Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction May and June 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
This is the illustrated, shorter version of the EBook #24436
ANYTHING YOU CAN DO!
First of two parts. The Alien was really alien—and Earthwas faced with a strange problem indeed. They had to havea superman. And there weren't any. So....
by Darrell T. Langart
ILLUSTRATED BY LEONE
I
Like some great silver-pink fish, the ship sang on through the eternalnight. There was no impression of swimming; the fish shape had neitherfins nor a tail. It was as though it were hovering in wait for a member ofsome smaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, so that it, inturn, could pounce and kill.
But still it moved.
Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have toldthat this fish was dying.
In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder—long, tapered, andoval in cross-section—but it showed none of the exterior markings onemight expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With oneexception, the smooth, silver-pink exterior was featureless.
That one exception was a long, purplish-black, roughened discolorationthat ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters oflength. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying.
Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the discoloration.Had he thought about it, he would have deduced the presence of the burn,but it was the least of his worries. The internal damage that had beendone to the ship was by far the more serious. It could, quite possibly,kill him.
The Nipe, of course, had no intention of dying. Not out here. Not so far,so very far, from his own people. Not out here, where his death would beso very improper.
He looked at the ball of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that sucha relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendouslyenergetic plasmoid that it could still do the damage it had done so farout. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normallyproduce such energetic swirls of magnetic force.
But the thing had been there, nonetheless, and the ship had hit it at highvelocity. Fortunately, the ship had only touched the edge of the swirlingcloud, otherwise the entire ship would have vanished in a puff ofincandescence. But it had done enough. The power plants that drove theship at ultralight velocities through the depths of interstellar space hadbeen so badly damaged that they could only be used in short bursts, andeach burst brought them nearer to the fusion point. Most of theinstruments were powerless; the Nipe was not even sure he could land thevessel. Any attempt to use the communicator to call home would have blownthe ship to atoms.
The Nipe did not want to die, but, if die he must, he did not want to diefoolishly.
It had taken a long time to drift in from the outer reaches of this sun'splanetary system, but using the power plants any more than absolutelynecessary would have been fool-hardy.
The Nipe missed the companionsh