Collected Short Fiction, page 128
“Fools, gentlemen!” he repeated.
The President made a little futile, protesting gesture, but he did not speak. All of them save the Admiral seemed awed and oppressed into brooding silence by the weight of insidious peril, by the pressure of a desperate problem that they could not solve.
“Who the hell are you?”
The Admiral shot the question in a voice of savage irritation at a little man slowly crossing the floor, as if glad of a chance to vent his repressed anger.
“Who let you in?”
The little man smiled mildly, and came on toward the semi-circular table with a slow but confident step. His clothing was unobtrusively gray, and soiled with the red-yellow dust of the space-port. His dusty skin was pale; his eyes were blank, noncommital walls of light blue. Neither neatness nor shabbiness made him conspicuous. So colorless was every item of his appearance that it offered no single remarkable detail to attract the eye or cling in the memory.
“How the devil did you get in here?” thundered the Admiral, lunging to his feet behind the table.
His vague smile undismayed by this ungracious welcome, the little man stopped in front of the table, and said in a dry monotone:
“I simply walked through the door.” He chuckled softly. “I fancy your guards didn’t notice me.”
“Who are you?” snapped the Admiral. “What do you want? I’ll have you paid some notice!”
The little man reached unhurriedly into the pocket of his dusty coat and found a thin pasteboard, which he laid calmly on the table. The Admiral bent forward to snatch it up, and the four men leaned together to study its brief inscription:
White
Each of them made some suppressed ejaculation of astonishment, and the President ceased his tapping on the table to stare fixedly at the newcomer, while his forefinger, as if possessing a volition of its own, traced imaginary figures on the polished wood. The Admiral was the first to speak.
“You mean—” he boomed, “you mean you’re the White?”
“I am White,” said the little man. “A criminologist. From Denver. I understood that you gentlemen wanted to see me.”
His manner was soft, without any trace of uncertainty or confusion; he looked in mild inquiry from one to another of the four men in front of him.
l Still on his feet, the Admiral turned brusquely to the others.
“Gentlemen, this is a farce! The System is in frightful danger—and we wait for a—a runt like this to save us!”
White had produced a large handkerchief. He was deliberately wiping the stinging film of red alkali dust from his wrists and neck, brushing it from his clothing. Patiently he looked up at the four bewildered men.
“I don’t look prepossessing,” he offered. “That is deliberate—at least to an extent. You are familiar with the principle of protective coloration. I can’t afford to be obtrusive. May I inquire what you wanted?”
The Admiral snorted loudly, and made no other reply.
Unclasping his long hands from across his stomach, the Secretary of the League rested them on the table, and leaned forward to search White with grave eyes.
“You understand, Mr. White,” he said, “that you are rather unconventional in coming in upon us this way, without having yourself announced and sending ahead your credentials.”
“I imagined,” said White, “that the ability to walk past your guards would be a recommendation. These are my credentials.”
He drew a long envelope from his pocket, and laid it on the table. The Secretary picked it up, slipped from it a number of documents to which were fixed seals, ribbons and photographs. He and the silent President examined them, studied White.
“They are satisfactory,” said the Secretary.
“The case?” suggested White. “I understood that the matter was urgent.”
“So it is,” agreed the Secretary gloomily. He looked doubtfully at his companions.
“Enough of this!” objected the Admiral. “We can’t entrust our secret to this man. If it became known there would be a panic. As for expecting help from him! Preposterous!”
White smiled unassumingly.
“I might remind you,” he said, “that I have been able to solve problems that baffled other men.”
The Secretary looked back at him, with decision hardening his weary face.
Clasping his long hands together on the table, he began:
“Mr. White, we find ourselves in a predicament—a most awkward predicament. In a terrible situation. The fact is—” hesitating, he looked uncertainly at the three others, and then back at White, “the fact is that for the last two months the Council of the Planetary League has been obliged to submit to the dictation of a criminal.”
The slow smile faded from White’s face, leaving it, like his eyes, blankly unreadable. He revealed neither astonishment nor any other emotion.
“For two months, Mr. White,” continued the Secretary, “the Fleet has been confined to its bases—because we were ordered not to take it into space. We have been forced to pardon a score of infamous criminals from the penal colony on Deimos—among them Verlin Starr, the notorious woman murderess. We have been compelled to pay enormous sums to a criminal, from the treasury of the League.”
“He doesn’t seem very much surprised,” barked the Admiral, almost accusingly.
“I imagined that it would be something of the kind,” said White. “Otherwise you would not require my services.”
Abruptly roused from his sullen apathy, the Director demanded:
“You think you can assist us, then?”
“It’s possible,” said White. “I have enjoyed, you know, a certain experience in the investigation of unusual cases. If you will go ahead with the details—”
He nodded to the Secretary.
“You have heard of Dr. Andrade?”
“I knew of his work,” said White, tonelessly. “Electron physics. Died a few months ago, didn’t he?”
“Precisely,” said the Secretary. “Except that he was murdered.”
“You wish his murder investigated?”
“We must recover something that his murderer took.”
“And that—”
“Dr. Andrade,” the Secretary amplified, “was working on the annihilation of matter. The destruction of electrons. His process caused them to combine, forming neutronic particles, and free energy.
“A most perilous project, you understand. He worked almost alone, at an isolated laboratory in the desert, a hundred miles south of here. Three months ago he perfected his discovery.
“He called it the Electron Flame. A progressive destruction of matter. A flame of swift-marching destruction that consumes everything in its path—rock, soil, metal, water. The process is initiated by certain waves, that upset the equilibrium of forces in the atom. And the collapse of each atom generates more of the waves, which affect others, so that the thing spreads. Flame! Annihilation!”
CHAPTER II
White Goes to Work
l White put the tips of his dusty fingers together, and stared down at them soberly.
“More serious than I feared,” he said. “Was there any way of stopping the process?”
“Yes. Andrade was careful to have that worked out before he mentioned the discovery. The disintegration is spread by waves. And he had found a combination of wave-frequencies that interfere with the waves of annihilation to render them impotent.
“Andrade, just three months ago, demonstrated the Electron Flame to us, at a lonely spot on the desert. He was offering it to the League. A gift, that would make us supreme against any possible enemy. He convinced us that, as a weapon, the thing is incredibly destructive.
“We returned to Acestron, after the demonstration. And he remained in his laboratory, with one assistant. We did not dream that any save the six of us knew of the discovery.
“Andrade was murdered that night. The assistant, who had not been wakened, met us when we returned next morning. He took us to the body of the scientist. It was in the laboratory—burned to a crisp with a ray-needle. And the Electron Flame was gone!”
“What, precisely, was taken?” asked White. “Bulky apparatus?”
“No,” said the Secretary. “I should have been more specific. No equipment at all was taken. Merely a sheet of yellow paper. The Electron Flame, you see, was a mathematical discovery. The waves that initiate the process—as well as those that stop it—can be produced by our ordinary radio oscillators.
“What the thief took was merely a sheet of paper upon which is written the precise intensities and frequencies of the waves necessary to start and to stop the process of annihilation. Unfortunately there was no other copy. If we knew how to extinguish the Flame—”
“Were the figures short enough to be easily memorized?”
“Not easily. All four of us saw them; Andrade in fact explained them to us. They are quite exact, you understand. Decimals. Between the two processes the page was pretty well covered. Only an exceptional memory could carry it.”
“Yellow paper, you say?”
“Here is a similar sheet the assistant found for us.”
The Secretary took from a drawer of the table a folded sheet of heavy yellow paper. White took it from him, unfolded it, felt its texture as he stared at it, and then, folding it again, put it in his pocket.
“The assistant,” he asked, “has been eliminated as a suspect?”
“He has been in solitary confinement. We’ve had—well, psychologists. The poor fellow is half dead. We’re convinced he has no guilty knowledge. And it’s certain he’s had nothing to do with the recent demands of the thief.”
“How did the thief approach the laboratory?”
“We don’t know. Presumbably by rocket. But there were no traces. Not an identifying mark or object was left about the laboratory. We have had the best men, you understand. The job was thorough—”
“So far as it went,” smiled White.
“And they found nothing. Not a clue.”
“You have tried to trace the thief through the agents whose demands you speak of?”
“Of course. But they have an excellent organization—
they are really clever men. We captured one of them. He claimed—with apparent sincerity—not to know the whereabouts of the thief; his orders came, he said, by tight-beam radio from some other member of the gang whose address he did not know. And we were forced to release the man, by the threats of the thief.”
“The man has yet made no actual use of the weapon?”
“None. We dare not let him. His messages convinced us that he really possesses it. He threatens to strike first at Acestron, if we refuse his demands. We have not refused. It would mean panic! The disruption of League!”
“Here’s the situation!” abruptly boomed the Admiral. “The gang have the Electron Flame. With the figures on that yellow paper, they can destroy at will any city in the System. Or a whole continent. Or an entire planet, if they choose. We have no idea of the leader’s identity. We’ve no idea where he is. We can’t move the Fleet, or take any public measures to search for him—because he has forbidden it! We’re helpless.”
White stood for a time in front of the table, with the tips of his fingers in contact, looking thoughtfully at the floor.
“Can you tell me,” he asked at length, “if all the moons of Mars are occupied?”
“Deimos is a penal colony, you know,” the Secretary informed him. “And Phobos is devoted to the munitions factories and arsenals of the Fleet.”
“But there are two smaller moons.[*]
“So there are. Or lumps of rock. Neither of them half a mile in diameter. One of them is the seat of the Astronautical Observatory, and the other, I believe, is owned privately.”
“By whom?”
l “I see no sense in this!” boomed the Admiral. “If you are merely a tourist, Mr. White—”
“Please answer my question,” said White.
“Marth, I believe, is the owner,” said the Secretary. “Cyrus Marth, the radium magnate. Made millions, you know, in Radium of Callisto, Ltd. Bought the satellite for his private estate. Had planetary engineers make all modern improvements. Micronia, he calls it. I’ve seen descriptions of it.”
“Please find out for me,” requested White, “if Micronia was above the horizon when Andrade first demonstrated his invention to the four of you.”
“I can tell you that,” said the Admiral. He took a complex little device from his pocket, pushed various keys upon it, and read a dial. “It was. Within ten degrees from the zenith.”
“Thank you,” said White. “I shall report to you.”
“Understand,” said the Secretary, “there is no limit upon your expenses.”
From the drawer in the table he produced a heavy ray-needle, and a thick bundle of credit of exchange vouchers.
“Here is five million. Feel free to call for more at any time. We are interested only in results.”
White smiled vaguely.
“My bill,” he said, “will be rendered at the end of the year.”
“You have a pistol?” queried the Secretary.
“No,” White replied. “When all the batteries of the Fleet are useless, I should not expect much aid from a single ray-needle.”
He turned silently and walked out of the room.
“We are fools, gentlemen!” boomed the Admiral, “to expect anything from him!”
A tiny “space-shell” was slipping through the frigid void. A torpedo-shape of bright metal, silvered to reflect the heat of the supernal sun, driven athwart the vacuum of space by miniature rocket motors. Ten feet in length and but three in diameter at its widest, it provided accommodation for but a single passenger, and that for short trips only.
Lying inside it, hands on its controls, eyes fastened to its vitrolene observation panels, White guided it toward the tiny satellite Micronia, the inhabited planetoid of which the Secretary had told him.
A bright, misty speck floating within the star-clustered yawning chasm of the infinite void, it grew larger before him, hung against utter blackness. A rugged mass of rock, not two thousand feet in diameter. But he could see that it had been improved. A faint veil of atmosphere softened the harsh outlines of its black, jagged pinnacles. In the “valleys” was green vegetation. He saw even a tiny lake—or perhaps, he thought, in consideration of its relative size, it should be called a sea.
The planetary engineer, indeed, is a worker of scientific miracle. His raw material is a bare asteroid, an airless, lifeless fragment of rock, scorched upon one side by the unchecked flame of the sun and frozen on the other by the ultimate Night of space.
He drives a shaft to the center of the barren planetoid, and installs there a Vindall gravitator, adjusted to make the surface gravitation of the tiny rock equal to that of the earth, and to enable it to hold an atmosphere.
Then, setting up his Kappa elemental transmutators, he feeds them rock blasted from the surface of the little world, which is transformed into water and atmospheric gases. Aided by chemicals and bacteria, he forms soil from finely ground rock, and plants vegetation to maintain the new atmosphere in a breathable condition.
Finally he releases special harmless gases, to reflect or absorb the sun’s heat as may be necessary to secure the desired average temperature. With that, the miracle is complete; a lonely and useless rock has been made into a livable world.
l White guided his space-shell toward the tiny lake, which lay in the deeper depression of Micronia, a sheet of crystal blue, green-bordered, and walled with rough black crags. Above it spread the wide wings of an imposing, white-roofed residence, half surrounded with trees. Behind the residence was a vast, barn-like structure of silvered metal, which, he knew, must be the hangar of the space-yacht which the owner of such an island of the void would surely possess.
At the summit of a rock above the house White saw a small building, above which rose the complex coils and mirrors of directional antennas designed for secret, tight-wave transmission. Beside the building was a small dome through which projected the barrel of a telescope.
A number of men, all in white and wearing pith helmets—for the sun pierces pitilessly through the thin atmosphere of such a tiny world—were busy about the grounds. Most of them, White saw, carried ray-needles. They were, he thought, trying to watch his approach without appearing to do so.
He landed near the shore of the lake, and unfastening the cap of the space-shell, clambered out upon the green turf. At the edge of the crystal water he paced back and forth a few times to limber his travel-weary muscles. Still he wore the grey clothing and the unobtrusive yet confident manner of his interview with the Council of the Planetary League.
A hard-faced man in white, with a vicious looking ray-needle strapped to his side, came striding from a mass of flowering shrubbery below the white pile of the residence.
“Did you know,” he asked harshly, “that Micronia is a private estate?”
White looked at him with his vague smile. “So I understood,” he said in colorless tones.
“Mr. Marth permits absolutely no trespassing. You must leave at once.”
“I did not come to trespass,” White informed him mildly. “I wish to see Mr. Marth.”
The man scanned him frostily.
Mr. Marth does not receive strangers.
“He will see me,” quietly stated White.
“Well, come along,” the guard told him shortly.
The man led the way up the green, lovely slope from the lake-shore, toward the immense white building that was half hidden among lofty trees. Gaunt and rugged rocks walled the tiny valley. Above them the sky, through the thin atmosphere of Micronia, was nearly black. Stars pricked it with pale points; the small sun blazed fiercely in it; and Mars was suspended there like a huge, gibbous red moon.
His guide stalked ahead of White, and another armed man fell in behind.
White was perspiring in the hot air when they reached the broad verandah above the valley. He leaned against a gigantic pillar, and mopped his face with his hanker-chief. His conductor rang a bell at the massive door, and a small panel in it opened.
