Of Berserkers, Swords and Vampires Page 2

  On a completely different note from classic myth, lightly touching horror (although Fred did not consider himself a horror writer), are Fred's explorations into the world of vampires. One day on rereading Bram Stoker's original DRACULA, probably on impulse as the book was one of the dog-eared paperback versions on a shelf in his study, Fred came downstairs and said: "You know, there's nothing in this book from the title character's viewpoint." That's all he said. And so started Fred's fascination with Dracula.

  (Unless you give credence to Fred's relating of how as a young boy of six or so he hid under the seat in the movie theater to escape Bela Lugosi's Dracula.) Critics of the vampire genre have noted that Fred was the first writer to have a vampire tell his own story. That was in THE DRACULA TAPE. Almost all of Fred's Dracula stories are told as full-length novels, ten in all. He wrote only two Dracula stories ("From the Tree of Time," "Box Number Fifty") and one vampire story ("A Drop of Something Special in the Blood"). Set in 1897, "Box Number Fifty" exposes Dracula's rather surprising paternal feelings. The story originally appeared in DRACULA IN LONDON edited by P.N. Elrod. Fred's last solo short story, "A Drop of Something Special in the Blood," presents one possible origin of Bram Stoker's work DRACULA. "A Drop of Something Special in the Blood" appeared in an anthology edited by Andrew Greeley entitled EMERALD MAGIC. Fred enjoyed Fr. Greeley's work, especially the nonfiction, from as far back as our days in Chicago, when we avidly read Greeley's column on sociology in the Chicago Sun Times.

  Hope you enjoy the stories in this collection.

  —Joan

  It was my honor and my life's greatest joy to be Fred's wife from June 29, 1968 to June 29, 2007. See you at home, Fred.

  FIRST STORIES

  The Long Way Home

  When Marty first saw the thing it was nearly dead ahead, half a million miles away, a tiny green blip that repeated itself every five seconds on the screen of his distant-search radar.

  He was four billion miles from Sol and heading out, working his way slowly through a small swarm of rock chunks that swung in a slow sun-orbit out here beyond Pluto, looking for valuable minerals in concentration that would make mining profitable.

  The thing on his radar screen looked quite small, and therefore not too promising. But, as it was almost in his path, no great effort would be required to investigate. For all he knew, it might be solid germanium. And nothing better was in sight at the moment. Marty leaned back in the control seat and said: "We've got one coming up, baby." He had no need to address himself any more exactly. Only one other human was aboard the Clementine, or, to his knowledge, within a couple of billion miles.

  Laura's voice answered through a speaker, from the kitchen two decks below. "Oh, close? Have we got time for breakfast?"

  Marty studied the radar. "About five hours if we maintain speed. Hope it won't be a waste of energy to decelerate and look the thing over." He gave Clem's main computer the problem of finding the most economical engine use to approach his find and reach zero velocity relative to it.

  "Come and eat!"

  "All right." He and the computer studied the blip together for a few seconds. Then the man, not considering it anything of unusual importance, left the control room to have breakfast with his bride of three months. As he walked downstairs in the steadilymaintained artificial gravity, he heard the engines starting.

  Ten hours later he examined his new find much more closely, with a rapidly focusing alertness that balanced between an explorer's caution and a prospector's elation at a possibly huge strike. The incredible shape of X, becoming apparent as the Clem drew within a few hundred miles, was what had Marty on the edge of his chair. It was a needle thirty miles long, as near as his radar could measure and about a hundred yards thick—dimensions that matched exactly nothing Marty could expect to find anywhere in space.

  It was obviously no random chunk of rock. And it was no spaceship that he had ever seen or heard of. One end of it pointed in the direction of Sol, causing him to suggest to Laura the idea of a miniature comet, complete with tail. She took him seriously at first, then remembered some facts about comets and swatted him playfully. "Oh, you!" she said.

  Another, more real possibility quickly became obvious, with sobering effect. The ancient fear of aliens that had haunted Earthmen through almost three thousand years of intermittent space exploration, a fear that had never been realized, now peered into the snug control room through the green radar eye.

  Aliens were always good for a joke when spacemen met and talked. But they turned out to be not particularly amusing when you were possibly confronting them, several billion miles from Earth. Especially, thought Marty, in a ship built for robot mining, ore refining, and hauling, not for diplomatic contacts or heroics—and with the only human assistance a girl on her first space trip. Marty hardly felt up to speaking for the human race in such a situation.

  It took a minute to set the autopilot so that any sudden move by X would trigger alarms and such evasive tactics as Clem could manage. He then set a robot librarian to searching his microfilm files for any reference to a spaceship having X's incredible dimensions.

  There was a chance—how good a chance, he found hard to estimate, when any explanation looked somewhat wild—that X was a derelict, the wrecked hull of some ship dead for a decade, or a century, or a thousand years. By laws of salvage, such a find would belong to him if he towed it into port. The value might be very high or very low. But the prospect was certainly intriguing.

  Marty brought Clem to a stop relative to X, and noticed that his velocity to Sol now also hung at zero. "I wonder," he muttered,

  "Space anchor . . . ?"

  The space anchor had been in use for thousands of years. It was a device that enabled a ship to fasten itself to a particular point in the gravitational field of a massive body such as a sun. If X was anchored, it did not prove that there was still life aboard her; once "dropped," an anchor could hold as long as a hull could last. Laura brought sandwiches and a hot drink to him in the control room.

  "If we call the navy and they bring it in we won't get anything out of it," he told her between bites. "That's assuming it's—not alien."

  "Could there be someone alive on it?" She was staring into the screen. Her face was solemn, but, he thought, not frightened.

  "If it's human, you mean? No. I know there hasn't been any ship remotely like that used in recent years. Way, way back the Old Empire built some that were even bigger, but none I ever heard of with this crazy shape . . . "

  The robot librarian indicated that it had drawn a blank. "See?" said Marty. "And I've even got most of the ancient types in there." There was silence for a little while. The evening's recorded music started somewhere in the background.

  "What would you do if I weren't along?" Laura asked him.

  He did not answer directly, but said something he had been considering. "I don't know the psychology of our hypothetical aliens. But it seems to me that if you set out exploring new solar systems, you do as Earthmen have always done—go with the best you have in the way of speed and weapons. Therefore if X is alien, I don't think Clem would stand a chance trying to fight or run." He paused, frowning at the image of X. "That damned shape—it's just not right for anything."

  "We could call the navy—not that I'm saying we should, darling," she added hastily. "You decide, and I'll never complain either way. I'm just trying to help you think it out."

  He looked at her, believed it about there never being any complaints, and squeezed her hand. Anything more seemed superfluous.

  "If I was alone," he said, "I'd jump into a suit, go look that thing over, haul it back to Ganymede, and sell it for a unique whateverit-is. Maybe I'd make enough money to marry you in real style, and trade in Clem for a first-rate ship—or maybe even terraform an asteroid and keep a couple of robot prospectors. I don't know, though. Maybe we'd better call the navy."

  She laughed at him gently. "We're married enough already, and we had all the style I wanted. Besid
es, I don't think either of us would be very happy sitting on an asteroid. How long do you think it will take you to look it over?"

  At the airlock door she had misgivings: "Oh, it is safe enough, isn't it? Marty, be careful and come back soon." She kissed him before he closed his helmet.

  They had moved Clem to within a few kilometers of X. Marty mounted his spacebike and approached it slowly, from the side. The vast length of X blotted out a thin strip of stars to his right and left, as it it were the distant shore of some vast island in a placid Terran sea, and the starclouds below him were the watery reflections of the ones above. But space was too black to permit such an illusion to endure.

  The tiny FM radar on his bike showed him within three hundred yards of X. He killed his forward speed with a gentle application of retrojets and turned on a spotlight. Bright metal gleamed smoothly back at him as he swung the beam from side to side. Then he stopped it where a dark concavity showed up.

  "Lifeboat berth . . . empty," he said aloud, looking through the bike's little telescope.

  "Then it is a derelict? We're all right?" asked Laura's voice in his helmet.

  "Looks that way. Yeah, I guess there's no doubt of it. I'll go in for a closer look now." He eased the bike forward. X was evidently just some rare type of ship that neither he nor the compilers of the standard reference works in his library had ever heard of. Which sounded a little foolish to him, but . . .

  At ten meters' distance he killed speed again, set the bike on automatic stay-clear, made sure a line from it was fast to his belt, and launched himself out of the saddle gently, headfirst, toward X.

  The armored hands of his suit touched down first, easily and expertly. In a moment he was standing upright on the hull, held in place by magnetic boots. He looked around. He detected no response to his arrival.

  Marty turned toward Sol, sighting down the kilometers of dark cylinder that seemed to dwindle to a point in the starry distance, like a road on which a man might travel home toward a tiny sun. Near at hand the hull was smooth, looking like that of any ordinary spaceship. In the direction away from Sol, quite distant, he could vaguely see some sort of projections at right angles to the hull. He mounted his bike again and set off in that direction. When he neared the nearest projection, a kilometer and a half down the hull, he saw it to be a sort of enormous clamp that encircled X—or rather, part of a clamp. It ended a few meters from the hull, in rounded globs of metal that had once been molten but were now too cold to affect the thermometer Marty held against them. His radiation counter showed nothing above the normal background.

  "Ah," said Marty after a moment, looking at the half-clamp.

  "Something?"

  "I think I've got it figured out. Not quite as weird as we thought. Let me check for one thing more." He steered the bike slowly around the circumference of X.

  A third of the way around he came upon what looked like a shallow trench, about five feet wide and a foot deep, with a bottom that shone cloudy gray in his lights. It ran lengthwise on X as far as he could see in either direction.

  A door-sized opening was cut in the clamp above the trench. Marty nodded and smiled to himself, and gunned the bike around in an accelerating curve that aimed at the Clementine.

  "It's not a spaceship at all, only a part of one," he told Laura a little later, digging in the microfilm file with his own hands, with the air of a man who knew what he was looking for. "That's why the librarian didn't turn it up. Now I remember reading about them. It's part of an Old Empire job of about two thousand years ago. They used a somewhat different drive than we do, one that made one enormous ship more economical to run than several normal-sized ones. They made these ships ready for a voyage by fastening together long narrow sections side by side, the number depending on how much cargo they had to move. What we've found is obviously one of those sections."

  Laura wrinkled her forehead. "It must have been a terrible job, putting those sections together and separating them, even in free space."

  "They used space anchors. That trench I mentioned? It has a forcefield bottom. so an anchor could be sunk through it. Then the whole section could be slid straight forward or back, in or out of the bunch . . . here, I've got it, I think. Put this strip in the viewer."

  One picture, a photograph, showed what appeared to be one end of a bunch of long needles, in a glaring light, against a background of stars that looked unreal. The legend beneath gave a scanty description of the ship in flowing Old Empire script. Other pictures showed sections of the ship in some detail.

  "This must be it, all right," said Marty thoughtfully. "Funny looking old tub."

  "I wonder what happened to wreck her."

  "Drives sometimes exploded in those days, and that could have done it. And this one section got anchored to Sol somehow—it's funny."

  "How long ago did it happen, do you suppose?" asked Laura. She had her arms folded as if she were a little cold, though it was not cold in the Clementine.

  "Must be around two thousand years or more. These ships haven't been used for about that long." He picked up a stylus. "I better go over there with a big bag of tools tomorrow and take a look inside." He wrote down a few things he thought he might need.

  "Historians would probably pay a good price for the whole thing, untouched," she suggested, watching him draw doodles.

  "That's a thought. But maybe there's something really valuable aboard—though I won't be able to give it anything like a thorough search, of course. The thing is anchored, remember. I'll probably have to break in, anyway, to release that."

  She pointed to one of the diagrams. "Look, a section thirty miles long must be one of the passenger compartments. And according to this plan, it would have no drive at all of its own. We'll have to tow it."

  He looked. "Right. Anyway, I don't think I'd care to try its drive if it had one."

  He located airlocks on the plan and made himself generally familiar with it.

  The next "morning" found Marty loading extra tools, gadgets, and explosives on his bike. The trip to X (he still thought of it that way) was uneventful. This time he landed about a third of the way from one end, where he expected to find a handy airlock and have a choice of directions to explore when he got inside. He hoped to get the airlock open without letting out whatever atmosphere or gas was present in any of the main compartments, as a sudden drop in pressure might damage something in the unknown cargo. He found a likely looking spot for entry where the plans had told him to expect one. It was a small auxiliary airlock, only a few feet from the space-anchor channel. The forcefield bottom of that channel was, he knew, useless as a possible doorway. Though anchors could be raised and lowered through it, they remained partly imbedded in it at all times. Starting a new hole from scratch would cause the decompression he was trying to avoid, and possibly a dangerous explosion as well.

  Marty began his attack on the airlock door cautiously, working with electronic "sounding" gear for a few minutes, trying to tell if the inner door was closed as well. He had about decided that it was when something made him look up. He raised his head and sighted down the dark length of X toward Sol.

  Something was moving toward him along the hull.

  He was up in the bike saddle with his hand on a blaster before he realized what it was—that moving blur that distorted the stars seen through it, like heat waves in air. Without doubt, it was a space anchor, moving along the channel.

  Marty rode the bike out a few yards and nudged it along slowly, following the anchor. It moved at about the pace of a fast walk. Moved . . . but it was sunk into space.

  "Laura," he called. "Something odd here. Doppler this hull for me and see if it's moving."

  Laura acknowledged in one businesslike word. Good girl, he thought. I won't have to worry about you. He coasted along the hull on the bike, staying even with the apparent movement of the anchor.

  Laura's voice came: "It is moving now, toward Sol. About 10 kilometers per hour. Maybe less—it's so slow it's har
d to read."

  "Good, that's what I thought." He hoped he sounded reassuring. He pondered the situation. It was the hull moving then, the forcefield channel sliding by the fixed anchor. Whatever was causing it, it did not seem to be directed against him or the Clem. "Look, baby," he went on. "Something peculiar is happening." He explained about the anchor. "Clem may be no battleship, but I guess she's a match for any piece of wreckage."

  "But you're out there!"

  "I have to see this. I never saw anything like it before. Don't worry, I'll pull back if it looks at all dangerous." Something in the back of his mind told him to go back to his ship and call the navy. He ignored it without much trouble. He had never thought much of calling the navy.

  About four hours later the incomprehensible anchor neared the end of its track, within thirty meters of what seemed to be X's stern. It slowed down and came to a gradual stop a few meters from the end of the track. For a minute nothing else happened. Marty reported the facts to Laura. He sat straight in the bike saddle, regarding the universe, which offered him no enlightenment.

  In the space between the anchor and the end of the track, a second patterned shimmer appeared. It must necessarily have been let "down" into space from inside X. Marty felt a creeping chill. After a little while the first anchor vanished, withdrawn through the forcefield into the hull.

  Marty sat watching for twenty minutes, but nothing further happened. He realized that he had a crushing grip on the bike controls and that he was quivering with fatigue.

  Laura and Marty took turns sleeping and watching, that night aboard the Clementine. About noon the next ship's day Laura was at the telescope when anchor number one reappeared, now at the "prow" of X. After a few moments the one at the stem vanished. Marty looked at the communicator that he could use any time to call the navy. Faster-than-light travel not being practical so near a sun, it would take them at least several hours to arrive after he decided he needed them. Then he beat his fist against a table and swore. "It can only be that there's some kind of mechanism in her still operating." He went to the telescope and watched number one anchor begin its apparent slow journey sternward once more.