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Written October
1949
Space Bunyan
By Charles R. Tanner
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The old
racketeer breathed a sigh of relief. “Well,” he
said. “I’m glad that’s over. I thought we’d never
get a break.” That was almost like the old days…
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I thought the
old man would never lay her in her orbit. How long
we been sweatin’ it out, anyhow? “Four hours, eh?
Well, a four hour buck is pretty rare, nowadays,
isn’t it?”
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“Never seen a
longer one, eh? Well, I’ll tell you, back in the old
days, son, a four hour buck would have been sheer
luck. We’d have patted ourselves on the back for
weeks for getting into the fall so quick. In those
days, ten and twenty hour bucks were common. Why, I
remember once, when we bucked space till we were a
quarter of a million miles beyond the moon’s orbit.
”
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“Three
mortal days we fought our jets to get
into the fall. A dozen times, the old man swore
that things were O.K., and we’d get out a guitar for
a song or two, and then wha-ang would go the
alarm bell and we’d be bucking space for another
spell.”
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Well, after
three days, come to find out, a great big meteor had
set a course parallel to ours and its gravity was
throwing us off, every time our course was laid.
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“It didn’t
take Old Sam long to straighten things out, once he
found out about that; but he sure had a pooped out
crew for a week after.”
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“Old Sam—that
was our captain. Yessir, son, you’re looking at a
guy that once bucked space with the real Old Sam,
himself. Sam Buckridge, the top spaceman of them
all. All them stories you’ve heard about Sam—I
reckon you’ve found them hard to believe—but most of
them are true.”
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“For instance,
I remember the time—
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“Huh?
What’s that? Never heard tell of Sam Buckridge?
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“Oh no! Don’t
tell me that I’m stuck here in space, in the end of
a misbegotten Fourth of July sky rocket, with nobody
for company but a satin pink earthworm who never
even heard of Sam Buckridge.
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“Now that
beats me. I thought everybody had heard of
Old Sam. Sit down son. There’s nothing much for us
to do, now that she’s in orbit, so I’ll just while
away an hour or so, bringing your education up to
date.
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“You see, this
Sam--…
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And with this
introduction another recruit is initiated into the
art of tall tale telling, twenty-second century
variety. For, strange as it may seem, in this
modern world of ours; a new legend, a new group of
folk tales and a new ballad is growing up, a series
as fresh and spontaneous as was that of Robin Hood
in the twelfth century or Paul Bunyan in the
twentieth.
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Whenever and
wherever men have found time to rest from sweat
producing toil, they have found time to spin the
yarn, to throw the bull, to flog the dolphin or
fight the comet. And never has any time ever been
as opportune as the long days in a space ship, after
the orbit has been laid and the vessel is in free
fall. For then the crew has literally nothing to
do. The long struggle to lay the rocket in its
orbit, a back breaking job if there ever was one, is
over and the men find time hanging ever heavier on
their hands. So the guitars are brought out and the
songs begin, those endless songs such as we have all
heard at one time or another, where every man tries
to add a verse that he has heard on some previous
voyage, or maybe, if he has imagination, that he has
made up himself.
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The songs they
sing will usually be about the trials and
tribulations of the rocket man, or about his bravery
or exceptional sexual vigor, or his superiority to
the earthworms and the colonists.
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And the yarns
are almost sure to be about the adventures of some
favorite hero of his, such as Alman Taylor
or Hilary Boone, the pirate; or, last
but by no means least, Sam Buckridge.
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The origin of
this character, like the origin of his predecessors,
Hercules, Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, is
shrouded in mystery. For example, in preparing this
article, the author went through a tremendous amount
of material in an attempt to trace down the
beginnings of the name, Sam Buckridge. But the
search has been unrewarded save for a single
reference, in a magazine of over a century ago.
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Adam Magarian,
writing in a magazine called “Pursuit of Happiness,”
sad that spacemen of that day called loud-mouthed
blustering and bragging “buckrodging” and that a man
who was guilty of this kind of conduct was known as
a “buckrodger”: But if this is the real origin of
Sam’s name, it is of little help, for the origin of
that word is as lost in the mists of the past as is
the origin of the name for which we are searching.
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But if the
true origin of the name be lost, the legendary
origin of the character is very definite. All the
yarn spinners are agreed that his father was a
famous blast hand named “Bull Schmitt” and that his
mother was a beautiful Spanish senorita named Prieta
Del Toro.
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Prieta was a
chorus girl in Portomars, back in the days when that
now-thriving metropolis was a domed colonial town,
full of hard free-spending men and equally hard gold
digging women. Here, in an atmosphere not unlike
medieval Ireland, or the United States in the
nineteenth century, or any other land where Aryan
People were building up a new civilization, Bull
Schmitt wooed and won his sweetheart, and,
eventually carried her off in his rocket.
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Prieta was
pregnant when they left Mars, and the trip was
almost too much for her. Bull was forced to land
his rocket on Hydrophobia, the curious
dumbbell-shaped rock which was, in those days, the
only satellite Mars had.
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Here his
famous son was born and here Sam gave his first
evidence of the greatness that was someday to be
his. They say that one day his mother refused him
something and he went into a regular tantrum. He
kicked and screamed and finally ran out of the house
and ran down to the place where the two halves of
Hydrophobia were joined and, planting his feet on
one side of the planet, he began pushing the other
side until he tore the satellite right in two!
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Of course,
that wasn’t so wonderful, considering the slight
gravity— Sam accomplished far more wonderful things
later on— but one thing can be said about this first
exploit of his, it was permanent. Mars had
two satellites after that, one named Hydros, and the
other named “Phobos”. They kept those names for a
good many years, but Hydros means “water” in Greek,
and that never did seem like a good name for such a
dry little rock.
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So, a few
years ago, when the rocket companies started
charging a dime a glass for water on the rocket
liners, people got sarcastic and changed the name of
“Hydros” to Deimos.
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It might be
better to tell the rest of the story in the language
of the men who originated it, for much of the color
is lost when one translates it into the precise
literary language of the earthworms. So, stripped
of a bit of profanity and vulgarity, and eliminating
the pauses for expectoration, here is the story as
you might hear it today, on any cargo rocket:
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“Well, this
here young fellow grew older, and as the days
passed, his beautiful Spanish mother took to missing
the lad for a while each day. Course, on Earth or
Mars, that wouldn’ta meant much, but out there on
Phobos, where it’s all vacuum and two hundred below
except inside the little dome that Bull had made, it
was a pretty serious business.
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“Bull took
young Sam in hand and in an hour or so she had
wormed the whole story out of him. To make a long
story short, the young fellow had been practicing
living in a vacuum. He’d started by just opening
locks and dashing out on the surface for a minute or
two; but he had lengthened the time a little more
each day until, by the time Bull questioned him, he
was able to stay out on the surface of Phobos for a
whole hour at a time.
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“Old Bull saw
right away that there’d be a tremendous in that, so
he encouraged the lad, and Sam kept on practicing.
By the time he was three years old, he’d got to
where he could get along without air for a whole day
at a time. And a good thing it was that he did,
too, for more than once in the following years, he
saved his life by that very knack which he developed
there on Phobos.
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“Now, I know
that there statement will be hard for a bunch of
earthworms to believe, but, so help me, it’s true as
gospel. I ain’t saying every man could train
himself to live in a vacuum for days at a time, you
understand, but Sam wasn’t any ordinary man. Sam
was a wonder, a regular bullion-volt,
hundred-mile-a-second wonder, and he could do a lot
of things the average man couldn’t do.
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“Just the
same, it’s ree-markable what practice can do. When
I was a young man, I got so’s I could stay
out in space for twenty minutes or more, myself, and
that’s the solemn truth.
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“Well, getting back to
Sam-- He kept a-growing bigger and bigger and
stronger and stronger, until Bull decided that he
was just a little too big for Phobos. You
see, Sam had got hold of some sports magazine and
had got all excited over football. And Phobos
wasn’t such an awfully big satellite—
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“So Bull and
Prieta decided to take Sam to Earth for his
education. They blasted off from Phobos sometime in
Sam’s tenth year with Bull and Preita in the control
room and Sam acting as jet room crew. He weighted,
planted, tamped and insulated the steering
cartridges all by himself, which, in my estimation
is pretty good for a youngster just going on eleven.
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“But they
hadn’t gone far when tragedy struck. A big meteor
slapped into Bull’s rocket and cut it right smack in
two. Sam stared falling back to Mars, and Bull and
Prieta kept right on going, the way they had been,
only faster, for the meteor had struck them in such
a way that it speeded them up quite a bit.
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“Sam never
heard of his parents again, and neither did anyone
else, and the memory of them was such a sore spot
with Sam that he even changed his name to Buckridge
so he wouldn’t be reminded of his father.
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“Some people
do say, though, that Bull’s parents were never
crashed into no sun or planet, but, hurled hither
and thither by different gravity pulls, they were
forced to fall into first one orbit and then
another. And those folks claim that Bull Schmitt
and Prieta Del Toro are still being flung about in
space to this day. And I, for one, am inclined to
believe them.
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“As for Sam,
he started falling down towards Mars, and it was a
good thing for him that he had practiced living in a
vacuum, for he hadn’t a c.c. of air in all that
busted rocket. The rocket just missed Mars and took
up a spiral orbit around it, coming closer and
closer, and every revolution. About the
twenty-second time it went around, it was only about
twenty feet above the ground, and Sam saw it was
nearly time to jump. Just before the rocket
crashed, Sam gave an enormous big jump, sailed
through space and landed right smack on his nose.
He slid, too, slid right off across the horizon for
nearly forty miles; and splattered sand and rock so
high, wide and handsome that he left a big, deep
valley straight across the landscape.
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Fifteen years
later, the explorer, John Riverside, found that
valley and named it the Riverside Rift. I
understand they’ve made a National Park out of it,
recently and that the geologists have advanced some
complicated theory about how it was formed.
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“Well, I can
tell them there was nothing complicated about it.
It was plowed up by Sam Buckridge’s nose.
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“When Sam
picked himself up, he found himself in the driest,
dustiest, emptiest desert that you could find on all
Mars. “Flat, red and sand” were about all the
adjectives you could use to describe it unless you
used a jet hand’s vocabulary, which, of course, has
words that won’t fit into a respectable magazine.
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“Sam didn’t
mind it, though. It was choice building lots as far
as he was concerned, him having been raised on
Phobos. So he set off toward a low range of hills
in the distance and reached them just before
sundown.
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“He found a
likely looking nest of rocks and curled up in it and
went to sleep.
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He woke up
because the light of Phobos was shining in his eyes
and something was tickling him all over. He sat up
and looked around and in a moment he saw what was
causing the tickling. There were about twenty or
thirty little animals gathered around, little things
about the size of a good sized squirrel, and they
were all nibbling at something on the ground.
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At first, Sam
thought they were skeletons of animals because their
ribs projected out beyond their fur for a good
inch. But they certainly were alive, and he’d have
sworn they were eating something. Then he
remembered having heard about these animals before
and he knew they were the famous Martian shadow
eaters. These shadow eaters had once been quite
ordinary little rodent-like animals, way backing the
early days of mars, when there was plenty of air and
water on the planet. But the seas had dried up and
the land gradually became desert, and the little
creatures were cut off from their food supply, and
it began to look as if the whole species must starve
to death.
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“They got
thinner and thinner until their ribs stuck out all
over. Then they got thinner and thinner until their
ribs really did stick out all over. And
when, on rare occasions, one of them actually got a
square meal, it was usually too much for him and he
died of indigestion.
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At last one of
them got the bright idea of nibbling on shadows; and
by the time that the mossy vegetation that grows
over the surface of Mars had spread over the desert
in which they lived, the creatures digestive organs
had changed so much that they couldn’t adapt
themselves to heavy eating; and to this day, they
haunt the drier, dustier parts of Mars, living on
the shadows of such vegetable and animal life as
they can find.
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“Well, all
this popped into Sam’s mind by the time he’d jumped
up out of his sleep. He noticed at once that his
shadow was a wee bit ragged around the edges, but
not much damage was done to it yet, and it would be
all right if he could manage to keep the creatures
away from it, from here on in.
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“Of course, he
jumped over into the shadow of a big rock at first,
and hid there. Sam figured he wouldn’t have
a shadow, hiding behind that rock, but the creatures
were too smart to let that hold them. They just
attacked the shadow of the rock, tearing off chunks
and spitting them out again, until within fifteen
minutes, they’d nibbled it all away and Sam’s shadow
was exposed. Sam had to run for another rock.
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“Well, this
kept up for several hours. An animal has to have
awfully sharp teeth to tear into a shadow and those
shadow eaters had teeth so sharp that it didn’t take
them no time to tear apart the shadow of a rock.
Young Sam was really beginning to worry, leaping
from one rock to another, when he saw Deimos rising
above the horizon.
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“He gave a
sigh of relief, for he had already figured out what
he was going to do. He kept on jumping from rock to
rock until Deimos was high enough for him to have
two shadows, one from Deimos and one from
Phobos. Then he stepped out from his shelter,
pegged down one of his shadows with a couple of
dornicks, gave a sudden violent jump and tore loose
from his second shadow entirely. Then he was off
like a streak of greased lightening, the shadow he
had left trying as hard as it could to keep up with
him, leaving his extra shadow as a prey for the
shadow eaters.
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Sam didn’t
mind losing that extra shadow—a man doesn’t usually
need but one— but for the rest of his life he was
kind of sensitive about standing in two lights.
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“Well, now,
for the first time, Sam was on a regular planet.
He’d heard about Mars and Venus and the earth from
his father, but the place he found himself in didn’t
look much like the Mars he had pictured from the
stories his father had told. He decided he’d have
to hunt for this “Portomars” he’d heard his father
talk about, little realizing how big Mars was and
how far away Portomars might be.
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It took him
ten years to find the colony and during that time,
he had to live on the land, getting his air and
water and food wherever he could. It was a hard
life, in fact, it would have killed an ordinary man
in about two days, but it just made Sam harder and
harder, until, when he finally came upon Portomars
one day, he must have been the hardest, toughest,
meanest creature in the solar system.
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The watchman
at the locker gate of the big dome of Portomars was
playing a game of solitaire and wishing his job was
a little more exciting, when all of a sudden the
signal rang that meant somebody wanted in from
outside. He leaned over and pushed the button that
manipulated the lock.
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Couple minutes
later, he heard the inner door of the lock open and
he looked up to see who was coming in. Then he let
out a screech and leaped back against the wall,
unable to believe his eyes.
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It was a sort
of man, there naked as a new born jay-bird if you
don’t count dirt and scratches—but if you count dirt
and scratches, he was the most over-dressed man on
Mars. He was mounted on a ten foot desert
polybrash*, holding all ten of its tentacles in one
hand and swinging a Martian sand snake in the other
for a whip. A big ‘bull-dozer” about the size of a
great Dane was trotting behind the polybrash like a
coach dog, and the color combination of a green and
blue polybrash, a plant that it was named after the
flower and not after the old Greek in the myth that
was so stuck on himself that he starved to death
looking at his reflection in the water. Sam
couldn’t approve of such a character, for Sam
himself was extremely modest and only had scorn for
the sort of racketeers who spend their time telling
tall tales of their adventures in space. Facts
were all Sam had time to tell and facts were all he
wanted to hear from anybody else.
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For instance,
one time Johnny Wayer, who was Sam’s jet-room chief,
was sitting around telling some wild yarn about a
fellow who had captured a comet and kept it tied up
on some asteroid. Sam reproached Johnny sternly for
stretching the truth and said he was quite sure that
no comet could ever be tamed.
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Johnny stood
up and swore that he was telling the unvarnished
truth and that he was willing to put his money where
his mouth was and bet that a comet could be tamed.
Sam snapped at the bet that quick, and so it
was arranged to go out around Jupiter and pick up
one of the Jovian comets.
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So they
shifted course and off they went. They picked up a
likely looking comet without no trouble and Sam laid
an orbit parallel to it. Johnny got a good long
cable and in no time at all, he’d made a lasso of it
and roped the comet.
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But a comet is
a darn quick customer and, although Johnny aimed for
its head, it almost slipped entirely through the
noose before Johnny tightened it. Result was,
Johnny found he had the comet by the tail, and no
sooner did it see that its tail was caught, than it
started hell-bent for the sun. Johnny snubbed his
line around the ship and hung on for dear life, and
away they went.
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When they got
closer to the sun, the comet’s tail stretches out
for millions of miles, and as a comet always faces
the sun and lets its tail stream out in the opposite
direction, rounding the sun was like a regular game
of “crack the whip” for Sam and his crew. A
perihelion, they must have been going several
thousand miles a second.
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But they got
around without breaking loose and as they started
out away from the sun, Sam saw that they were going
to intersect the earth’s orbit, just about the time
the earth reached them. This gave him an idea and he
whispered it to Johnny, so Johnny jetted over to the
North Pole and snubbed the comet’s tail to that,
adding a bowline knot for good measure.
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“All right,”
says Sam to Johnny Wayer. “There’s your comet,
shipshape and in her cradle. Now, let’s see you
tame her.”
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Johnny’s eyes
bugged out a bit at that. He thought he’d done
quite a job, tying that comet down, but now he
realized that his job had only begun. He was game
though. I’ll have to admit he tried. But shucks—He
knew that Sam was right all the time. Ad after a
week or so, he had to admit that you couldn’t tame a
comet.
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For that comet
was really wild. It bucked and sun fished;
it switched and whip lashed; it butted and flung
itself around until Sam was afraid it was going to
tear the earth right out of its orbit. When Sam saw
that the comet had torn the magnetic pole clean away
from the true pole and down into Baffin Land, he was
about to call it quits, but fortunately, just about
that time, Johnny admitted he’d lost the bet and—the
comet broke loose.
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It left about
half of its tail tied to the pole and took off for
the deepest parts of space, and astronomers say that
it has never been seen from that day to this.
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Its tail is
still there, though, and if you get up into the
northern latitudes, you can still see it flickering
over the pole. The earthworms have named it the
Roaring Alice, or something like that.
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But Sam never
tried to tie up another comet. He realized it was
too dangerous. That comet had almost pulled
the earth right out of its place. To this day, the
North Pole doesn’t point exactly to the North Star
anymore. It’s several degrees off.”
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If all the
stories that have been told about Sam Buckridge were
to be written down, they would undoubtedly fill
several books. There are long sagas that are little
more than continual variations on a single theme,
stories obviously dreamed up by men utterly unversed
in any form of literature, and there are little
antidotes, hardly more than a few sentences, so full
of humor and double meaning that they are true
classics.
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There is the
story of how Sam dug the Martian Canals and why he
dug them, there are stores of the men who made up
his crew—Johnny Wayer, “Putz” Svennsen and “Goosie”
Stratemeyer, and there are stories of how he
inevitably, cleared the orbits of the pirates.
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But the
greatest feat of all, to most tellers of tales, was
the great battle Sam had with the phoenix of space.
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“This here
Phoenix,” says the old racketeer, was a bird of
sorts; at least, most people figured it was a bird
because it had something like wings that stuck out
from its body, but it was like no other bird that
you ever heard of.
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“For one
thing, it lived in space. And it lived on
hydrogen. It ate hydrogen and its peculiar
metabolism built up the hydrogen into helium and
used the released energy to keep the bird alive.
For another thing, it had a wing spread of two
thousand miles! The first peculiarity was what
started that historic battle, and you’ll have to
admit that the second peculiarity was enough to make
that battle historical.
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“You see,
space had gotten to be a pretty dangerous place to
travel in. Rockets were disappearing entirely too
frequently, and the people were beginning to believe
that the space pirates had come back. So the
Interplanetary Board of Control called in Sam and
asked him to investigate and find out where the
ships were disappearing to.
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“Well, what
was actually happening was this. In the old days,
with the use of the old Nielsen atomic Drive, most
of the ship’s exhaust was hydrogen, and when a
rocket roared out into space, the Phoenix would get
a whiff of the hydrogen and come whizzing along in
the wake of the rocket, gobbling up the hydrogen as
it came. It was faster than any rocket except maybe
Sam’s, so sooner or later, it would catch up with
rocket and there’d be one more gulp and that would
be the end of that rocket. ‘Course, to the
bird, that rocket would be just a bit of roughage in
an otherwise enjoyable meal.
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“Sam was
plowing along between the earth and Mars, where most
of the disappearances has taken place, when “Putz”
Svenssen, the big Swedish radar man, shouted that
something was coming up from behind.
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“’It looks
like a bird, he hollered. ‘But if it’s a bird, it’s
one that’d make Sinbad’s roc look like a gnat.’”
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“Sam dashed to
the vision screen, but he barely had time to get one
good look when a terrific gulp sounded through the
walls of the rocket and the vision screen went dark.
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‘”He’s
swallowed us!’ Sam bellowed, figuring out instantly
what had happened. ‘Stand by the gun, boys, we’re
gonna have to shoot our way out.’”
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“Well, sir,
that was one time that Sam had an idea that was
strictly from Yngvi. The bird’s stomach was so big
that the range of Sam’s guns didn’t even carry from
the rocket to the walls of that stomach. So after
they’d fired a hundred shells or so, with no
results, they gave it up. Then Sam had another
idea.
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“’When them
shells shot out, I heard a swish, like,’ he
announced, ‘That means there’s an atmosphere in this
here bird’s belly. Test it, Johnny.’
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Johnny did so
and found an atmosphere of hydrogen at about four
pounds pressure. Sam ordered the compressors out,
and told them to pump hydrogen in and oxygen out.
As they emptied the oxygen bottles, they filled them
with hydrogen. For a whole day, they kept this up
and then Sam announced that he was satisfied. The
mixture of gas in the bird’s stomach was about two
hydrogen to one oxygen, and then Sam gave a squirt
from the main jets in the rear.
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There was a
terrific flash and an explosion, the God-awfulest
explosion any of the crew had ever heard, and the
rocket went flying out of that bird’s gullet at over
ten miles a second. The bird, bothered for the
first time in its life by gas on the stomach, would
probably have fled on its own hook, but that
terrific belch sent it off backwards at the same
speed that Sam was taking in the opposite
direction. They ended up about forty million miles
apart, with Sam only a couple of million miles from
Mars.
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Sam fell down
to the red planet, madder than a wet hen. It had
been a long time since he had had a foeman worthy of
his steel, but a two thousand mile wide bird seemed
like it might be enough to challenge even his
ingenuity. He stamped over to the government
offices, reported his findings and began to order
apparatus and instruments like mad.
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“Within a
week, his rocket was stocked with H-bombs, oxygen
bottles, tracer instruments and a hundred other
gadgets. ‘I’m off,’ he shouted to the Commissioner
of Space Travel. ‘I’ll bring back the critter
that’s been devouring our rockets, dead or alive.”
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“’Don’t you
dare!’ the commissioner shouted, all panicky.
‘Don’t you dare to bring him back, dead or
alive.’”
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“Sam laughed,
and shouted his first order to Johnny Wayer. Two
hours later, they were out in space, on their first
orbit, with a keen eye out for the bird that had
challenged Sam’s claim to supremacy in the void.
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“That old bird
must have had a pretty good bit of intelligence, for
he avoided Sam for weeks. Sam blasted as often as
possible, taking first one orbit and then another in
an attempt to lure the bird with the hydrogen he
left in his wake, but the bird wasn’t having any,
thanks. Sam even sprinkled powdered sugar through
one of the pilot jets, hoping that the bird would be
tempted with icing on its hydrogen, but it was no
use.
-
-
“And then—just
when they were about to give up, Svenssen spied the
bird, lurking around on the far side of the moon.
That side was almost completely uninhabited in those
days and it made an ideal spot for the bird to hide
in. It couldn’t be seen from the earth, and the
bird could see every rocket that passed the moon’s
orbit on the way out. It had probably had that
hiding place for months, which accounted for the
high percentage of disappearances lately.
-
-
“Sam decided
there was only one thing to do, so he unlimbered a
big H-bomb and dropped it directly into the cent of
the big mare where the bird was resting. But
the bird wasn’t asleep by any means, and when the
bomb hit, it was the moon it hit and not the bird at
all. The bird had just moved out of the way about
five hundred miles, just enough to avoid an
unpleasantness caused by the bomb.
-
-
“Sam was a
little irritated by the miss, so he ordered another
bomb dropped. Unfortunately for Sam, and the moon,
and the future of the human race on the moon, the
bird managed to duck again.
-
-
“Then Sam lost
his temper. He hurled bomb after bomb at that
creature, and every time he missed, Sam got madder.
When he ran out of fusion bombs, he began hurling
fission bombs, and when he ran out of them,
he heaved ordinary explosives; but the bird ducked
them all, and the sounds that came through the radio
sounded amazingly like chuckling.
-
-
“When Sam had
used up every thing he had, the moon was a sight to
behold. The whole face of it was full of craters
from ten feet to a hundred miles across, and it had
been ruined permanently for anything but mining, and
it’s stayed ruined right up to this very day.
-
-
“Well, when
Sam’s bombs were exhausted, seems like the bird knew
it. It left the moon and took off into space like
all hell was after it; and if you ask me, something
a darned sight worse was. Sam was tailing the bird
like the bird had tailed the rockets it devoured.
-
-
“Out past Mars
past the asteroids, and finally past Jupiter the
bird fled, and never slowed down until it almost
reached Saturn. But it had been flying all the way
up hill, without any chance to absorb any food, and
just this of Saturn’s orbit, it turned around in a
huge curve that carried it back toward the sun.
-
-
“Sam tagged
right along, staying just so far behind the thing,
for he hadn’t any idea of what he’d do, it he caught
up; but just inside Venus’s orbit, an idea hit him
like a streak of lightning.
-
-
“Break out
them casks of rock salt that’s stored in the nose;
he shouted. ‘And unlimber all the forward guns.’
-
-
The bird kept
heading on an orbit that would round the sun just
inside the orbit of Mercury, and it was just inside
that orbit that Sam let her have it. Sam’s rocket
wasn’t more than fifty miles from the bird’s tail
when his guns crashed out. They’d been crammed to
the muzzle with salt, and that salt was scattered
for a hundred miles around, ahead of Sam’s flight.
The bird stopped in its tracks, flopped wildly for a
moment, and then started falling into the sun.
-
-
“’What
happened?’ hollered Johnny Wayer from the
jet-room. “What happened to the bird Sam?’
-
-
“’I salted her
down!’ yelled Sam, fair wild with delight. “I fixed
her up like you’d fix any darn bird. I sprinkled
salt on her tail.’”
-
-
“Well, there
isn’t much more to tell and what there is, is sad.
Sam and his crew watched the bird fall down and down
until it disappeared into the blinding glory of the
sun’s atmosphere. Then Sam called his men together
and made them a speech.
-
-
“’Men,’ he
says. ‘We’ve won, temporary. But the sun is full
of hydrogen, and it won’t be no time until that bird
will be strong again, and eager to get out into
space and start doing damage. If we want to keep
that bird out of the space lanes, it’s up to us to
keep her out. We got to follow her down into the
sun, and keep her there.’
-
His men nodded
silently and as silently they turned to their
duties. A few minutes later, their refrigeration
units going full blast, the Narcissus plunged
into the sun.
-
-
Down, down,
they went, one thousand, ten thousand, and a hundred
thousand miles. In the very heart of the sun, they
found the Phoenix, and with the salt and the power
of Sam’s jets, they’ve kept her there.
-
-
“And they’re
there to this day. I know that some folks tell a
different story—something about Sam retiring with
some girl and living happily ever after. But
shucks! That’s just wishful thinking. Sam’s right
down there in the sun, guarding the bird and seeing
to it that it tends proper to the duties Sam has
assigned to it.
-
-
“And if you
don’t believe this, just ask some astronomer what it
is that keeps the sun shining and giving off heat.
If he don’t tell you it’s the Solar Phoenix, I’ll
eat my hat. Yes, and yours too.”
The End
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