Honeymoon in Hell Page 6

  “Most of the surface of their planet seems to be covered with water in which sodium chloride is present. Shall we synthesize some?”

  Hanley yelled, “No! Not even water without salt. I want a drink! Whiskey!”

  “Shall I analyze his metabolism?” Three asked. “With the intrafluoroscope I can do it in a second.” He unwound himself from the controls and went to a strange machine. Lights flashed. Three said, “How strange. His metabolism depends on C2H5OH.”

  “C2H5OH?”

  “Yes, alcohol—at least, basically. With a certain dilution of H2O and without the sodium chloride present in their seas, as well as exceedingly minor quantities of other ingredients, it seems to be all that he has consumed for at least an extended period. There is .234% present in his blood stream and in his brain. His entire metabolism seems to be based on it.”

  “Boys,” Hanley begged. “I’m dying for a drink. How’s about laying off the double-talk and giving me one.”

  “Wait, please,” Nine said. “I shall make you what you require. Let me use the verniers on that intrafluoroscope and add the psychometer.” More lights flashed and Nine went into the corner of the cube which was a laboratory. Things happened there and he came back in less than a minute. He carried a beaker containing slightly less than two quarts of clear amber fluid.

  Hanley sniffed it, then sipped it. He sighed.

  “I’m dead,” he said. “This is usquebaugh, the nectar of the gods. There isn’t any such drink as this” He drank deeply and it didn’t even bum his throat.

  “What is it, Nine?” Three asked.

  “A quite complex formula, fitted to his exact needs. It is fifty per-cent alcohol, forty-five per-cent water. The remaining ingredients, however, are considerable in number; they include every vitamin and mineral his system requires, in proper proportion and all tasteless. Then other ingredients in minute quantities to improve the taste—by his standards. It would taste horrible to us, even if we could drink either alcohol or water.”

  Hanley sighed and drank deeply. He swayed a little. He looked at Three and grinned. “Now I know you aren’t there,” he said.

  “What does he mean?” Nine asked Three.

  “His thought processes seem completely illogical. I doubt if his species would make suitable slaves. But we’ll make sure, of course. What is your name, creature?”

  “What’s in a name, pal?” Hanley asked. “Call me anything. You guys are my bes’ frien’s. You can take me anywhere and jus’ lemme know when we get Dar.”

  He drank deeply and lay down on the floor. Strange sounds came from him but neither Three nor Nine could identify them as words. They sounded like “Zzzzzz, glup—

  Zzzzzz, glup—Zzzzzz, glup.” They tried to prod him awake and failed.

  They observed him and made what tests they could. It wasn’t until hours later that he awoke. He sat up and stared at them. He said, “I don’t believe it. You aren’t here. For Gossake, give me a drink quick.”

  They gave him the beaker again—Nine had replenished it and it was full. Hanley drank. He closed his eyes in bliss. He said, “Don’t wake me.”

  “But you are awake.”

  “Then don’t put me to sleep. Jus’ figured what this is. Ambrosia—stuff the gods drink.”

  “Who are the gods?”

  “There aren’t any. Blit this is what they drink. On Olympus.”

  Three said, “Thought processes completely illogical.” Hanley lifted the beaker. He said, “Here is here* and Dar is Dar and never the twain shall meet. Here’s to the twain.” He drank.

  Three asked, “What is a twain?”

  Hanley gave it thought. He said, “A twain is something that wuns on thwacks, and you wide on it from here to Dar.” “What do you know about Dar?”

  “Dar ain’t no such things as you are. But here’s to you, boys.” He drank again.

  “Too stupid to be trained for anything except simple physical labor,” Three said. “But if he has sufficient stamina for that we can still recommend a raid in force upon this planet. There are probably three or four billion inhabitants. And we can use unskilled labor—three or four billion would help us considerably.”

  “Hooray!” said Hanley.

  “He does not seem to coordinate well,” Three said thoughtfully. “But perhaps his physical strength is considerable. Creature, what shall we call you?”

  “Call me Al, boys.” Hanley was getting to his feet.

  “Is that your name or your species? In either case is it the full designation?”

  Hanley leaned against the wall. He considered. “Species,” he said. “Stands for—let’s make it Latin.” He made it Latin.

  “We wish to test your stamina. Run back and forth from one side of this cube to the other until you become fatigued. Here, I will hold that beaker of your food.”

  He took the beaker out of Hanley’s hands. Hanley grabbed for it. “One more drink. One more li’l drink. Then I’ll run for you. I’ll run for President.”

  “Perhaps he needs it,” Three said. “Give it to him, Nine.”

  It might be his last for awhile so Hanley took a long one. Then he waved cheerily at the four Darians who seemed to be looking at him. He said, “See you at the races, boys. All of you. An’ bet on me. Win, place an’ show. ’Nother li’l drink first?”

  He had another little drink—really a short one this time —less than two ounces.

  “Enough,” Three said. “Now run.”

  Hanley took two steps and fell flat on his face. He rolled over on his back and lay there, a blissful smile on his face.

  “Incredible!” Three said. “Perhaps he is attempting to fool us. Check him, Nine.”

  Nine checked. “Incredible!” he said. “Indeed incredible after so little exertion but he is completely unconscious— unconscious to the degree of being insensible to pain. And he is not faking. His type is completely useless to Dar. Set the controls and we shall report back. ‘And take him, according to our subsidiary orders, as a specimen for the zoological gardens. He’ll be worth having there. Physically he is the strangest specimen we have discovered on any of several million planets.”

  Three wrapped himself around the controls and used both ends to manipulate mechanisms. A hundred and sixty-three thousand light years and 1,630 centuries passed, cancelling each other out so completely and perfectly that neither time nor distance seemed to have been traversed.

  In the capital city of Dar, which rules thousands of useful planets, and has visited millions of useless ones—like Earth —A1 Hanley occupies a large glass cage in a place of honor as a truly amazing specimen.

  There is a pool in the middle of it, from which he drinks often and in which he has been known to bathe. It is filled with a constantly flowing supply of a beverage that is delicious beyond all deliciousness, that is to the best whiskey of Earth as the best whiskey of Earth is to bathtub gin made in a dirty bathtub. Moreover it is fortified—tastelessly— with every vitamin and mineral his metabolism requires.

  It causes no hangovers or other unpleasant consequences. It is a drink as delightful to Hanley as the amazing con—

  formation of Hanley is delightful to the frequenters of the zoo, who stare at him in bewilderment and then read the sign on his cage, which leads off in what looks to be Latin with the designation of his species as A1 told it to Three and Nine:

  ALCOHOLICUS ANONYMOUS

  Lives on diet of C2H5OH, slightly fortified with vitamins and minerals. Occasionally brilliant but completely illogical. Extent of stamina—able to take only a few steps without falling. Utterly without value commercially but a fascinating specimen of the strangest form of life yet discovered in the Galaxy. Habitat—Planet 3 of Sun JX6547-HG908.

  So strange, in fact, that they have given him a treatment that makes him practically immortal. And a good thing that is, because he’s so interesting as a zoological specimen that if he ever dies they might come back to Earth for another one. And they might happen to pick up you o
r me—and you or I, as the case might be, might happen to be sober. And that would be bad for all of us.

  MILLENNIUM

  Hades was hell, Satan thought; that was why he loved the place. He leaned forward across his gleaming desk and flicked the switch of the intercom.

  “Yes, Sire,” said the voice of Lilith, his secretary.

  “How many today?”

  “Four of them. Shall I send one of them in?”

  “Yes—wait. Any of them look as though he might be an unselfish one?”

  “One of them does, I think. But so what, Sire? There’s one chance in billions of his making The Ultimate Wish.”

  Even at the sound of those last words Satan shivered despite the heat. It was his most constant, almost his only worry that someday someone might make The Ultimate Wish, the ultimate, unselfish wish. And then it would happen;

  Satan would find himself chained for a thousand years, and out of business for the rest of eternity after that.

  But Lilith was right, he told himself.

  Only about one person out of a thousand sold his soul for the granting of even a minor unselfish wish, and it might be millions of years yet, or forever, before the ultimate one was made. Thus far, no one had even come close to it.

  “Okay, Lil,” he said. “Just the same, send him in first; I'd rather get it over with.” He flicked off the intercom.

  The little man who came through the big doorway certainly didn’t look dangerous; he looked plain scared. * Satan frowned at him. “You know the terms?”

  “Yes,” said the little man. “At least, I think I do. In exchange for your granting any one wish I make, you get my soul when I die. Is that right?”

  “Right. Your wish?”

  “Well,” said the little man, ^I’ve thought it out pretty carefully and—”

  “Get to the point. I’m busy. Your wish?”

  “Well ... I wish that, without any change whatsoever in myself, I become the most evil, stupid and miserable person on earth.”

  Satan screamed.

  THE DOME

  Kyle Braden sat in his comfortable armchair and stared at the switch in the opposite wall, wondering for the millionth —or was it the billionth?—time whether he was ready to take the risk of pulling it. The millionth or the billionth time in—it would be thirty years today, this afternoon.

  It meant probable death and in just what form he didn’t know. Not atomic death certainly—all the bombs would have been used up many many years ago. They’d have lasted long enough to destroy the fabric of civilization, yes. There were more than enough bombs for that. And his careful calculations, thirty years ago, had proven that it would be almost a century before man got really started on a new civilization—what was left of him.

  But what went on now, out there, outside the domelike force field that still shielded him from horror? Men as beasts? Or had mankind gone down completely and left the field to the other and less vicious brutes? No, mankind would have survived somewhere; he’d make his way back eventually. And possibly the record of what he had done to himself would remain, at least as legend, to deter him from doing it a second time. Or would it deter him even if full records remained to him?

  Thirty years, Braden thought. He sighed at the weary length of them. Yet he’d had and still had everything he really needed and lonesomeness is better than sudden death. Life alone is better than no life at all—with death in some horrible form.

  So he had thought thirty years ago, when he had been thirty-seven years old. So he still thought now at sixty-seven. He didn’t regret what he had done, not at all. But he was tired. He wondered, for the millionth—or the billionth?—time whether he wasn’t ready to pull that lever.

  Just maybe, out there, they’d have struggled back to some reasonable, if agrarian, form of living. And he could help them, could give them things and knowledge they’d need. He could savor, ^before he was really old, their gratitude and the good feeling of helping them.

  Then too he didn’t want to die alone. He’d lived alone and it had been tolerable most of the time—but dying alone was something else. Somehow dying alone here would be worse than being killed by the neo-barbarians he expected to find out there. The agrarians were really too much to hope for after only thirty years.

  And today would be a good day for it. Exactly thirty years, if his chronometers were still accurate, and they wouldn’t be far wrong even in that length of time. A few more hours to make it the same time of day, thirty years to the minute. Yes, irrevocable as it was, he’d do it then. Until now the irrevocability of pulling that switch had stopped him every time he’d considered it.

  If only the dome of force could be turned off and then on again the decision would have been easy and he’d have tried it long ago. Perhaps after ten years or fifteen. But it took tremendous power to create the field if very little power to maintain it. There’d still been outside power available when he’d first flashed it on.

  Of course the field itself had broken the connection—had broken all connection—once he’d flashed it into being, but the power sources within the building had been enough to supply his own needs and the negligible power required to maintain the field.

  Yes, he decided suddenly and definitely, he’d pull that switch today as soon as the few hours were up that would make the time exactly thirty years. Thirty years was long enough to be alone.

  He hadn’t wanted to be alone. If only Myra, his secretary, hadn’t walked out on him when ... It was too late to think of that—but he thought of it as he had a billion times before. Why had she been so ridiculous about wanting to share the fate of the rest of humanity, to try to help those who were beyond help? And she’d loved him. Aside from that quixotic idea she’d have married him. He’d been too abrupt in explaining the truth—he’d shocked her. But how wonderful it would have been had she stayed with him.

  Partly the fault was that the news had come sooner than he’d anticipated. When he’d turned the radio off that morning he’d known there were only hours left. He’d pressed the button that summoned Myra and she’d come in, beautiful, cool, unruffled. You’d think she never listened to the newscasts or read the papers, that she didn’t know what was happening.

  “Sit down, my dear,” he’d told her. Her eyes had widened a bit at the unexpected form of address but she’d gracefully seated herself in the chair in which she always sat to take dictation. She poised her pencil.

  “No, Myra,” he said. “This is personal—very personal. I want to ask you to marry me.”

  Her eyes really widened. “Dr. Braden, are you—joking?”

  “No. Very definitely not. I know I’m a bit older than you but not too much so, I hope. I’m thirty-seven although I may seem a bit older right now as a result of the way I’ve been working. You’re—is it twenty-seven?”

  “Twenty-eight last week. But I wasn’t thinking of age. It’s just—well. ‘This is so sudden,’ sounds like I’m joking, but it is. You’ve never even”—she grinned impishly—“you’ve never even made a pass at me. And you’re about the first man I’ve ever worked for who hasn’t.”

  Braden smiled at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was expected. But, Myra, I’m serious. Will you marry me?”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “I—don’t know. The strange thing is that—I guess I am in love with you a little. I don’t know why I should be. You’ve been so impersonal and businesslike, so tied up in your work. You’ve never even tried to kiss me, never even paid me a compliment.

  “But—well, I don’t like this sudden and—unsentimental— a proposal. Why not ask me again sometime soon. And in the meantime—well, you might even tell me that you love me. It might help.”

  “I do, Myra. Please forgive me. But at least—you’re not definitely against marrying me? You’re not turning me down?”

  She shook her head slowly. Her eyes, staring at him, were very beautiful.

  “Then, Myra, let me explain why I am so late and so sudden in asking y
ou. First I have been working desperately and against time. Do you know what I’ve been working on?”

  “Something to do with defense, I know. Some—device. And, unless I’m wrong you’ve been doing it on your own without the government backing you.”

  “That’s right,” Braden said. “The high brass wouldn’t believe my theories—and most other physicists disagreed with me too. But fortunately I have—did have—private wealth from certain patents I took out a few years ago in electronics. What I’ve been working on has been a defense against the A-bomb and the H-bomb—and anything else short of turning Earth into a small sun. A globular force field through which nothing—nothing whatever—can penetrate.”

  “And you .. .”

  “Yes, I have it. It is ready to flash into existence now around this building and to remain operative as long as I wish it to. Nothing can get through it though I maintain it for as many years as I wish. Furthermore this building is now stocked with a tremendous quantity of supplies—of all kinds. Even chemicals and seeds for hydroponic gardens. There is enough of everything here to supply two people for—for their lifetimes.”

  “But—you’re turning this over to the government, aren’t you? If it’s a defense against the H-bomb . . .”

  Braden frowned. “It is, but unfortunately it turns out to have negligible, if any, military value. The high brass was right on that. You see, Myra, the power required to create such a force field varies with the cube of its size. The one about this building will be eighty feet in diameter—and when , I turn it on the power drain will probably burn out the lighting system of Cleveland.

  ‘To throw such a dome over—well, even over a tiny , village or over a single military camp would take more electric power than is consumed by the whole country in weeks. And once turned off to let anything or anybody in or out it would require the same impracticable amount of power to recreate the field.

  “The only conceivable use the government could make of it would be such use as I intend to make myself. To preserve the lives of one or two, at most a few individuals—to let them live through the holocaust and the savagery to come. And, except here, it’s too late even for that.”