LITMIR.BIZ

      Rescue Squad

      by Thomas J. O’Hara

       When Mr. O’Hara won the prize story contest recently conducted by the fantasy writers’ workshop at the College of the City of New York, in conjunction with fantastic universe, it was the unanimous opinion of the judges that a second story by Mr. O’Hara, rescue squad, deserved honorable mention. We think you’ll agree with that decision when you’ve read this documentary-type science-fiction yarn, which so excitingly combines realistic characterization with the mystery, suspense and terror of the near future’s exploration of space and a lone pilot’s struggle to survive.

       Stark disaster to a brave lad in space may—to the mind that loves—be a tragedy pridefully concealed.

      The mail ship, MR4, spun crazily through space a million miles off her trajectory. Her black-painted hull resembled a long thermonuclear weapon, and below her and only a scant twenty million miles away burned the hungry, flaming maw of the Sun.

      The atomic-powered refrigeration units of the MR4 were working full blast—and still her internal and external temperatures were slowly and inexorably rising. Her atomic engines had been long since silenced—beaten by the inexhaustible, fiery strength of the invincible opponent waiting patiently a narrowing twenty million miles “below.”

      Hal Burnett twisted painfully on the narrow space-bunk, his tormented body thrusting desperately against the restraining bands of the safety straps that lashed him in against the dangers of non-gravity.

      He moaned, and twisted sideways, while his half-asleep mind struggled on an almost instinctive level against a dimly-remembered, utterly intolerable reality.

      It was a losing battle. He was suddenly wide awake, staring in horror at the vibrating bulkheads of the deserted little mail ship. For a moment his conscious barriers against reality were so completely down that he felt mortally terrified and overwhelmed by the vast emptiness about him. For a moment the mad idea swept into his mind that perhaps the universe was just another illusion, an echo of man’s own inner loneliness.

      Realizing his danger, Burnett quickly undid the restraining safety straps, sat up and propelled himself outward from the edge of his bunk. The sudden surge of physical action swept the cobwebs from his mind.

      He thought of his father—and there was bitterness in his heart and frustration, and a rebellious, smouldering anger. The old man would never know how close he had come to cracking up.

      For a moment he wondered fearfully if his father’s cold and precise appraisal of his character and courage had been correct. Suppose he was unable to stand the rigid strains and pressures of a real emergency. Suppose— He tightened his lips in defiant self-justification. What did they expect of a twenty-year-old kid anyway? He was, after all, the youngest and probably the greenest mail pilot in the entire Universal Run.

      Suddenly the defensive barriers his mind had thrown up against the grievous flaw in his character, which made him feel uncertain of himself when he should have felt strong and capable, crumbled away completely. He could no longer pretend, no longer deceive himself. He hated his father because the elder Burnett had never known a moment of profound self-distrust in his entire life.

      He remembered his father’s favorite line of reasoning with a sudden, overwhelming resentment. “Fear can and must be controlled. If you have your objective clearly in mind a new experience, no matter how hazardous, will quickly become merely a routine obstacle to be surmounted, a yardstick by which a man can measure his own maturity and strength of purpose. You’ll find peace of mind in doing your work ably and well and by ignoring all danger to yourself.”

      It was so easy to say, so hard to live up to. How, for instance, could a twenty-year-old kid on his first mail run hope to completely outwit fatigue, or even forget, for a single moment, that it was his first run. Fatigue had caused his undoing, but had he been completely fearless he might have found a way to save himself, might have managed somehow to prevent the small, navigational errors from piling up until they had carried him past the point of no return.

      A constant re-checking of every one of his instruments might have saved him. But he had been too terrified to think straight, and too ashamed of his “first-run” inexperience to send out a short wave message requesting emergency instructions and advice. Now he was hopelessly off his course and it was too late. Too late!

      He could almost feel the steadily-growing pull of his mindless enemy in the distant sky. Floating and kicking his way over to the Tele-screen, he quickly switched the instrument on. Rotating the control dials, he brought the blinding white image of the onrushing solar disk into perfect focus. Automatically he adjusted the two superimposed polaroid filters until the proper amount of light was transmitted to his viewing screen. They really built ships and filters these days, he reflected wryly. Now if they could only form a rescue squad just as easily—

      Even through the viewing screen he could almost feel the hot blast of white light hit his face with the physical impact of a baseball bat. With what was almost a whimper of suppressed fear he rocked backward on his heels.

      The Sun’s ghastly prominences seemed to reach beckoning fingers toward him, as its flood of burning, radiant light seared through the incalculable cold of space, and its living corona of free electrons and energy particles appeared to swell and throb menacingly.

      Fearfully he watched the flaming orb draw closer and closer, and as its pull grew more pronounced he wondered if it were not, in some nightmarishly fantastic fashion becoming malignantly aware of him. It resembled nothing so much as a great festering sore; an infection of the very warp-and-woof stuff of space.

      He flipped off the power control on the Tele-screen and watched the image fade away with a depleted whine of dying energy. That incandescent inferno out there— Grimly he tried to recall the name of the man who had said that, philosophically, energy is not actually a real thing at all.

      He knew better than to waste time trying the pilot controls again. They were hopelessly jammed by the great magnetic attraction of the Sun. They had been jammed for hours now. He forced his way back to his bunk, and securely lashed himself to it again. Sleep was his only hope now, his only real escape from the growing, screaming hysteria within him.

      He flung an arm across his tired face. His thin features trembled as he remembered the continuous alterations in his trajectory that had brought him within range of the Sun’s mighty pull. He remembered also every detail of the last and gravest of the series of miscalculations that had swept him from the established route of the regular Venus-Mercury mail run, and threatened him with a violent, flaming end.

      Greatly off course, he had been approaching Mercury, a routine thirty-six million miles from the Sun. On this, the final leg of his long journey, he had deviated just far enough from the extreme limits of safety to find himself and his ship gripped inexorably in the mighty magnetic fields of the Sun’s passage . . . .

      He remembered a name— Josephine.

      There would be no lover’s meeting now on the green fields of Earth in the dusk of a summer evening. There would be no such meeting now. Not unless the prayers and dreams a boy and a girl had shared had followed him, plunging senselessly into the cold glacial heart of interstellar space.

      His

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