diff options
Diffstat (limited to '78725-h')
| -rw-r--r-- | 78725-h/78725-h.htm | 330 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 78725-h/images/cover.jpg | bin | 0 -> 252742 bytes |
2 files changed, 330 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/78725-h/78725-h.htm b/78725-h/78725-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..924ba6a --- /dev/null +++ b/78725-h/78725-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,330 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> + <meta charset="UTF-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <title> + Incident | Project Gutenberg + </title> + <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <style> + +body { + margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + +h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + clear: both; +} + +p { + margin-top: .51em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .49em; +} + +.p2 {margin-top: 2em;} + +hr { + width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: 33.5%; + margin-right: 33.5%; + clear: both; +} + +hr.tb {width: 45%; margin-left: 27.5%; margin-right: 27.5%;} +hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} +@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} } + + +div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} +h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} + + +blockquote { + margin-top: 0; + margin-bottom: 0; + margin-left: 5%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + +.center {text-align: center;} + + +figcaption {font-weight: bold;} +figcaption p {margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: .2em; text-align: inherit;} + +/* Images */ + +img { + max-width: 100%; + height: auto; +} + + +.figcenter { + margin: auto; + text-align: center; + page-break-inside: avoid; + max-width: 100%; +} + + +/* Transcriber's notes */ +.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA; + color: black; + font-size:small; + padding:0.5em; + margin-bottom:5em; + font-family:sans-serif, serif; +} + +.f15 {font-size: 1.5em;} +img.w20 {width: 20em;} + + +/* Illustration classes */ +.illowp53 {width: 53%;} +.x-ebookmaker .illowp53 {width: 100%;} + </style> +</head> + +<body> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78725 ***</div> + + +<figure class="figcenter illowp53" id="cover" style="max-width: 114.4375em;"> + <img class="w20" src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""> + <figcaption> + <p>Transcribed from Fantastic Universe, May 1955 (Vol. 3, No. 4.).</p> + </figcaption> +</figure> + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"><div class="chapter"></div> +<h1> +Incident +</h1> + +<p class="center f15">by <strong>Thomas J. O’Hara</strong></p> + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"><div class="chapter"></div> + +<p><i>A prize-winning story emanating from a college course eminently successful and pioneering will, we are sure, be of paramount interest to our readers. The idea was happily suggested and guided by our book critic, Mr. Robert Frazier and by another editor, Mr. Samuel Moskowitz, who conduct in able association the SCIENCE FANTASY WRITERS' WORKSHOP at the College of the City of New York (School of General Studies, Extension Division, Fall-Winter Semester recently concluded). Mr. Frazier and Mr. Moskowitz made a careful selection of the most promising stories submitted by their students and the editors of FANTASTIC UNIVERSE acted in a further advisory capacity in deciding on a winning entry to be published in our May issue. We think you'll agree that Thomas O'Hara's fine story was a most felicitous choice.</i></p> + + +<p class="p2"><b>A floating coffin was the ship, its lone survivor specter-gaunt and adrift in a pitiless universe.</b></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"><div class="chapter"></div> +<p>He was, now, the last one left alive.</p> + +<p>The captain had gone first, +quietly and without preparation.</p> + +<p>There had been no hint of the plague’s +coming—no slightest premonition of death.</p> + +<p>There had been only the +briefest of preliminaries: the sudden, burning fever; the quick decay of +flesh and the bright-hued, bursting sores. Then had come the terrible +vertigo and the brief mindless interval before the agonizing end.</p> + +<p>The +next two had gone a little easier.</p> + +<p>The second mate had simply not +awakened one morning, and the third victim, the engineer who guarded +and supervised the workings of the great uranium-fission chambers +that drove the mighty star-ship, had noticed at first only a mounting +vertigo which was swiftly followed by a fever which brought a bright +flush to his cheeks.</p> + +<p>Reeling, he had clutched at the rail guarding the +edge of the power-machines, then, before he could sound an alarm or +cry out for help, a sudden fatal spasm convulsed him. With a soundless +shriek he plunged headlong into the mass of throbbing machinery, and +burning, radio-active material.</p> + +<p>A moment later, like a great burst of +flame, his remains dissolved into a million tiny, glowing fragments +that flashed from the great exhaust tubes to a final end in the cold +wastes of space. Like a glowing nimbus, his final, mortal atoms spun +round the ship—a halo of radiant death cleansed and purified by the +absolute-zero cold and the burning heat of energy-breakdown.</p> + +<p>The +fourth victim was wiser by far—he killed himself before he became +infected.</p> + +<p>There had been six of them plunging headlong at tremendous +speeds through the darkness of a night that was beyond all reckoning, +plunging endlessly through a sea that knew no charting, nor had heard +of any shore-line. The flames of endless giant suns had shot past, +the tiny, beckoning eyes of a thousand planets, and yet they had +passed onward to a greater goal.</p> + +<p>Six of them, hermetically sealed in +a vast metal argosy—a giant trireme sailing the interstellar seas of +a vast and pitiless universe in search of new worlds undreamed of; +a galactic ship that had now become a self-contained coffin without +even an atmosphere for the dead and dying to breathe as their +desperation increased.</p> + +<p>This was, for the crew, an interlude in an +expanding saga of exploration and discovery, a single incident in the +cosmic drama important to them alone.</p> + +<p>The ship had been checked and +double-checked and checked once more at the start of her great odyssey.</p> + +<p>“We have explored and conquered the nearer planets.” The captain had +reminded them. “But who can guess what lies beyond in other systems, +other galaxies?”</p> + +<p>How remote now seemed the skyport in the dawn, and +all of that far-off day’s activities.</p> + +<p>Where had the sickness come +from? They had no way of knowing, beyond their certainty that it had +not originated in their own world. Was the answer to be found in an +improper diet, the too sudden adjustment in atmospheric content and +volume, or even in a minute frozen spore lodged in some tiny crevice +in the exhaust tubes or the hull—a frozen bacillus brought to the ship +on some tiny chunk of rock from some unknown world?</p> + +<p>A daring surmise +worthy of further research and investigation. Tomorrow, on another +world perhaps, but certainly not here and now in this flying missile of +death; this tragically doomed and expiring space-giant.</p> + +<p>Their hopes and +expectations had soared in the beginning, but now +the great dream was dead and lying with the bodies of the spacemen. It +had been man’s first dream of galactic empire; and might well be his +last.</p> + +<p>True, there would be other space-flights, but they could never +be the same. This was the first, the virgin voyage—and beyond it was +the bitterness of a lost hope, of a broken dream.</p> + +<p>For the hopes and +aspirations of a whole race, of a great people, to break and settle in +a trough of frustration, was in itself an incredible sin. It was a sin +against the Mind that had created and breathed life into the vast and +lonely emptiness of the interstellar void.</p> + +<p>And now, plague-ridden, the +vast ship plunged downward toward the surface of a strange new world.</p> + +<p>Its seas stretched wide and blue across the televiewing screen, and +its rich brown earth stretched out a warm and welcoming hand. Its very +youth sounded a clarion call to rest and dream from the weariness of +the long voyage.</p> + +<p>Light-aureoled clouds stretched about it, girdling +and shielding it in clinging, wispy fragments of dream-traceries.</p> + +<p>The +ship’s lone survivor cried out—in agony, and not as a protest against +the beauty of the world below, and the memory of his comrades, dead +only hours before. Once again the strange sickness twisted a sharp, +agonizing knife against his vitals. Once again the vertigo gripped +him, and pulled him to the floor with a giant hand.</p> + +<p>The tele-view +screen, the controlroom, the universe itself seemed to melt beneath +him, so that for a full, terrible moment he felt himself to be without +support, plunging toward the spinning, twisting mass of the approaching +planet.</p> + +<p>Clouds and skies, the blueness of seas and the harsher greens +and browns of vegetation spun vertiginously as he stared and became a +tortured nightmare to his inflamed senses.</p> + +<p>Crying out again, he sank +to the floor and sobbed his bitter loneliness to the darkness of the +long night.</p> + +<p>It must have been hours later when consciousness returned +to him.</p> + +<p>He lay on the floor, obscurely aware of the muffled throb of +the powerful engines vibrating through the ship, and grateful for +that awareness.</p> + +<p>Finally his faculties steadied and he got weakly to +his feet, only to be reminded again that he had but a few short hours +left. In the tele-view screen he could see the new planet plainly, its +bulk swelling the view screen with its nearness.</p> + +<p>All at once his true +position became clear to him. It had seemed for an instant as if this +strange world might offer some release from his suffering. But, now, he +realized that the hope was a mockery and a snare.</p> + +<p>What would it matter +if he succeeded in landing safely and the planet’s atmosphere +could support his kind of life?</p> + +<p>His fate was already decided. A few +brief hours of freedom and then—death, swift and remorseless.</p> + +<p>There was +no known cure for his disease. And the chances of the inhabitants of an +alien planet possessing such a cure, or even being familiar with the +disease itself, seemed infinitely remote.</p> + +<p>His face set in hard lines.</p> + +<p>He thought of the plague sweeping the green world like some ravening +specter of the night. In his mind he could picture the inhabitants +dying in agony, crying out in bitter despair as the terrible vertigo +came upon them.</p> + +<p>To the right of the televiewing screen was the small +control-unit which regulated the output of the atomic generators. It +was an output that could be doubled and tripled—that could turn +the ship into a flaming mass of raw energy and destroy it, or bring it +to a controlled and gentle landing.</p> + +<p>Deliberately, gently, he reached +out and shifted the control handle—</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p>In a green valley far below, a girl +with spun-gold hair raised her head from her companion’s shoulder.</p> + +<p>“Robert,” she murmured, contentedly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”</p> + +<p>The boy’s +arm tightened around her slender waist. “It’s only a shooting-star, +darling,” he said. “It doesn’t mean a thing—”</p> + +<p>In the distance a steeple +bell started chiming, and the twilight deepened above the green hills +and valleys of Earth.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> +<div class="chapter"></div><div class="transnote"> + <h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_note"> + Transcriber’s note: + </h2> + +<blockquote> +<p> This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, May 1955 (Vol. 3, No. +4.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. +copyright on this publication was renewed.</p> + +<p> Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor +inconsistencies have been retained as printed.</p> +</blockquote> +</div> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78725 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/78725-h/images/cover.jpg b/78725-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..fa476ea --- /dev/null +++ b/78725-h/images/cover.jpg |
