened to be vacant at his floor—and started it down to the ground floor; he was never seen again alive."

Wilkins clapped me on the shoulder. "Well, I turn up here. We'll see each other again."

"Wait," I called. "What happened to Splunk? Certainly a twenty-foot ride in an automatic elevator never killed anyone—or did the cage crash?"

"You don't understand?" He looked at me oddly. "Why, I thought you'd realize what happened at once.

"Splunk, you remember, was dreaming. A second of actual time meant hours to him. The elevator wasn't a fast one, and needed several seconds for the trip between floors. Once in motion, the door couldn't be opened until it stopped again. It was late at night, and there were no loud noises to waken him. That was Cackleworthy's trouble."

"But what happened?" I demanded. "Don't tell me he died of boredom, for lack of anything to do during the trip!"

"Of course not," Wilkins said. "You see, the small elevator cage was air-tight. Splunk died of suffocation, before the elevator reached the first floor!"

THE GREEN SPHERE

Dennis Tucker

The Green Sphere landed on Earth in the middle of a Mexican desert, on October 27, 2021. As was to be expected, scientists from all round the globe took the first plane they could get, and went to the scene of the landing. They found that what they had heard was true; the Sphere was a brilliant green in color and was composed of very dense matter, being perfectly round and just over a mile and a quarter in diameter, without sign of a break or rivet on its surface. At night a green fluorescence became discernible, casting a glow rather like that of a mercury lamp, giving everyone present a ghastly pallor.

During the following few days, many and varied were the attempts to break through the wall of the Sphere to the interior, including pneumatic drills with diamond points, oxyacetylene apparatus, and dynamite, but all were to no avail.

It was on the fourth day that first symptoms of the illness became apparent. All the party camping out around the Sphere complained of sickness and dizziness. In brief, their bodies first became the same violent green hue of the Sphere and then seemed to rot away. They died quickly. It was concluded that some emanation originating in the green globe was the direct cause of the disaster, and it soon became apparent that the area of danger was spreading rapidly.

It seemed that the mysterious rays took effect only after an exposure of three days. Humans could endure it with impunity for three days—no more. The spot was now five hundred miles in diameter and still growing with undiminished speed.

Many plans were tried to destroy the thing. Brave souls went into the danger area with trucks of dynamite, which was carefully set out around and under the Sphere. Bombers were sent over, dropping tons of high explosive. Finally, all sorts of radio waves were tried in hopes of counteracting the Sphere's destroying influence. But, miraculously, the green globe emerged unscratched. Still the death spot grew, now having a diameter of sixteen hundred miles, with three thousand deaths accredited to it. Many fled the advancing threat.

It could only have ended in the complete annihilation of the human race, but for the suggestion of the world-renowned physicist, Professor A. Knutt, whose statue now adorns a public place in practically every town on the face of this Earth.

Men were rushed to the Sphere in fast planes and excavating work was rushed with all possible speed. The men who worked the first two days were replaced by a second shift, and so on, each gang working only the two days. Finally, came Earth's great day. The Green Sphere had suddenly shot away from the Earth at an enormous speed and it eventually vanished into the depths of space, whence it came. The menace had gone, leaving a death roll of seven thousand.

In conclusion, and by way of explanation, we quote the professor's radio speech:

"The means of ridding the Earth of the invader from space was at first evasive by its very simplicity. Explosives would not dent the Sphere. We could not destroy it, so the obvious alternative was to remove it from the planet entirely. After a little thought, this was comparatively simple. I had a shaft dug into the ground at a short distance from the Sphere. A tunnel was then cut from the foot of the shaft to a point right under the Sphere. Another shaft upward and we broke surface against the bottom of the Sphere itself. I then had a powerful searchlight installed at the foot of this shaft, and directed it up at the great globe. Then, after fixing a large block of solid helium over the lens of the searchlight, we turned on the current. The result was just as we had planned and expected. The light, on passing through the solid helium, immediately froze solid, giving us, in effect, a projectile traveling at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. This tremendous force, on hitting the Sphere, was easily able to shift it: to shift it so well, in fact, that it was thrown clean out into space! We then switched off the light and came home."

A MATTER OF ECLIPSES

P. Schyler Miller

"Well, sir," said Old Man Mulligan, emptying another tumbler of spodlak down his lead-lined gullet, "when you been around for thirty-forty thousand years, like I have, you see a lot of mighty peculiar things. Like this business of eclipses—

"Take the time I was on Mars with Pershing—or was it MacArthur? Anyway, I was off somewhere in the drylands by myself with a whole tribe of those runty little natives whoop-in' an' hollerin' after me, an' intendin' to lift my scalp. We'd been shootin' back an' forth at each other for quite a while, an' my water was runnin' a mite low, when this eclipse come on. Now you know well's I do how fast Phobos, the inside moon, moves, an' how quick the temperature drops soon's it gets dark. Matter of fact, Phobos slides in front of the Sun so all-fired fast 'at the eclipse is practically instantaneous, an' the air cools an' condenses so suddenlike that it gives off a crack like a rifle shot. Them drylanders heard this eclipse comin' across the desert like the rattle of a machine gun an' lit out like the whole Patrol was after 'em. Saved my life, it did."

Mulligan reached for a full bottle and filled his glass to the brim. He scratched the top of his naked, bun-shaped skull thoughtfully. " 'Tain't only Mars," he observed. "You get some of the damnedest eclipses on Jupiter an' Saturn, what with all them different moons.

"I r'member one time I was hidin' out in a portable dome when Black Lem Gulliver an' a bunch of his cutthroats jumped me. We was havin it hot an' heavy, an' my ammunition was `beginnin' to run a little low. There wasn't a Patrol ship inside of a million miles, an' I wouldn't have wanted to see it any more'n Gulliver did. Anyway, the situation was beginnin' to look sort of serious, with them creepin' up on me behind shields, blastin' away with everythin' from dynamite to heat rays, when along come this eclipse. It's so damn cold on Jupiter that the air freezes in the shadow of the moons, so's you have a column of ice sweepin' across the face of the planet at about thirty thousand miles an hour. Well, sir, that frozen shadow smashed right through Gulliver's gang like a solid tornado an' flattened 'em out like strawberry jam. Only thing saved me from bein' mashed was that two of the moons happened to be in conjunction just then, an' the second shadow come along just in the nick of time, busted right into the first one, an' knocked it out of the way. Didn't miss me by more'n a couple of feet."

He took a long swallow and peered suspiciously at his audience over the top of the glass. "There was another time I was saved by an eclipse," he admitted. "On the Moon it was—only I don't like to tell about it. Anybody that don't have scientific trainin' is apt to think it couldn't happen. But I reckon you men here 't the University Club ought to be broad-minded about things like that. Anyway, you know what diffraction is

"I don't have to tell you how it is with shadows. Average man looks at a shadow an' he'll tell you it breaks off straight an' sharp, but it doesn't. There's bands of shadow outside the edge, bright an' dark, like stripes, on account of the diffraction monkeyin' up the light waves when they go past some-thin'. You take on the Moon, when the Earth gets in front of the Sun an' eclipses it, those stripes of light an' dark are miles wide, on account of the whole thing's on such a big scale.

"Time I'm talking about I was out by myself, prospectin'. Mare Serenitatis or Tycho or some place—don't matter. Well, sir, I'm pokin' around under a ledge when I get a funny feelin' an' look up. There's a scolloper headin' for me. Now you know well's I do there's no use shoot-in' at them things—they've got hides like solid rock. All I could do was run, with the scolloper right after me. On the rocks I could get a little bit ahead, but in the dust it could make ten feet to my one. Looked bad for me—an' then I looked up an' saw the Earth beginnin' to creep across the Sun. First thing you know the first strip of shadow come sailin' along, an' right then I knew I had a chance.

"Thing was 'at I could move in the dark, but the scolloper couldn't. Moon animals freeze up in the dark. I'd fumble my way along for a piece, an' then along would come a bright band an' the critter would thaw out an' take after me again. Gain on it in the dark an' lose ground in the light—that's how it was. I figgered if I could keep ahead of it until the main shadow come along, I'd get clean away, but it was too far off an' the bright spaces was too wide. So I picked me a big rock, got my back up against it, an' got ready to fight.

"Well, sir—you know what happened ? Like any of us, the Moon animals tell time by the passin' of light an' dark. It's born in 'em. An' with light an' dark stripes passin' over him one right after another like that, damned if that scolloper didn't shrivel up an' drop dead of old age, right there in front of me! Damnedest thing you ever saw! Diffraction was what did it."

He set the empty bottle down reluctantly and picked up his massive oaken staff. "Gotta be goin'," he said. "Next time I'm up this way remind me to tell you about the time I was fightin' for General Joshua, down Jericho way. The time we made the Sun stand still. It ain't exactly an eclipse, but I figger it was a lot like one."

The End