And Shrick was frightened.
He had never quite believed Wesel’s garbled version of the nature of the world until now. But he could see, at last, that the ship was moving. The fantastic wonder of it all held him spellbound until a thin edge of intolerable radiance crept into view from behind the rim of one of the ports. The navigator touched something and, suddenly, screens of dark blue glass mitigated the glare. But it was still bright, too bright, and the edge became a rapidly widening oval and then, at last, a disk.
The humming of the gyroscope stopped.
Before the silence had time to register a fresh sound assailed Shrick’s ears. It was the roar of the main drive.
A terrifying force seized him and slammed him down upon the deck. He felt his bones crack under the acceleration. True child of free fall as he was, all this held for him the terror of the supernatural. For a while he lay there, weakly squirming, whimpering a little. The navigator looked down at him and laughed. It was this sound more than anything else that stung Shrick to his last, supreme effort. He didn’t want to move. He just wanted to lie there on the deck slowly coughing his life away. But the Little Giant’s derision tapped unsuspected reserves of strength, both moral and physical.
The navigator went back to his calculations, handling his instruments for the last time with a kind of desperate elation. He knew that the ship would never arrive at her destination, neither would her cargo of seed grain. But she would not — and this outweighed all other considerations — drift forever among the stars carrying within her hull the seeds of the destruction of Man and all his works.
He knew that — had he not taken this way out — he must have slept at last, and then death at the hands of the mutants would inevitably have been his portion. And with mutants in full charge anything might happen.
The road he had taken was the best.
Unnoticed, inch by inch Shrick edged his way along the deck. Now, he could stretch his free hand and touch the Giant’s foot. In the other he still held his blade, to which he had clung as the one thing sure and certain in this suddenly crazy world.
Then he had a grip on the artificial skin covering the Giant’s leg. He started to climb, although every movement was unadulterated agony. He did not see the other raise his hand to his mouth, swallow the little pellet that he held therein.
So it was that when, at long last, he reached the soft, smooth throat of the Giant, the Giant was dead.
It was a very fast poison.
For a while he clung there. He should have felt elation at the death of the last of his enemies but — instead — he felt cheated. There was so much that he wanted to know, so much that only the Giants could have told him. Besides — it was his blade that should have won the final victory. He knew that, somewhere, the Little Giant was still laughing at him.
Through the blue-screened ports blazed the sun. Even at this distance, even with the intervening filters, its power and heat were all too evident. And aft the motors still roared, and would roar until the last ounce of fuel had been fed into hungry main drive.
Shrick clung to the dead man’s neck, looked long and longingly at the glittering instruments, the shining switches and levers, whose purpose he would never understand, whose inertia would have defeated any attempt of his fast ebbing strength to move them. He looked at the flaming doom ahead, and knew that this was what had been foretold.
Had the metaphor existed in his language, he would have told himself that he and the few surviving People were caught like rats in a trap.
But even the Giants would not have used that phrase in its metaphorical sense.
For that is all that the People were — rats in a trap.
E FOR EFFORT
T. L. Sherred
The captain was met at the airport by a staff car. Long and fast it sped. In narrow, silent room the general sat, ramrod-backed, tense. The major waited at the foot of the gleaming steps shining frostily in the night air. Tires screamed to a stop and together the captain and the major raced up the steps. No words of greeting were spoken. The general stood quickly, hand outstretched. The captain ripped open a dispatch case and handed over a thick bundle of papers. The general flipped them over eagerly and spat a sentence at the major. The major disappeared and his harsh voice rang curtly down the outside hall. The man with glasses came in and the general handed him the papers. With jerky fingers the man with glasses sorted them out. With a wave from the general the captain left, a proud smile on his weary young face. The general tapped his fingertips on the black glossy surface of the table. The man with glasses pushed aside crinkled maps, and began to read aloud.
Dear Joe:
I started this just to kill time, because I got tired of just looking out the window. But when I got almost to the end I began to catch the trend of what’s going on. You’re the only one I know that can come through for me, and when you finish this you’ll know why you must.
I don’t know who will get this to you. Whoever it is won’t want you to identify a face later. Remember that, and please, Joe — hurry!
It all started because I’m lazy. By the time I’d shaken off the sandman and checked out of the hotel, every seat in the bus was full. I stuck my bag in a dime locker and went out to kill the hour I had until the bus left. You know the bus terminal — right across from the Book-Cadillac and the Statler, on Washington Boulevard near Michigan Avenue. Like Main in Los Angeles, or maybe Sixty-third in its present state of decay in Chicago, where I was going. Cheap movies, pawnshops, and bars by the dozens, a penny arcade or two, restaurants that feature hamburg steak, bread and butter and coffee for forty cents. Before the War, a quarter.
I like pawnshops. I like cameras, I like tools, I like to look in windows crammed with everything from electric razors to sets of socket wrenches to upper plates. So, with an hour to spare, I walked out Michigan to Sixth and back on the other side of the street. There are a lot of Chinese and Mexicans around that part of town, the Chinese running the restaurants and the Mexicans eating Southern Home Cooking. Between Fourth and Fifth, I stopped to stare at what passed for a movie. Store windows painted black, amateurish signs extolling in Spanish “Detroit premier… cast of thousands… this week only… ten cents—” The few eight-by-ten glossy stills pasted on the windows were poor blowups, spotty and wrinkled; pictures of mailed cavalry and what looked like a good-sized battle. All for ten cents. Right down my alley.
Maybe it’s lucky that history was my major in school. Luck it must have been, certainly not cleverness, that made me pay a dime for a seat in an undertaker’s rickety folding chair imbedded solidly — although the only other customers were a half-dozen Sons of the Order of Tortilla — in a cast of secondhand garlic. I sat near the door. A couple of hundred-watt bulbs dangling naked from the ceiling gave enough light for me to look around. In front of me, in the rear of the store, was the screen, what looked like a white-painted sheet of beaverboard, and when over my shoulder I saw the battered sixteen millimeter projector I began to think that even at a dime it was no bargain. Still, I had forty minutes to wait.
Everyone was smoking. I lit a cigarette and the discouraged Mexican who had taken my dime locked the door and turned off the lights, after giving me a long, questioning look. I’d paid my dime, so I looked right back. In a minute the old projector started clattering. No film credits, no producer’s name, no director, just a tentative flicker before a closeup of a bewhiskered mug labeled Cortez. Then a painted and feathered Indian with the title of Guatemotzin, successor to Moctezuma; an aerial shot of a beautiful job of model-building tagged Ciudad Méjico, 1521. Shots of old muzzle-loaded artillery banging away, great walls spurting stone splinters under direct fire, skinny Indians dying violently with the customary gyrations, smoke and haze and blood. The photography sat me right up straight. It had none of the scratches and erratic cuts that characterized an old print, none of the fuzziness, none of the usual mugging at the camera by the handsome hero. There wasn’t any handsome hero. Did you ever see one of those French pictures, or a Russian, and comment on the reality and depth brought out by working on a small budget that can’t afford famed actors? This, what there was of it, was as good, or better.