Superstition E-Book

Lester Del Rey

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 83

Beschreibung

Superstition is a dangerous thing; it's always extremely hard to fight. But nobody had ever had quite so hard a time with superstitions as these interstellar warriors—because the superstitions worked...and that made them really dangerous!

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

SUPERSTITION, by Lester del Rey

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1954, renewed 1982 by Lester del Rey.

Originally published in Astounding, August 1954.

Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

SUPERSTITION,by Lester del Rey

1

The Sépelora crawled along at her maximum eighty light-years an hour, as she had done for the four months since she’d left the university planet of Terra. The space-denial generators hummed on monotonously, maintaining the field around the ship where space almost ceased to exist. The big viewing panel and ports were blanked out by the effect, forming perfect mirrors. There was a steady wash of slightly stale air through the control cabin, and the pseudo-gravity on the decks was unvarying. With less than a day of superspeed left, Captain Derek should have been content.

Instead, he sat slumped loosely over the control board, staring with unfocused eyes at his image in the panel, while his fingers doodled black aces, hangman’s knots, and all the other symbols of doom for which his culture had no real referents. His deep-set eyes and the hollows in his cheeks gave him an almost cadaverous look, borne out by the general angularity of his body. At forty-five he looked fifty, with gray speckles around his temples and lines of worry etched deeply into his face.

Abruptly a small speaker came to life with the voice of his aide, Ferad. “Psych Siryl to see you, sir.”

Derek sighed, letting his eyes focus slowly as his fingers came up in the ancient sign against evil, pointing at his own image. The physicist, Kayel, must have sent her; the man had been eyeing Derek all during the orders for instrument alert. But now that she was here, there was nothing to be done about it. “Send her in,” he acknowledged, and turned slowly to face the door that began opening.

Siryl’s bearing was more military than his, in spite of her civilian blouse. Her feet tapped across the deck precisely, her hips swayed just enough in the split skirt, and her face bore the impersonal warmth of all psychologists on duty. Under her professional pride lay the curious overdeveloped consciousness of being female possible only to women who wanted to be men. She was ten years younger than Derek and only slightly shorter, but her features and body were good, as near beauty as grooming and care could make them. Only her hair was wrong, and its black severity was deliberate.

She wasted no tune. Before he could rise, she was beside him, rolling back his sleeve. There was the coldness of an antiseptic and then the faint bite of a needle. “You’ll be all right in a minute,” she said coolly. “I’d have come sooner, but all these rumors have kept me busy. I’ve been expecting this; your chart shows you’re a depressive with an irregular cycle.” Her precise smile was calculated to make it seem no more than mention of a bit of common gossip. “Come on now, Captain. Things aren’t all black.”

Now that the drug had ended his chance to wallow in the mood of his ill-fortune, he was almost glad. But her words touched it off again. The jinx was more than a mood. He was the only man of his age in the Service who rated less than sector commander. Everything he undertook went wrong, and seldom through his own failure. There had been the training ship that blew up, the girl who died from mutational weaknesses, the mislaid citation papers—and the whole affair leading to this foredoomed command.

“Optimism!” he said bitterly. “You should head an expedition that you know is bound to fail—because you head it!”

She snorted. “Superstition! Sure, you had a run of misfortune, Derek. But your real trouble came when you started to believe that jinx nonsense. You’re so sure of bad luck now that it’s sapped all your initiative. Look at you. You’ve been eyeing me for months, wanting me and being afraid to make a pass because something might go wrong!”

There was too much truth in it, and he could feel the blood rush to his face. She stood studying his reaction clinically, as if using it to gauge the progress of the anti-depressant. Then suddenly she laughed easily and dropped to the opposite chair. “Maybe you should try sometime, Derek—but not now. I’m having my hands full with the men’s rumors. Look, why not tell me the truth about this expedition? After all, we’re almost ready to cut speed.”

The drug was beginning to work now, killing some of his gloom. He was still convinced of his jinx, but he could think of other things. Now he considered her question, surprised that she hadn’t already been briefed. “How much of the background and history of the war do they teach on Terra?” he asked. Some of the distant worlds had queer legends that would make explanation difficult.

She frowned impatiently for a second. Then she apparently decided to humor him and began sketching her knowledge in. Aside from her provincial belief that men had originated on Terra, it was accurate enough. Wherever men had started, the race had seemingly discovered space travel two thousand years before and somehow had almost immediately stumbled onto some form of faster-than-light travel. They had spread over the cosmos at a fantastic rate, using up vast quantities of some power element known as uranium.

Thirteen hundred years ago, dwindling supplies of that had split them into two competing empires. An unthinkably violent war had blasted systems of suns to novas, had used the last of the uranium, and had left their culture in ruins. Except for misleading hints that it had involved negation of time, the superdrive had been lost. It had taken centuries to find new power in the fusion of boron. It had taken longer to discover how to eliminate space around the ship, leaving only a subfractional connection with the universe and using the “suction” reuniting from imbalance to drive them. Then men began spreading again.

Fifty years ago, they had run into the other empire—an empire technically ahead of them and filled with hate that had been nursed for thirteen centuries. The enemy gave no quarter and began savagely wiping them out, planet by planet. For a time, the Federation had seemingly been doomed. But lately, under the drive of necessity, they had begun to match the enemy science. In a few more years…

“In a few years—or months—there won’t be a Federation, unless this mission succeeds,” he cut into her routine optimism. He fished around in a drawer to locate one of the mission briefing sheets he’d helped prepare. For a second, his lips twisted as he saw the dull, official words.

The Waraok, on its way to rendezvous with the Fifth Fleet, had cut its space-denial drive to make a fix in one of the old sun-blasted sectors at 9-17/2.47:23 Federation time. At 9-17/2.47:26 they were less than a quarter million miles from one of the planets of Sirius.

Something had thrown them more than two hundred thousand light-years instantaneously! And unless they could wipe out the enemy base or find the secret and its countersecret, that something could as easily throw boron bombs into every Federation sun! With that threat, even such harebrained schemes as this mission had to be tried.

The Sépelora and eleven other ships were hastily stocked with every possible instrument, staffed with technicians, and blasted off on a course that would bring them out of superspeed at points around the recorded original fix of the Waraok. Their instruments would be recording and their space-denial transmitters signaling as they emerged, while a fleet of battleships followed. If they ran into the mysterious weapon and were lucky, the instruments might determine its nature. Otherwise, the locations of their last signals might pinpoint the enemy base for bombing. Then they could only hope it was an experimental station and the only one the enemy had.

Siryl had glanced over the paper. Now she crumpled it in sudden disgust. “They gave us this guff back on Terra! Derek, you don’t expect me or the men to believe such nonsense? Instantaneous teleportation! Could you believe it?”

He stared at her, his first thrust of anger giving place to bitterness that drove away the last physical effects of the drag. “I should be able to,” he told her. “I was captain of the Waraok when it happened!”

It had been his first command of a battleship—and his last chance at promotion; the loss of plans he had been carrying had cost the Federation a major defeat, even though it had been no fault of his. Such miracles weren’t beyond the power of his jinx.

She snorted incredulously. “Captain, even I know that a single photon would have infinite energy against a ship at infinite speed! You couldn’t keep it out without a perfect space-denial-which means ceasing to exist. This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan’s we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!”

Legends indicated that people had once had such abilities to some extent, but there was obviously no use in reminding her of that. He swore hotly. “I tell you, I was there!”

“Hypnotic implantation! Propaganda based on old superstition! You’d better look in your safe for sealed orders, Captain Der—”

Red lights erupted on the control board. The alarm system went wild, with every gong clamoring. A blare of light struck in through the viewing panel and the big radar let out a whine, with a picture and coordinates forming to show a body of planetary size less than ten thousand miles below. Needlessly, the green letters on the board blazed out the fact that the superdrive was off.