Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

conscious mind. But down underneath⁠—I’ll always see those houses burning, and those men shooting at each other.”

“You⁠—” She hesitated. “I know what you need. Your trouble, my boy, is that underneath that Yankee conservatism, you’re a hopeless romantic. Your mind dwells on the sudden and dramatic. Now the positive benefits of capacitite aren’t anywhere near as quick and spectacular as the temporary evils were. What you have to do, to satisfy those Puritan chromosomes, is to produce something really big and fancy, something of immediate, large value.”

He chuckled, lifted out of his dark mood in spite of himself. “I imagine you’re right, Dr. Freud,” he said. “But what?”

“I don’t know.” She frowned with worry for him. “But think, man. We have leisure now⁠—in another year or so, well, we won’t be the millionaires we once dreamed of, but like everybody else we’ll have real security and real time to ourselves. You could use that time to work on something.”

“Hm⁠—” Automatically, his brain turned to practicalities. “Let’s see, now. Capacitite offers a way of concentrating energy enormously⁠ ⁠… a very small packet will hold a hell of a lot⁠—My God!” His yell shook the windows as he leaped to his feet.

“What the devil⁠—something wrong?” Elizabeth got up too.

“No!” He was running toward the phone. “Got to get hold of Colin⁠—M.I.T.⁠—don’t you see, darling?” His hands trembled as he dialed, but there was laughter in his voice. “Don’t you see it? Spaceships!”

Out of the Iron Womb I

The most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men, but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds.

Darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bo Jonsson crouched on a whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill him.

There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque bowsprit.

There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit. Otherwise⁠ ⁠… no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars.

Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his murderer conducted through the ground.

Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close, catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when gravity was feeble enough.

The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends. Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the remote sun could understand. But they didn’t care, he saw that now. To them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he was gone into night.

He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid with him, hunting him down.

Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive, it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for fear he wouldn’t be able to stop.

Let’s face it, he told himself. You’re scared. You’re scared sweatless. He wondered if he had spoken it aloud.

There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could skulk around, hide⁠ ⁠… and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died. And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.

He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into death. Not till men came and hunted each other.

Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth’s October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.

Bo Jonsson’s tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would command. But he couldn’t do that. Even if the other man let him do it, which was doubtful, he couldn’t. Johnny Malone was dead.

Maybe that was what had started it all⁠—the death of Johnny Malone.

There are numerous reasons for basing on the Trojan asteroids, but the main one can be given in a single word: stability. They stay put in Jupiter’s orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only minor oscillations; spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed to be. The trailing group is the jumping-off place for trans-Jovian planets, the leading group for the inner worlds⁠—that way, their own revolution about the sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost, while minimizing the effects of Jupiter’s drag.

Moreover, being