Collected Short Fiction, page 163
He had been a generator-man until, ten years before, the service had automatically retired him, sent out another man to take his place. We let him stay aboard, wrapped up in the Great Idea that—had success chosen to crown it—would have made him famous. We even dug into our own pockets to make up his quarterly pay check, to provide funds to carry on the experiment that was the old man’s life.
And the girl was Tonia Andros.
Eight years old, she was, a slim little wisp of elfin gravity. She was not actually a beautiful child; her mouth was too wide and her nose turned up impudently. But her dark eyes were wistfully grave, and all of us loved her. After all, men so far from home, from family, from all that is life, could not be critical of her.
The story of Tonia Andros must have been another of those adventures of space that are the stuff of romance. We knew but a chance fragment of it. Months before, we had found the wrecked freighter drifting. A meteor stream from the nebula had struck it; the rusty hull was riddled, and all on board—save Tonia—were frozen and dead.
She had been sealed between the valves of the main air lock, where some one must have placed her after the catastrophe. The tube of oxygen in the little cavity with her was exhausted; she was unconscious from asphyxiation and cold. But we reached her in time.
But not in time to save the ship. The wreck was already fast in the relentless gravitation-field of the Dead Star. It went plunging down to incandescent ruin upon that black and dying sun, carrying with it the history of Tonia Andros, and whatever patrimony may have been hers.
The experience must have been painful; her tortured mind may have sought relief by blotting that time out of memory. Whether she remembered more we never knew, but she would tell us only her name.
Tonia was a friend to each of us. But she and old Gideon Clew felt a particular affinity. The little girl haunted his cabin, and he seemed not to fear her hands upon the precious apparatus he had gathered there.
The child must have brought something of the warm glow of life back into a nature that had been shut off from life too long. Gideon turned aside from his invention to make toys for her, with his skilled old hands. Yet he worked ever harder, and he told us that he was going to adopt her, give her home and education, when his discovery was perfected.
“When his discovery was perfected”—that phrase had been in his talk for forty years and more.
Still the thing was not done, and all of us save Gideon Clew knew that it was chimera. Now we were waiting for the Bellatrix to come down the passage. Captain Manners was retiring; our new officer was to come upon the liner. Manners was to take Tonia with him—though the child was not eager to leave Gideon Clew—to try to find a home for her.
The old man himself was torn between impatience and relief as we waited for the liner. It was almost breaking his heart to part with the child, who must have been his only really intimate companion in those five decades. But he was madly anxious for the vessel to come with a shipment of parts for his invention, that he had ordered a year before.
Time can pass slowly on Dead Star Station. A small world, completely isolated. The station is really an obsolete war-rocket, too antiquated to fly with the system’s fleets. A corroded metal hull, some two hundred feet long. Space aboard is limited, quarters cramped, means of diversion lacking.
But beyond the station’s vitrolar ports is space in abundance. The view must be the most weirdly colossal, the most awesome, in all the galaxy. The Great Nebula spans the sky like an octopus of living flame. A vast, angry sea of swirling white fire, eerily tinged with the green of nebulium, its twisting streamers reaching out like incandescent tentacles.
Unthinkably vast, those tentacles seem to grasp the Dead Star. That cyclopean cold sun is a little black disk limned against livid flame. Its dark face is patched with marks of sullen crimson—illimitable seas of yet molten lava, for the Dead Star is not utterly dead.
The hurtling meteor-streams and the seas of incandescent gas that make up the Great Nebula of Orion form the most stupendous barrier to trans-stellar navigation in the entire galaxy. Light itself, at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, takes three years and more to cross it.
But there is a way through. The Orion Passage. A lane kept cleared of darting meteors and burning gas by the colossal gravitation of the Dead Star, a titanic dark sun that lurks like a black spider in the bright web of the nebula, reaching out with resistless, invisible force for what it may draw to destruction.
No ship has ever visited the Dead Star. No rocket could pull away from its inconceivable surface gravity. It is estimated that a human body would weigh well over a hundred tons upon its surface—enough so that the bones would break and the flesh run away from them like water. The idea is unpleasant.
The station, equipped with powerful electron-blast motors to keep her clear of the giant sun’s inexorable pull, was established as an aid to navigation in the passage, her duties being to chart the continually shifting meteor-streams, inform passing shipping by photophone of the safer courses, and to go to the aid of any endangered vessels.
Time passed slowly upon the tiny metal world of the station, that was but a mote hung between titan black sun and the changeless fiery glory of the nebula. But at last the Bellatrix came. And from dull weeks of waiting, we were plunged incontinently into mad confusion.
The Bellatrix was a new vessel, of three times the station’s tonnage, regularly plying the passage. Those of us who could went aboard the liner during the little time the valves were coupled, to enjoy briefly the spaciousness of the vessel, her cosmopolitan atmosphere, the gossip of her curious passengers.
Vance, our photophone operator, returned with one interesting bit. He talked to one of her passengers, a man in an invalid chair, with a bandaged head. This man told him that the Bellatrix carried an immensely valuable cargo of uranium ingots, and that her officers had been warned to beware of Skal Doon, the inter-stellar buccaneer.
Even so, there was no great novelty in a warning against Skal Doon. He was one of the last freebooters of space, the most notorious and daring. For three decades he had been a terror of the void, escaping capture partly by a flair for originality, partly by ruthless cruelty in the elimination of opponents, and largely by an intimate knowledge of the mazes and fiery ways of the Great Nebula, which he knew as no other man. It is curious that men spoke of him with a certain admiration and respect, which he deserved as little as a human being could.
Gideon Clew and Tonia Andros parted at the valves. The child’s wistful eyes were frankly tearful as Captain Manners led her away, and old Gideon’s lisping voice choked oddly. And then the old man went to claim the long, carefully wrapped package that had come for him—the anxiously awaited parts for his invention.
Presently the new captain came aboard the station. Clive Kempton was his name. A tall young man, in severe white uniform, with the eagle insignia of the service on his cap. His face was lean and stern.
We saw at once that he was the sort that takes responsibility very seriously, that considers regulations much more holy than they are—perhaps because of a subconscious fear of criticism.
A little time of bustling, mad confusion. Stores coming aboard, cylinders of oxygen, drums of fuel for our generators. Then the last shout of farewell. The valves were sealed again, uncoupled. And the Bellatrix went on.
We upon the station were left—or so we supposed—to wait through other weary weeks, until another vessel picked its way between the flaming walls of the passage. None of us had premonition we were to see the liner again, so soon and under such distressing circumstances.
HUME, the station’s mate, was in the bridge room with the new captain, when Gideon Clew limped hesitantly in, with a hopeful smile upon his red, wrinkled face.
“Captain, thir?” he lisped, a little timidly.
“What is it?” Kempton asked brusquely. “What’s your name?”
He did not intend to be unkind. He was taking his new command much too seriously. The vague, blind hostility and the supernal power of the Great Nebula and the titanic Dead Star had already set their print of terror in his soul.
“Gideon Clew, thir. You thee, thir, I have invented a gravity-screen. I’ve just installed the last parts, that came on the Bellatrix. Pleathe, thir, may I use power from the ship’s generators to test it?”
“What’s this? A shield, you mean, against the force of gravitation?”
“Yeth, thir. I’ve been working on it many yearth, thir.”
Perhaps, if it had not been for Gideon’s lisp, Kempton would have listened. But the lisp made the bright-eyed, apple-cheeked little man unconsciously and pathetically funny; and the more serious he became, the worse his lisp. And Kempton was young; he had not yet learned that regulations are made to be broken.
“How much power do you need?” he asked.
“Two hundred thousand kilowatts, thir.”
Kempton, astonished, looked inquiringly around at Hume.
“Why, that’s the full capacity of our generators!”
“I know, thir. But just a few minuteth——”
“Just who are you, anyhow?” the captain demanded.
Gideon’s wide blue eyes stared at him in bewilderment, and Hume spoke to explain the old fellow’s status upon the station.
“You know, it’s against regulations for you to be here at all,” Kempton said. “You must prepare to leave, Clew, when the Bellatrix returns. I don’t understand how it happened.”
“But, thir, the power——”
“I must refuse your extraordinary request. Of course! I want you to realize this is not a playhouse. And not an old man’s home. I don’t understand it!”
The serious, bright eyes about the man’s little red cheeks were fixed intently upon Kempton’s face for a long time. Then they began to blink, and Hume saw huge, slow tears gathering in them.
“Yeth, thir,” Gideon whispered. And he stood there.
Kempton and Hume were busy with the astrographic charts, checking their maps of the nebula’s flaming streamers, which flooded the bridge with greenish, ghostly radiance. Kempton seemed to forget.
Clew, and the little man stood there blinking. It must have been ten minutes later that he spoke again.
“Captain Kempton, thir?”
“Eh? Oh, you’re still here? What is it?”
The bright eyes winked bravely.
“Captain, you don’t understand, thir. I’ve been working on my gravity-screen nearly fifty yearth. Ever since I first came here, thir. It was the Dead Thtar, tho near. I got books on electronics. I studied hard, thir.
“Other men have come and gone, thir. Even the mechanics stay only thix yearth, you know. Because it is tho lonely. Now, thir, it is done. An electronic field, a screen of ions, that flows over the surface of any conductor, and reflects, dissipates, the radiations of gravity.”
Kempton laughed. He did not intend to be malicious; there was something irresistibly funny about Gideon Clew, lisping so seriously.
“Why, gravitation isn’t even a radiation, man! It’s a strain in the ether, a curvature——”
“I know, thir, that is one theory. But I have proved it is a radiation, on the order of the subelectronic particles——”
Kempton was suddenly brusque. Angry with himself because he had laughed.
“Anyhow, you’ll have to give it up. We’ve no fuel to waste on fool experiments.”
He bent over the charts again. Gideon Clew turned dazedly toward the door, moisture glittering unheeded on his bright, wrinkled cheeks. It is not easy for a man to give up what he has worked for all his life—not when he has labored and planned and dreamed as had Gideon Clew.
He turned and lisped again: “Captain, thir?”
“What is it now?” Kempton showed his annoyance at the interruption.
“Captain, there’s Tonia Andros. A little girl, that we took off a wreck. When my invention is successful, thir, I am going to adopt her——”
“Sorry, Clew, I’m busy.” Kempton nodded at the door.
“Yeth, thir.”
Gideon Clew blinked and turned slowly again. He fumbled for the door knob with twisted old fingers, and could not see it. “Wait!” came Kempton’s brisk voice, and he turned, sober blue eyes shining with incredulous hope.
“Thir?”
“I suppose you’ve a clutter of apparatus in your cabin. See that it’s cleared out. Have it all in order when you leave.”
“But captain, thir, I can’t dismantle my apparatus. I’m an old man. I’ll never have money, or a chance to try it again. Oh, don’t you thee?”
There was something in the appealing blue eyes that Kempton could not resist.
“All right,” he said suddenly. “I’ll have Mr. Colin supply you the power-output, for exactly five minutes. I shouldn’t do it; it’s against regulations.”
Gideon’s face was wrinkled into a grin of radiant joy; his round blue eyes shone mistily.
“Go on, now, and try it,” Kempton said. “And afterward clear the rubbish out of your cabin.”
Gideon vanished, and the station’s lights were dim for five minutes, and the electron-blast motors dead for that long, allowing us to drift to the unopposed drag of the Dead Star’s relentless gravity.
During those minutes, Gideon Clew was furiously busy in his cabin, among complex apparatus that filled it so completely that there was scant room for his body. Transformers hummed, and the tall vacuum tube that the Bellatrix had brought filled with pallid, virescent fire. He closed a switch that grounded one of its electrodes to the station’s hull. A feeble green glow shimmered along the wire.
Gideon Clew felt the ship pause beneath him as that slow drift toward the Dead Star was arrested! Crying out from sheer pain of joy at success after fifty years of toil, he watched in proud wonder.
Plop!
He heard the hollow, muffled sound. Heart sinking, he spun around. Green radiance was gone from tube and wire. The new tube had burned out!
“Captain, thir,” Gideon lisped with earnest eagerness, back on the bridge, “didn’t you feel our drift-acceleration stop, when my electronic screen cut off the attraction of the Dead Thtar?”
“No, I’m afraid not. And remember our bargain, now. You’ve had the power. Now you must dismantle your machine, and get it ready to take on board the Bellatrix.”
“But captain, I know——”
Clive Kempton turned, reached for an ellipsograph. He was a young man, full of his new responsibility. And he did not realize how much Gideon’s experiment had meant to the old fellow.
The bright, sober eyes were blinking very fast. Trembling hands fumbled blindly at the door. Gideon Clew let himself out, and stood a long time leaning against the wall. An old man, sick with failure. He was glad that none came near him.
The Bellatrix, flashing onward along the flaming corridor of the passage, was still in photophone communication with us. A private call came for Gideon Clew, and Vance, our operator, sent the steward to find the old man.
“A call for me, thir?” he lisped in excited astonishment as he shuffled into the photophone room. It must have been the first in fifty years.
Vance made him sit down in front of the projection screen, and tuned his set and synchronized the scanning tube. The bright-hued geometric figures of the registration pattern vanished suddenly, and on the screen was Tonia Andros.
“Oh, Granddad!” she cried, in a voice atremble with eager joy and relief. And she ran forward until she went out of focus, and blurred.
Smiling reassuringly, Gideon lisped: “What ith it, Tonia?”
Vance and the other operator were inevitable eavesdroppers, for without their continual adjustments, the narrow etheric nerve between the ships would have snapped in half a minute. The two seemed to forget them.
The little girl’s image sharpened again, and she stood there, bewildered, dark eyes round and huge and solemn.
“Oh, Granddad!” she pleaded—she always called him that. “I’m so lonesome! I made them let me talk to you. I want you to come and stay with me. Please, won’t you? You said you would come when your invention is done. Please hurry!”
Gideon clenched his gnarled old hands, and his blue eyes glistened.
“No, Tonia,” he whispered. “No, I’m afraid——” He choked and stopped. Tears rolled out on his cheeks and he did not heed them. “No, Tonia,” he cried again. “My invention—will never be—finished. And, Tonia, I—have to go away——”
“But, Granddad!” Her grave voice was distressed. “You promised me! You must!”
“Tonia!” he cried convulsively. “Tonia, I will! In spite of everything! I’ll come after you!”
She laughed happily. Then the other operator must have spoken to her, for she looked away from the screen, and back again.
“Good-by, Granddad!” she called. “I’ll wait!”
“Good-by, Tonia,” whispered Gideon Clew. But the connection had already been cut, and he spoke to a blank and empty screen.
NOT AN HOUR later, Vance’s call-bell rang again, urgently.
When the set was tuned, he saw the Bellatrix’s operator on the screen. And swift realization of tragedy overcame him. The man’s cap was gone, his face haggard, his eyes wild with desperation. His white uniform, Vance saw, was torn at the shoulder, one sleeve crimson with blood that dripped and spattered on the floor.
The man’s lips were working nervously; he was gasping. Apparently he was too frightened to speak.
“Cool off!” Vance shot at him. “What is it?”
“Come——” he cried incoherently.
“For life’s sake! They murdered the captain! Come!”
Vance heard blows upon the Bellatrix’s door, and shouts beyond it. The wounded operator turned and stared mutely, as three men burst it open and came in, all of them carrying glowing ionic needles. The operator stood facing them, trembling, helpless, blood dripping from his sleeve.
Vance knew the leader of the three at once by one feature of his face, described in many warnings and offers of reward. He had no nose. Only a blue ray-scar where it should have been, with two black slits for nostrils.
