Short Fiction

not immediately recognize. The spokesman nodded and took the object by its hair. He stroked it effusively, calling upon it to protect and succor him in war and in peace. He begged that the object’s pity and benevolence would extend to the whole tribe. He praised the object in terms that would have embarrassed any living man. Then he turned to Bill and made a very low bow. “It came ashore before you,” he said. “And we are most grateful!”

Bill opened his eyes wide with horror. He sought to express his agony in words, but no sound came from between his black, swollen lips. A sudden shriek would perhaps have saved him, and Bill tried hard to make a sound in his throat. But his horror lay too heavily upon him. He made a wild, horrid gesture with his right arm and collapsed in a heap upon the sand.

Three months later Bill was taken off by a trading-sloop. He blabbered idiotically about the right of a head to decent burial and made uncomplimentary allusions to the wearing of teeth. He evidently sought to stir up anger against the cannibals, but the traders ignored his insinuations, since he was obviously mad and since the cannibals had worshiped him and given him the run of the island. The memory of Van Wyck’s encrimsoned head had addled his wits.

The Vibration Wasps

I

Out in Space

I was out in space with Joan for the sixth time. It might as well have been the eighth or tenth. It went on and on. Every time I rebelled Joan would shrug and murmur: “All right, Richard. I’ll go it alone then.”

Joan was a little chit of a girl with spun gold hair and eyes that misted when I spoke of Pluto and Uranus, and glowed like live coals when we were out in space together.

Joan had about the worst case of exploritis in medical history. To explain her I had to take to theory. Simply to test out whether she could survive and reach maturity in an environment which was hostile to human mutants, Nature had inserted in her makeup every reckless ingredient imaginable. Luckily she had survived long enough to fall in love with sober and restraining me. We supplemented each other, and as I was ten years her senior my obligations had been clear-cut from the start.

We were heading for Ganymede this time, the largest satellite of vast, mist-enshrouded Jupiter. Our slender space vessel was thrumming steadily through the dark interplanetary gulfs, its triple atomotors roaring. I knew that Joan would have preferred to penetrate the turbulent red mists of Ganymede’s immense primary, and that only my settled conviction that Jupiter was a molten world restrained her.

We had talked it over for months, weighing the opinions of Earth’s foremost astronomers. No “watcher of the night skies” could tell us very much about Jupiter. The year 1973 had seen the exploration of the moon, and in 1986 the crews of three atomotor-propelled space vessels had landed on Mars and Venus, only to make the disappointing discovery that neither planet had ever sustained life.

By 2002 three of the outer planets had come within the orbit of human exploration. There were Earth colonies on all of the Jovian moons now, with the exception of Ganymede. Eight exploring expeditions had set out for that huge and mysterious satellite, only to disappear without leaving a trace.

I turned from a quartz port brimming with star-flecked blackness to gaze on my reckless, nineteen-year-old bride. Joan was so strong-willed and competent that it was difficult for me to realize she was scarcely more than a child. A veteran of the skyways, you’d have thought her, with her slim hands steady on the controls, her steely eyes probing space.

“The more conservative astronomers have always been right,” I said. “We knew almost as much about the moon back in the eighteenth century as we do now. We get daily weather reports from Tycho now, and there are fifty-six Earth colonies beneath the lunar Apennines. But the astronomers knew that the moon was a sterile, crater-pitted world a hundred years ago. They knew that there was no life or oxygen beneath its brittle stars generations before the first space vessel left Earth.

“The astronomers said that Venus was a bleak, mist-enshrouded world that couldn’t sustain life and they were right. They were right about Mars. Oh, sure, a few idle dreamers thought there might be life on Mars. But the more conservative astronomers stood pat, and denied that the seasonal changes could be ascribed to a low order of vegetative life. It’s a far cry from mere soil discoloration caused by melting polar ice caps to the miracle of pulsing life. The first vessel to reach Mars proved the astronomers right. Now a few crackbrained theorists are trying to convince us that Jupiter may be a solid, cool world.”

Joan turned, and frowned at me. “You’re letting a few clouds scare you, Richard,” she said. “No man on Earth knows what’s under the mist envelope of Jupiter.”

“A few clouds,” I retorted. “You know darned well that Jupiter’s gaseous envelope is forty thousand miles thick⁠—a seething cauldron of heavy gases and pressure drifts rotating at variance with the planet’s crust.”

“But Ganymede is mist-enshrouded too,” scoffed Joan. “We’re hurtling into that cauldron at the risk of our necks. Why not Jupiter instead?”

“The law of averages,” I said, “seasoned with a little common sense. Eight vessels went through Ganymede’s ghost shroud into oblivion. There have been twenty-six attempts to conquer Jupiter. A little world cools and solidifies much more rapidly than a big world. You ought to know that.”

“But Ganymede isn’t so little. You’re forgetting it’s the biggest satellite in the solar system.”

“But still little⁠—smaller than Mars. Chances are it has a solid crust, like Callisto, Io, and Europa.”

There was a faint, rustling sound behind us. Joan and I swung about simultaneously, startled by what was obviously a space-code infraction. A silvery-haired, wiry