Science Fiction - Daily Short Stories

Accidental Death - Peter Baily

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Duration:: 25m
Broadcast on:: 18 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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That's renterswearhouse.com or call 303-974-9444 to speak to a rent-to-state advisor today. This summer, saddle up with the only sports book where you can bet on horse racing. FanDuel. Right now, new customers can get a no-sweat first bet up to $500. Just download the app or go to fanduel.com/horses to score your no-sweat bet up to $500. 21+ and present in Colorado. Offer valid on first real money major of $5 or more. Verify an FD racing account required. Bonus issued a non-withdrawable racing site credit that expires seven days after issuance. Max refund $500. Restrictions apply. See terms at racing.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-Gambler. Accidental death by Peter Bailey. The most dangerous of weapons is the one you don't know is loaded. The wind howled out of the Northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice, it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow, plowed ruler straight through stream-lined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow-sloped to a frozen glare, penciled black shadowed down the long furrow and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics. An artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness. Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing walked, nothing talked, but the thing in the hollow was stirring in stiff jerks like a snake with its back broken or a clockwork toy running down. When the movement stopped there was a click and a strange sound began, thin, scratchy, inaudible more than a yard away, weary but still cocky, there leaked from the shape in a hollow, the sound of a human voice. I've tried my hands and arms and they seemed to work, it began. I've wiggled my toes with entire success. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. Right now I don't feel like struggling up and finding out. I'm fine where I am. I'll just lie here for a while and relax and get some of the story on tape. This suit's got a built in recorder, I might as well use it. That way, even if I'm not as well as I feel, I'll leave a message. You probably know we're back and wonder what went wrong. I suppose I'm in a state of shock, that's why I can't seem to get up, who wouldn't be shocked after luck like that. I've always been lucky I guess. Luck got me a place in the whale. Sure, I'm a good astronomer, but so are lots of other guys. If I were ten years older it would have been an honor, being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever. At my age it was luck. You'll want to know if the ship worked. Well, she did. Like a bomb. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked "Jump". Took his finger off the button, and there we were, Alpha Centauri. Two months later your time, one second later by us. We covered our whole survey assignment like that. Smooth is a pint of old and mild, which right now I could certainly use. Better yet would be a pint of hot black coffee with sugar in, failing that I could even go for a long drink of cold water. There was never anything wrong with a whale till right at the end, and even then I doubt if it was the ship itself that fouled things up. That was some survey assignment. We astronomers really lived. Wait till you see, but of course you won't. I could weep when I think of those miles of lovely color film all gone up in smoke. I'm shocked all right. I never said who I was. Matt Hennessy from Farsight Observatory, back of the Moon. Just back from a proving flight, whom astronomical survey in the starship whale. Whoever you are who finds this tape, you're made. Take it to any radio station or newspaper office. You'll find you can name your price, and don't take any wooden nickels. Where had I got to? I told you how we happened to find Chang didn't I? That's what the natives call it. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1g gravity and a 20% oxygen atmosphere at 15 psi. The odds against finding Chang on a six sun survey on the first star jump ever must be up in the Googles. We certainly were lucky. The Chang natives aren't very technical. Haven't got space travel for instance. They're good astronomers though. We were able to show them our sun in their telescopes. In their way, they're a highly civilized people. Look more like cats than people, but they're people alright. If you doubt it, chew these facts over. 1. They learned our language in four weeks. When I say they, I mean a 10 man team of them. 2. They brew a near beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the whale. 3. They've got a great sense of humor. Even rather to silly practical jokes, but still, can't say I care for that hot foot and belly laugh stuff myself, but tastes differ. 4. The 10 man language team also learned chess and table tennis. But why go on? People who talk English drink beer like jokes and beat me at chess or table tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers and trousers. It was funny the way they won all the time at table tennis. They certainly weren't so hot at it. Maybe that 10% extra gravity put us off our strokes. As for chess, Sven Love was our champion. He won sometimes. The rest of us seemed to lose whichever Ching Si we played. There again it wasn't so much that they were good, how could they be in the time. It was more that we all seemed to make silly mistakes when we played them. And that's fatal in chess. Of course it's a screwy situation. Playing chess was something that grows its own fur coat, has yellow eyes, an inch and a half long, and long white whiskers. Could you have kept your mind on the game? And don't think I fell victim to their feline charm. The children were pets, but you didn't feel like patting the adults on their big grinning heads. Personally, I didn't like the one I knew best. He was cold. Well, we called him Charlie, and he was the ethnologist, ambassador, contact man or whatever you like to call him, who came back with us. Why I disliked him was because he was always trying to get the edge on you, all the time he had to be top. Great sense of humor, of course, I nearly broke my neck on that butter slide he fixed up in the metal alleyway to the whale's engine room. Charlie laughed, fit the bust, everybody laughed. I even laughed myself, though doing it hurt me more than the tumblehead. Yes, life and soul of the party, old Charlie. My last sight of the minnow was a cabin full of dead and dying men. The Swedish stink of burned flesh and the choking reek of scorching insulation. The bolt, jolting and shuddering and beginning to break up and in the middle of the flames still unheard was Charlie. He was laughing. Oh my God, it's dark out here. Consider how high I am. Must be all of fifty miles and doing eight hundred miles an hour, at least. I'll be doing more than that when I land. What's final velocity for a fifty mile fall? Same as a fifty thousand mile fall, I suppose. Same as escape, twenty-four thousand miles an hour. I'll make a mess. That's better. Why didn't I close my eyes before? Those star streaks made me dizzy. I'll make a nice shooting star when I hit air. Come to think of it, I must be deep in air now. Let's take a look. It's getting lighter. Look at those peaks down there. Like great knives. I don't seem to be falling as fast as I expected, though. Almost seem to be floating. Let's switch on the radio and tell the world hello. Hello, Earth. Hello again and goodbye. Sorry about that. I passed out. I don't know what I said, if anything, and the suit recorder has no playback or eraser. What must have happened is that the suit ran out of oxygen and I lost consciousness due to anoxia. I dreamed I switched on the radio, but I actually switched on the emergency tank, thank the Lord, and that brought me round. Come to think of it, why not crack the suit and breathe fresh air instead of bottled? No, I'd have to get up to do that. I think I'll just lie here a little bit longer and get properly rested up before I try anything big like standing up. I was telling about the return journey, wasn't I? The long jump back home, which should have dumped this between the orbits of Earth and Mars, instead of which, when James took his finger off the button, the mass detector showed nothing except the noise level of the universe. We were out in that no place for a day. We astronomers had to establish our exact position relative to the solar system. The crew had to find out exactly what went wrong. The physicists had to make mystic passes in front of meters and mutter about residual folds in stress-free space. Our task was easy because we were about half a light year from the sun. The crew's job was also easy. They found out what went wrong in less than half an hour. It still seems incredible. To program the ship for a star jump, you merely told it where you were and where you wanted to go. In practical terms, that entailed first a series of exact measurements, which had to be translated into the somewhat obtrus coordinate system we used based on the topological order of mass points in the galaxy. Then you cut a tape on the computer and hit the button. Nothing was wrong with the computer. Nothing was wrong with the engines. We'd hit the right button and we'd gone to the place we'd aim for. All we'd done was aim for the wrong place. It hurts me to tell you this and I'm just a attached personnel with no spaceflight tradition. In practical terms, one highly trained crewmember had punched a wrong pattern of holes on tape. Another equally skilled had failed to notice this when reading back. A childish error, highly improbable, twice repeated, thus squaring the improbability. Incredible, but that's what happened. Anyway, we took good care with the next lot of measurements. That's why we were out there so long. They were cross-checked about five times. I got sick so I climbed into a spaceship and went outside and took some photographs of the sun which I hoped would help to determine hydrogen density in the outer regions. When I got back, everything was ready. We disposed ourselves about the control room and relaxed for all we were worth. We were all praying that this time nothing would go wrong and all looking forward to seeing Earth again after four months' subjective time away. Except for Charlie, who was still chuckling and shaking his head. And Captain James, who was glaring at Charlie, and obviously wishing human dignity permitted him to tear Charlie limb from limb. Then James pressed the button. Everything twang like a bowstring. I felt myself turned inside out, passed through a small sieve, and poured back into shape. The entire bow-wall screen was full of Earth. Something was wrong all right, and this time it was much, much worse. We'd come out of the jump about two hundred miles above the Pacific, pointed straight down, traveling at a relative speed of about two thousand miles an hour. It was a fantastic situation. Here is the whale, the most powerful ship ever built, which could cover fifty light years and a subjective time of one second, and it was helpless. For as a course you know, the Star Drive couldn't be used again for at least two hours. The whale also had ion rockets, of course, the standard deuterium fusion thing with direct conversion. As again, you know this is good for interplanetary flight because you can run it continuously, and it has extremely high exhaust velocity. But in our situation it was no good because it has rather a low thrust. It would have taken more time than we had to deflect us enough to avoid a smash. We had five minutes to abandon ship. James got us all into the minnow at a dead run. There was no time to take anything at all except the clothes we stood in. A minnow was meant for short, heavy hops to planets or asteroids. In addition to the ion drive it had emergency atomic rockets, using steam for reaction mass. We thank God for that when Kazamian canceled our downward velocity with them in a few seconds. We curved up way over China, and from about fifty miles high we saw the whale hit the Pacific. Six hundred tons of mass at well over two thousand miles an hour makes an almighty splash. By now you'll have divers down, but I doubt they'll salvage much you can use. I wonder why James went down with the ship, as the saying is. Not that it made any difference. It must have broken his heart to know that his lovely ship was getting the chopper. Or did he suspect another human error? We didn't have time to think about that or even to get the radio working. The steam rockets blew up. Poor Kazamian was burnt to a crisp. The only thing that saved me was a space shoot I was still wearing. I snapped the faceplate down because the cabin was filling with fumes. I saw Charlie coming out of the toilet. That's how he escaped and I saw him beginning to laugh. Then the port side collapsed and I fell out. I saw the launch spinning away, glowing red against the purplish black sky. I tumbled head over heels towards a huge curved shield of earth fifty miles below. I shut my eyes and that's about all I remember. I don't see how any of us could have survived. I think we're all dead. I'll have to get up and crack this suit and let some air in, but I can't. I fell fifty miles without a parachute. I'm dead, so I can't stand up. There was silence for a while except for the vicious howl of the wind. Then snow began to shift on the ledge. A man crawled stiffly out and came shakily to his feet. He moved slowly around for some time. After about two hours he returned to the hollow, squatted down and switched on the recorder. The voice began again, considerably rearier. Hello there. I'm in the bleakest wilderness I've ever seen. This place makes the moon look cozy. There's precipice around me every way but one and that's up. So it's up I'll have to go until I find a way to go down. I've been chewing snow to quench my thirst, but I could eat a horse. I picked up a shortwave broadcast on my suit but couldn't understand a word. Not English, not trench and there I stick. Tune to it for fifteen minutes just to hear a human voice again. I haven't much hope of reaching anyone with my five milliwatts suit transmitter but I'll keep trying. Just before I start the climb there are two things I want to get on tape. The first is how I got here. I've remembered something from my military training when I did some parachute jumps. All velocity for a human body falling through air is about 120 miles per hour. Falling fifty miles is no worse than falling five hundred feet. You'd be lucky to live through a five hundred foot fall, true, but I've been lucky. The suit is bulky but light and probably slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile an hour updraft, this side of the mountain, skidded downhill through about half a mile of snow and fetched up in a drift. The suit is part worn but still operational, I'm fine. The second thing I want to say is about the Ching Sea and here it is. Watch out for them. Those jokers are dangerous. I'm not telling how because I've got a scientific reputation to watch, you'll have to figure it out for yourselves. Here are the clues. Number one, the Ching Sea talk and laugh, but after all, they aren't human. On an alien world a hundred light years away, why shouldn't alien talents develop? A talent that's so uncertain and rudimentary here that most people don't believe it might be highly developed out there. Number two, the whale expedition did fine till it found Ching, then it hit a seam of bad luck. Real stinking bad luck that went on and on till it looks fishy. We lost the ship, we lost the launch, all but one of us lost our lives. We couldn't even win a game of ping pong. So what is luck, good or bad? Scientifically speaking, future chance events are by definition chance. They can turn out favorable or not. When a preponderance of chance events has occurred unfavorably, you've got bad luck. It's a fancy name for a lot of chance results that didn't go your way, but the gambler defines it differently. For him luck refers to the future, and you've got bad luck when future chance events won't go your way. Scientific investigations into this have been inconclusive but everyone knows that some people are lucky and others aren't. All we've got are hints and glimmers, the fumbling touch of a rudimentary talent. There's the evil eye legend and the Jonah, bad luck bringers. Superstition? Maybe. But ask the insurance companies about accident prones. What's in a name? Call a man unlucky and you're superstitious. Call him accident prone and that's sound business sense. I've said enough. All the same search the space flight records. Talk to the actuaries. When a ship is working perfectly and is operated by a handpicked crew of highly trained men in perfect condition, how often is it wrecked by a series of silly errors happening one after another in defiance of probability? I'll sign off with two thoughts, one depressing and one cheering. A single chingsy wrecked our ship and our launch. What could a whole planet full of them do? On the other hand, a talent that manipulates chance events is bound to be chancy. No matter how highly developed, it can't be surefire. The proof is, I've survived to tell the tale. At twenty below zero and fifty miles an hour, the wind ravaged the mountain, peering through his polarized visor at the white waist and the snow-filled air howling over it, sliding then stumbling with every step on a slope that gradually got steeper and seemed to go on forever. Mad Hennessy began to inch his way up the north face of Mount Everest. The end of accidental death by Peter Bailey. Well, it sounds like the tenants hit your rental property sure know how to throw a great party. You just wish they wouldn't throw so many parties on Tuesdays until 4am. And if they could pay the rent on time, that would be nice too. Being a landlord can be stressful, but it doesn't have to be. Let renters warehouse handle the hard part of property management for you, like finding quality tenants you can trust. 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Drive distracted, shifting to safe, a message from the Colorado Department of Transportation.