Space Chantey Read online

  And they were rushing into the Vortex at two hundred million kilometers a second, and there was no possible way to break out of it.

  They felled a flipping doggie, made a bobble-up,

  And dropped to mokey sun that worked the gobble-up.

  It swallowed time and flow in loins and liver yet,

  And voided all that ever gave the Giver yet.

  One countered not with care or even laughter it,

  It drew in whole and pulled the hole in after it.

  Use but a thumb to gull the gulping glutton there!

  That hammer-handling kid had put a button there!

  Ibid

  “I always wanted to study an involuted, massive, black-giant sun,” Crewman Bramble said. “I dreamed as a young man how interesting it would be to have plenty of time to study one and at close range. We will have the time of our life for it now and a very close range. I say it all again, but I have a false tongue in my head in two different senses. Roadstrum, I never wanted so little to do a thing in my life!”

  “The equivalent-day recorder has gone crazy,” said Roadstrum. “Look at the days flip over. Why, Bramble, there’s nine days passed while we talk here.”

  “That idiot kid Hondstarfer must have meddled with it as he did with everything else on the crafts,” Bramble guessed. “Still, it’s peculiar that it should begin to misfunction after all this time.”

  “Captain Puckett,” Roadstrum called over the communicator, “has the equivalent-day recorder gone crazy on your craft?”

  “Yep, gone crazy,” Puckett answered. “We’ve been amusing ourselves with it. We’ve got to amuse ourselves with something as we drop to our deaths. Do you know, Roadstrum, according to this thing, I’ve aged a year in the last baseline hour? Hey, this would make a man old fast if he went by it, wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s a damned dumb thing that the equivalent-day recorders should go wrong on both hornets at the same time,” Roadstrum growled.

  “It was a damned dumb kid we had meddling with our equipment,” Bramble complained. “But so far we’ve figured out a purpose for everything he did, except the equivalent-day recorder now, and the Dong button.”

  The Dong button was just that, a big green button with the word Dong engraved on it. You pushed it, and it went dong. Well, that was almost too simple. Should there not be a deeper reason for it? And the small instruction plate over it didn’t add much. It read: “Wrong prong, bong gong.”

  “There’s no more to the button than is apparent?” Roadstrum asked Crewman Bramble.

  “Yes, there is more. Everything on our hornets works by the static-repulsion principle now, you know. And the Dong button contains one half of a static-repulsion couple. But wherever in wall-eyed space the other half of that couple is, I don’t know. It isn’t on the hornets.”

  Well, they were well-fed by the space-calf that had masqueraded as a rock until they had slaughtered it. They were well provisioned by its leavings. They were rested and well, and they were falling to their sure deaths.

  So the men busied themselves, or they did not, according to their natures. They had fun variously. And now and again one of them returned to one of the crazy equivalent-day recorders.

  “Look, look,” Crewman Crabgrass chortled. “I’m a month older just while I was in the john. You guys always did say I took too long there. And I’m two years older than I was when I finished my third breakfast a while ago.”

  “A man could live a lifetime every two days by that thing,” Crewman Snow laughed.

  But the crewmen laughed less loudly when they discovered (about the time that the equivalent-day recorder had racked up five years since the beginning of its malfunction) that they had all aged about five years in appearance during those short hours.

  Thereafter they whistled softly and spookily and began to look at the recorder with something like frightened awe. And they looked at each other furtively and did not meet each other’s eyes.

  A little later, Crewman Mundmark died of heart stoppage. He hadn’t been too old a man, and he had kept in pretty good shape. But he had lived the violent years of a spaceman, and with twenty years suddenly piled on top of that (for it was about twenty years now) it was no great wonder that he should die.

  There were balding pates and graying heads popping out all over the place. Crewman Ursley lost three fingers suddenly. There was nothing happened to them. Suddenly they were gone. A bandage bloomed briefly where the three fingers had been, and then there was only old scar tissue. And Ursley gazed at his changed hand in understandable amazement.

  “Whence have I this sudden, great, old scar-gash on my cheek?” Roadstrum croaked out baffled. “When have I lost me my fine right eye, and how is it that I find myself carrying that eye (in pickled form) in my pocket?”

  “These are all incidents of the lives we would have lived out were we not falling into the blind black sun,” Crewman Clamdigger gave the opinion. “These are the losses and mutilations that we would suffer in our normal lives, and they show on us here as we come to these equivalent years in our fall into the Vortex.”

  “There was an old World movie named ‘Death Train’ of which I forget the plot but remember the impression,” said Crewman Crabgrass. “And at the end of it they were in a runaway train going into a long tunnel to their deaths. So are we.”

  “It reminds me of a freight train I caught out of Waterloo, Iowa one night about three hundred years ago,” said Deep John the Vagabond. “Man, that train did have an eerie mournful sound to it, and the clicking of the rails—why I can hear the same clicking of the rails now.”

  “So can we all,” said Roadstrum, “but how would there be rails clicking when we are going at a thousand times the speed of light?”

  “Roadstrum,” Puckett called from his hornet in a much-aged voice, “I’ve turned into a bald-headed, pot-bellied, crabby old man with no teeth and not very much vision. I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like my own aging, Puckett. Have any of your men died?”

  “Yes, about half. A good thing too. They’re not much good for anything when they get to that age. Roadstrum, this will have to be goodbye. I’m too old and stove in to get outside the sphere these last two years—ah—that is, the last thirty minutes. It’s happening faster now, you know.”

  “Myself, I will try it once more,” said Captain Roadstrum.

  Roadstrum went outside the hornet sphere. He had always liked to go outside, but now it was unpleasant and very difficult. He could not comprehend that positive black light nor the distortions of space. With the reversal of the curvature, the turning inside-out of mass and moment, it seemed that they were already inside the bulk of the black sun, but they rushed forever faster into the deep Vortex.

  Roadstrum barely made it back inside. Still, he was proud of himself.

  “I always said I’d live to be a hundred,” he boasted. “Holy Cow, am I not a ramrod straight and imposing man at ninety-four! A Gray Eminence! Maggy, has it any effect on you? What does that mirror you are so busy with tell you?”

  “Really, Captain Roadstrum, twenty or even twenty-one is not a bad age. I study myself as I come to that. No, I do not age as quickly as you do, but I age. I like me when I’m young. I like me when I’m old. I bet I even like me when I get to be twenty-two or even twenty-three.”

  “What, all the men dead except Hobo John?”

  “Yes, all the others, Roadstrum, and now it catches up to me also. I had won a delay some centuries ago, actually I won the delay in a gambling game with a certain Power, but now both my basic and my extended life come to an end,” said Deep John.

  “It hasn’t been a bad life, but it was rather disappointing that the last two-thirds of it should pass away in less than an equivalent day. Seems unfair, but we did kill that calf, and perhaps we shouldn’t have. We should have known that such odd cattle would have belonged to someone. What, dying, Hobo John?”

  “Might as well, Roadstrum,” said Deep John the Vagabon
d, and he died.

  “Be there any living on the other hornet?” Roadstrum called.

  “None but me,” came the crackling old voice of Crewman Oldfellow. “And I’m about to turn in and die myself. It’s funny, Captain Roadstrum, they called me Oldfellow because I was the youngest man in the crews, and the name stuck. And somehow it never seemed to me that I’d really get old. I got to die now, and I doubt if we’ll ever meet again. But if they do ever let you visit up our way, look me up.”

  “I will, Oldfellow. Pleasant death to you.”

  Margaret the houri had just made a little cake.

  “Happy birthday, Captain Roadstrum,” she called out cheerfully now.

  “What, what Mag, what’s this?”

  “You just turned a hundred, Captain. Eat it.”

  “I will, Mag. Say, did you ever notice that a man gives off a pretty strong odor for about a second when he dies. Well, they’re all gone but me, and now I go. It was nice, but shorter than I expected.”

  And he went into death snooze. Why not? He was a hundred and eight at least by the time he had finished the cake. It was going faster now.

  “You are like all the others,” said Margaret. “Why did I think you might be different?”

  “Snuff, snuff, snooze,” Roadstrum breathed in his death slumber.

  “To boil a lobster, one takes first a lobster— Will not that rouse you again, Roadstrum? ‘Passed the last possible moment,’ Deep John would say, and now he is dead. Are you dead also, Roadstrum?”

  “Mighty near.” Roadstrum spoke out of his death sleep. “Leave me in peace.”

  “What was that word, Roadstrum? Peace? It’s a fine word for the mob, but it will gag the one man in a million. Shall I say it again, Captain? Peace.”

  “I am one man in a million,” Roadstrum protested out of his deep, old-man sleep. “Maggy, it does gag me. Why, I’ll erupt out of the grave and stage my own resurrection.”

  And he did manage to sit up, looking very much like Lazarus.

  “How old am I now, Mag?” he asked in his reedy voice.

  “A hundred and twenty, Captain, and it goes faster.”

  “That’s not a bad age for a real man. What went wrong? There is a way out of everything, but somewhere we took the wrong turning, the wrong prong.”

  Then he looked at the Dong by his side, the button that the boy Hondstarfer had put there. “Wrong prong, bong gong,” said its instruction plate. Roadstrum pushed this button as he had many times before, and it went dong as it always did.

  Then Roadstrum fell back once more into what seemed to be his death slumber. But now there was somehow a change in the low purr, in the cosmic sound.

  “I had better just hop over to the other hornet and push the button there too,” Margaret said, and she did.

  Yes, a fellow smells a little high for the short second just before he comes back to life, just as he did for a short second after he died. Margaret snuffled her nose at Crewman Oldfellow, and left. She went back to Roadstrum’s hornet. It was her regular place. Everything was much as it had been before, except that the equivalent-day recorder had begun to run backwards as soon as the Dong button had matched the other half of its coupler with something in the black sun. And pretty soon Roadstrum came out of his death slumber on the same side he had gone into it.

  “Mighty rum thing, Maggy, mighty rum. You remember what the high poet said:

  The eating, aging, empty ogre got ’em there;

  They fell into the well that had no bottom there.

  Let us expunge that couplet, Maggy, for it was writ of ourselves, and we are entitled to edit our own epic. Perhaps the black sun did get us, but in the time reversal thing he did not. This is a most handy button. Now we can back out of anything we get into, as long as we are with the hornets.”

  It was fun watching the men return. There was something comic in their difficulty in accepting the thing. “You’re kidding. It couldn’t really happen like that,” they all said. They were a bunch of cranky old men, and then they began to get younger as hope welled up in them. They came back, every last one of them. Roadstrum had his rogue eye back in his head, unpickled and serene. The scar-gash left his cheek. And Crewman Ursley had his three fingers back on his hand.

  But there is a weirdness in almost all actions done backwards. It wasn’t as much fun regurgitating the space-calf as it had been eating it. And they did have a blue hell of a time putting that thing back together. Roadstrum hated to give up the magnificent horns and hooves, but there was no way out of it. You go on that backwards jag and you’d better expect the improbable.

  Certain bodily functions are unusual and almost unpleasant when done in reverse; but to get out of a hole like they were in, you will put up with a lot.

  They were back among the clashing rocks, “the rocks wandering.” They were out of those rocks again on the other side of them. They were lost in space again; but the equivalent-day recorder was running normally now, in the right direction and apparently at the right speed.

  “Whyever did we choose that path into the clashing rocks over all other possible paths?” Roadstrum asked in amazement.

  “Give a look at the other possible paths, Captain Roadstrum, as you looked before,” said Crewman Crabgrass.

  “I look. I shudder,” groaned Roadstrum. “I’m not sure but what the terrible course we just backed out of is not the best one. Horror, horrors everywhere we look.”

  “One thing, Roadstrum,” Captain Puckett called from his hornet. “We didn’t lose any time on that side trip. We came out at exactly the same moment that we went in.”

  (“False voice,” warned the communicator, “false voice.”)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He won a thousand worlds, and made the bums of them,

  And mocked the Gentry for the broken thumbs of them.

  He propped the Universe, but propped it jerkily,

  For mighty Atlas after Georgie Berkeley.

  He climbed the Siren-zo and made a clown of it,

  And plucked the high note from the very crown of it.

  Hold hard with heels and hands and crotch and cuticle

  For episodes becoming epizootical.

  Ibid

  “I BELIEVE that I have found a sure way to beat the games,” Roadstrum said. And all the men groaned.

  “Give it up, Captain Roadstrum,” Crewman Clamdigger begged. “The smartest gambling men in all the worlds are here; and a mental man you are not.”

  “This is a sure thing,” Roadstrum insisted.

  “Give it up, Captain,” Crewman Trochanter pleaded. “There are men here with luck growing out of their fingers and toes, luck in their eyes and voices, in their minds and in their nether-minds, in their beards and in their bowels. And there is no man of us, even with false tongue, who can say ‘Lucky Captain Roadstrum’ without laughing. A lucky man you are not.”

  They were down on Roulettenwelt, the gamblers’ world. This was the showiest of all worlds, and it was said that the streets there were paved with gold. Actually, only the Concourse, the Main Mall, the Royal Row, Broadway West, Vega, and Pitchman’s Alley were paved with gold, and these only in their central blocks, not over five thousands of meters of roadway in all.

  And crewmen went into the big houses and watched the big gamblers; and they listened to the tall stories about them. There was Johnny Greeneyes, who could see every invisible marking on cards with his odd optics. There was Pyotr Igrokovitch with the hole in his head. Pyotr was the most persistent suicide of them all. Following heavy losses in his youth he had shot himself through the head. It had not killed him, but the shot had carried away great portions of the caution and discretion lobes of his brain. The passage through his head had remained open, with pinkish flaps of flesh covering the holes fore and aft.

  Now, whenever Pyotr suffered heavy losses, he jerked out his pistol and shot himself through the head. It was all for a joke; he always shot himself through the same passage; and the “brains” which he a
ppeared to spew out the back opening with the shot were in reality only phlegm that had gathered in his head. But it was rather a weird thing when seen by one for the first time, and Pyotr very often killed spectators standing behind him.

  There was the Asteroid Midas, a big-beaked bird of a gambler who could do things with card and dice and markers in his long talons that seemed unlawful. There was Sammy the Snake, who held his “hands” in his mouth, or in his little forked tongue darting around. The last man who accused Sammy of cheating and who made a grab for the hidden card lost his arm clear up to the shoulder. But the man still insisted that Sammy did have a hidden card, that he, the man, had succeeded in grabbing it and even then held it in his hand, and that he would prove the thing if Sammy would only give him back his hand and his arm.

  There was Willy Wuerfelsohn, Jr. Willy, as his father had been, was a devoted gambler. The father had died of starvation, being nineteen days and nights in a gambling session without eating or drinking. Willy senior was a well-liked man, and there were many people at his funeral mass.

  “Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine,” the priest said rather near the end of it, “and now we pay special memorial to him by the one thing he loved most.”

  The priest and the pallbearers dealt out hands of hasty poker on the coffin and bet and played. They showed, and the winner was about to pull when a hand came up out of the coffin. It held, of course, a royal flush; and the hand raked the money into the coffin with him.

  “—per misericordiam Dei requiescant in Pace,” the priest concluded. Then they took him out and buried him. A remarkable man, as was his son.

  “I know these are all the finest gamblers from all the worlds here,” Roadstrum said. “So much the greater opportunity. This thing can’t miss, can it, Crewman Bramble?”

  “Of course it can miss,” Bramble protested. “We haven’t even tried it.”