Collected Short Fiction, page 119
“Then I delivered the ultimatum—you know the rest.
“I went back with the Martians, of course. I have several friends among the scientists—really marvelous minds. They always accorded me the utmost courtesy and consideration.
“The last five years, I’ve spent on Mars. That’s a long time, Sidney, to be away from all human beings. Much as I admire the Martians—the fact remains that they are a good bit different from men.
“I got lonely, Sidney, homesick. Got so I thought about the earth most of the time that I should have been sleeping. Blue, clear skies with birds singing in them. The cool wind on your face when you walk in the country. The roar of the city and the whisper of human voices. The washing of the sea, and its keen air.
“Then my tobacco was gone. And I was tired of the Martian food.”
He ran his fingers through his long white hair, and smiled quickly at me—and something made tears come in my eyes.
“Anyhow, Sidney, I’m an old man. Old men ought to be where they can see people they love, and talk, and dream. An old man can’t live off on a strange planet, even if its inhabitants are kind—
“I had the Martians bring me back. I knew, naturally, that I’d be persona non grata, if caught But I thought I could hide somewhere and live out the rest of my years in peace, among human beings. Anyhow, I’d been away from earth long enough to take the risk. So I had them bring me back.
“That’s the story, Sidney. And you understand why you can’t repeat it.”
My throat was tight, so I could hardly speak. I stammered, “But you can’t—can’t let them flash you out! You can’t let them condemn you for a traitor, when you’ve done all that!”
“Think of the Federation, Sidney. Men believe there is a hostile power on Mars. An injustice, of course, to the Martians. But the belief holds them together. It gives them the sense of a common cause. It builds world-patriotism.
I nodded; my throat was aching. I could not speak.
“Enough of that!” he cried, and smiled almost gaily, and ran his fingers through his white hair. “Tell me about yourself, and Joan, and what you have done together.”
I began talking to him, a little wildly and incoherently, I fear, of the happy, tranquil life that Joan and I had been leading.
All too soon, the bolts clicked, the rays vanished from across the door, and the warden entered to take me away.
Dr. Eldred rose, with a smile, to bid me farewell. My eyes dimmed so that his image swam before me; I had to grope for his outstretched hand.
“Good-bye, Sidney,” he called after me, as I was hurried out. “And remember, not a word!”
In the bitter days that followed, during the trial and the brief preliminaries to the execution, I struggled hard with myself. My word was nothing, against the life of my friend. But I understood his reason for silence—and I kept my promise.
I saw Dr. Eldred during the trial, in the crowded courtroom in the Federation Tower. His white head was held high; he was always composed.
I glimpsed him a last time, as he was being conducted into the chamber of execution. Tranquil composure still supported him. His thin old body was staunchly upright; his weary face showed no bitterness.
He smiled, and walked proudly into the black room.
THE END
[*] Since the Earth-Mars opposition the planets were moving steadily apart, the Earth outstripping Mars in their race about the sun.
The Lady of Light
THE advances in the realm of science have barely even touched the outer rim of the vast circle of possibilities. With the progress made in the industries of synthetic commodities at the present time, perhaps the future will bring us not only synthetic foods, but perhaps some means will be found to draw various life-giving forces from the cosmos direct. In this seemingly fantastic story by our well-known author, numerous phenomenal theories are propounded, which are of unusual scientific interest.
CHAPTER I
“The Dynamite Hearse”
“ALL aboard the graveyard special!” Eric Locklin called, in the bitter humor that was characteristic of him. I tried to smile at him; but my own nervous tension was so great, that the effect must have been rather sickly, for Eric turned quickly toward me, and inquired politely if I needed smelling salts.
“The old world is just a nasty muddle, anyhow,” he went on, in the same grim vein. “It ought to be a relief to leave it behind, and see if the Creator—or evolution, if you please—didn’t mold with a surer hand on some other planet. And if the old hearse goes wrong, what do we amount to, anyway? A few messy pounds of protoplasmic slime, plastered over a framework of mineral salts!”
He grinned at me, and tossed his head in an odd way that he had.
I had known Eric Locklin too long and too well to take him seriously. I knew that his bitter, sardonic pessimism was assumed—that it was merely a cloak that he wore to shield from the cruel laughter of the world, a nature that was delicately sensitive and finely idealistic. It was a cloak of pretended cynicism, often thrown aside.
No man could have been more truly enthusiastic about our mad venture than was Eric. Yet he had ridiculed the attempt from the first. From the day that we had begun erecting the skeleton girders of the rocket, he had termed the vehicle the “dynamite hearse.” But despite all his talk of disaster, he had never once spoken, of abandoning the project.
It was in the early summer of 1930. The vast acres of prairie were richly green with new grass; the limitless rolling expanse of emerald was dotted with dark specks that were grazing cattle. A soft wind breathed cool and invigorating beneath a limpid sky. In spite of Eric’s unfelt sneers, the earth had become suddenly very attractive to me—to my own surprise, I found myself shrinking from the thought of leaving it so precipitately.
We had just stepped outside the faded, weatherbeaten old ranch house, in which I had lived, for many years, before I established the new ranch headquarters a dozen miles across the range, near the railroad. Vividly green locusts were clustered about the wide yard—the only trees in many square miles of this open range of eastern New Mexico.
And the rocket—which Eric insisted upon terming the “dynamite hearse”—reared its gleaming bulk just beyond the masses of darkly green foliage. The morning sunlight scintillated with blazing fulgor on its plates of polished beryllium bronze, and on its wide observation ports of pure fused quartz.
Squat and massive the rocket was, a thick metal cylinder capped with a dome. The full tanks of the secret liquid fuel, the mixing chamber and the powerful pump, and the reaction motors, were located in the cylinder. And in the dome above, behind the glistening ports, were our narrow quarters.
I closed the door of the kindly old house behind us, and Eric strode easily ahead of me toward the looming, splendid mass of the rocket.
“Zero hour is eight-seventeen,” he said, glancing at the watch on his wrist. “We’ve just twenty-nine minutes to go. Time to get aboard, inspect the pump, make our wills, and say our prayers. The old hearse is going to give us some blow-out of a funeral, anyhow, Higdon. Attila the Hun, with his golden coffin and all, isn’t even a side-show, compared with what we will do!”
But there was unmistakable eagerness in his step, as he swung ahead of me, under the trees, toward the ladder of thin metal strips, which ran up the smooth side of the rocket, to the air-lock in the top, at the center of the dome.
A big man, Eric was. Six feet two, and massively built. He always seemed to move slowly, almost-ponderously—yet there was a deceptive quickness about him. And I never knew a man who could stop him. He was dark of face and hair. His gray eyes were solemn, save when illuminated with a flash of his rare humor. Thirty-one years old, he was handsome only in a rugged sort of way, as any powerful man is handsome.
I loved Eric Locklin, as I might have loved a son of my own. And almost I regarded him as a son. His father, Dr. Alvin Locklin, and I, were roommates at Yale, many years ago—our intimacy had been only partly severed when, soon after graduation, I had been forced to come West for the sake of my health. Eric, as boy and young man, had been a frequent visitor at the ranch I had acquired.
When Dr. Locklin had died, after a lifetime devoted to research on the subject of rocket designs and rocket fuels, Eric had naturally come to me, Vernon Higdon, with his father’s plans and models. He had proposed that we build an experimental craft, and undertake a voyage to the moon.
While I had been at first a skeptic, I had soon come to share the burning, though concealed, enthusiasm of the young engineer. It had been possible for me to find the eighty thousand dollars required for the construction. And the old ranch house, no longer in use, had seemed an excellent place to work on building the machine, without attracting unwelcome publicity.
On the previous day the months of work had been ended, the temporary shed torn down from over the rocket, and the few hired mechanics sent back to ranch headquarters, on their way to the railroad and civilization.
There were to be no witnesses of the ascent, unless some curious cattle hand happened to be watching, from the range.
Eric climbed ahead of me, up the flimsy ladder. He paused on the little metal platform, beside the entrance to the air-lock, and muttered, “Good-by, old world—and Allah save you!”
He bent, turned a wheel, and the massive outer valve swung open.
He leapt lightly down into the chamber; I heard the clang as the inner valve opened. In a moment he called me to follow.
I WAS soon in the ten-foot dome, with its floor and walls elaborately cushioned to absorb the shocks and pressure of acceleration, with its masses of intricate navigation instruments, and its cylinders of oxygen which were to replenish the vital element in the air, with the vacuum jars of food and the few articles of personal use which we had permitted ourselves.
Eric dropped himself through the manhole in the floor, to make a last inspection of the mixing chamber into which the chemicals in the tanks were admitted in proper proportion to form Dr. Locklin’s secret liquid fuel, and the powerful pump which forced the explosive mixture into the combustion chambers, against reaction-pressure.
I discovered that a curious apathy had seized me. On the day before I had been wildly excited, filled with mad enthusiasm for the adventure. Now I felt dull and listless. I stood beside the broad, quartz observation panels, staring out unseeingly at the old, time-faded house, with the dark trees massed about it, and the wide, cattle-dotted sweep of vividly green, sun-lit range beyond. I recall that I mechanically started counting the piles of planks, which had formed the demolished shed under which we had built the rocket, and that I forgot the numbers before I had finished.
Eric startled me when he climbed back up into the dome.
“Time to select your last words, and note them down for posterity!” he called. “The motors are set to fire in three minutes!”
With a last, vaguely regretful look at the serene and lovely world beyond the windows, I lay down on the cushions, carefully disposing my limbs against the shock. I saw Eric doing the same.
Then an eternity seemed to pass. My heart was thumping very hard, and each beat of it seemed at first the beginning of the explosion. I recall that I wanted to say something to Eric—what it was, I cannot remember—and my mouth was so dry that I could not form the words.
Finally, when I thought that the mechanism must have failed to set off the rockets, it seemed that I was forced with cruel, crushing pressure against the floor. My body seemed made of lead; I struggled in vain to adjust my limbs to a more comfortable position. The breath was forced from my lungs; I could not lift my chest to get it back again. I felt as if I were being crushed beneath the foot of a malevolent giant.
A shrieking, bellowing roar beat upon my eardrums—the screaming of incandescent gases from the multiple exhausts.
That torturing, unendurable pressure seemed to last through dull ages of pain. Then suddenly there was a deafening, shattering report. A wicked tongue of bluish flame stabbed up through the manhole, from the rocket-room. The machine seemed to swerve abruptly, so that I was flung over against the cushioned wall.
The shrill screaming of the reaction-motors died quickly. A great silence seemed to flow into the cramped space about me. At the same time, it seemed that all my weight was gone. I floated above the cushions, experiencing an indescribable and not wholly pleasant sensation of utter weightlessness.
“Something gone wrong!” Eric muttered.
I turned and saw him. His face was white, and he had a bleeding bruise on the temple, where his head must have struck some instrument when the rocket had swerved. We were plainly floating free in space, for he seemed to have no weight. He moved through the air much after the manner of one learning to swim, struggling toward the manhole from which I had seen blue flame burst. He reached it, drew himself through it, beyond my sight.
My glance strayed to one of the quartz windows, and I could not repress an exclamation of wonder. Outside was—interplanetary space!
The sky was densely, utterly black. The stars were hot, vivid points of light against it, points of many brilliant colors. Among the glittering gems of the stars were faint silvery veils and tracery of distant nebulae. A supernal light, strange and wonderful beyond conception!
I looked through another window. Through it, the earth was in view. A huge, mottled sphere, of vaguely greenish, luminous color. Familiar continental outlines were traceable through its mists. One side of it was dark, the other splendidly brilliant in the sunlight.
I dared not try to see the sun itself, lest it blind me.
Eric had heard my cry of astonishment.
“What’s the matter, Higdon?” he called.
I told him what I had seen. And in a moment his voice came from below.
“Our address is on board, till further notice,” he said. “The pump and mixing chamber are blown to kingdom come! Fire somehow got past the valves—I suppose the combustion chambers got too hot. And the fuel in the pump and the mixing chamber exploded.”
“Can you fix it?” I called.
“Fix it hell!” he burst out. “Nothing left to fix, but a few scraps of twisted steel. A wonder it didn’t blow a hole in the shell, and let our air out! Nothing to do but sit and wait for something to happen. Or you might call up a garage, and have a wrecker sent out, to tow us in!”
With a sunken heart, I made my way to the manhole, and peered through it. A single glimpse of the twisted and blackened wreck of the mechanism was enough to assure me that repairs were out of the question.
Presently Eric clambered wearily back to join me.
As the hours passed, we took occasional readings with the navigation instruments. For some time the earth continued to dwindle behind us, as we shot on out into the frozen vacuum of space. Then presently its size remained constant. Soon our computations revealed that the rocket, due to its swerving at the last instant before the motors had stopped, and to the combined attractions of the sun and the moon, had fallen into a regular orbit about the earth, at a mean distance of nearly eighty thousand miles.
The ship had become a second moon!
We seemed destined, through the ages, to swing endlessly about the earth, in the chill and airless void of space.
“Dynamite hearse was right,” Eric said. “And what vault could be safer than this machine, beyond the reach of the elements and our destructive fellow man? We ought to last forever! Our situation would fairly turn an old Egyptian mummy green with envy!
“You know, I’m sorry, though, that the old pump exploded. We had a fair chance to get to the moon. . . . I really wanted to see a little more of life, before I checked out. Anyhow, we gave Lady Luck a good run for her money!”
Nothing shows the true nature of Eric Locklin better than the fact that he grinned and then seized my hand impulsively and gripped it crushingly, and presently began to trace the constellations in the wondrous gemceiling of the void.
I cannot endure going deeply into the details of the days that followed—as I look back, it seems an age of nightmare. During the first few hours it was tolerable enough. But soon the air became foul, and even fresh oxygen from the cylinders hardly made it breathable—our equipment for absorbing the wastes was crude and unsatisfactory.
Soon we were both very weak, hardly able to move about, even in our weightless condition. And we suffered the agonies of suffocation, strangling, gasping, fighting for breath, reeling with dizziness.
At last, unable to endure it any longer, I determined to leave the rocket through the air-lock. The unthinkable cold of space, and the total lack of air, I knew, would very soon end my pain. But I was already too weak to handle the massive valves. And Eric refused to help me leave the ship.
“No fun—“he gasped weakly, “to stay—in here. But stick—with me. You aren’t licked—till you know it!”
I abandoned the attempt. For a time, I must have been insensible again. Then Eric was shaking my shoulder, trying to whisper something to me, whispering something that sounded like the raving of delirium.
“Light—light! Someone—coming! Look!”
CHAPTER II
Sharothon, Lady of Light
MAD and incredible as Eric’s words were, I dragged myself weakly to the nearest of the quartz windows. I saw only the cold and terrible splendor of the vacant gulf, the gemmed veil of far-off, frozen stars. I shrank back from the supernal wonder of it, at the thought that never again would I see a kinder vision.
Eric drew himself laboriously across the dome, let the last few pounds of our hoarded oxygen hiss from the steel cylinder. A breath of the precious gas was like an invigorating draft.
Then he was beside me, pointing out at the star-jeweled tapestry of space.
“Watch!” he gasped, in a voice that had grown a little stronger. “The rocket is turning. Soon you will see. A human being!”
Indeed, the vessel was spinning slowly, like a little planet in the void. The blazing constellations wheeled slowly and majestically past the window. Then there came into view—an astounding thing.
