Collected Short Fiction, page 259
Yet he was only a bare sixth of the way to Persephone. He was lighting the twin pains, from without and within, striving once more to increase his speed, when, abruptly, his orientation was blotted out.
The tiny red Sun, the cold and distant stars, were swallowed in a cavern of darkness. Seized with a river of energy that he could not resist, he was flung spinning away. Scarlet agony engulfed him, as terrific forces tugged and battered at the cube.
HE WAS trapped in a sort of cosmic whirlpool, he knew—a colossal vortex created by the motion of the onrushing nebula. He fought its mad current with all his power, struggled to maintain the stability of the cube and gain his freedom. before he was dragged into the maw of the nebula.
Charged particles, given tremendous voltages in the stupendous electrostatic fields of the nebula, bombarded him with agonizing, paralyzing force. He sensed flaming lights of weird and incredible colors. Numbed, reeling, be was lost within the mazes of the nebula.
Once, when chance let him glimpse the Sun and a few southern constellations, they flickered in strange distortion, as if seen in curving mirrors. Light itself was twisted, lost in the terrific fields that held him.
But at last, weak and faint from loss of energy, wrenched from the tremendous field strains, numbed and battered from bombarding particles and quanta, he struggled free from the great vortex. For a time he wandered, utterly lost in the vast clouds, held to a snail’s pace by the resistance of the charged particles.
Then again, through a rift in the nebula, he caught the faint and reddened gleam of familiar stars. His orientation restored, he drove onward toward distant and unseen Persephone. Inimical radiations battered him. The treacherous suction of energy fields sought to drag him back into the monstrous cloud. He suffered agony from the increasing instability of the cube and the terrific demands upon its vital energy.
He was fighting, not for his own life, which had long since ceased to have any meaning or value in itself, but for the life of the Earth. Against the appalling darkness of the nebula, he saw forever the proud poise of Jildo’s bronze head, her blue eyes laughing or soft with affection, or flashing with injured pride; saw the graceful loveliness of her tall, fair body. She became to him the type and the symbol of the race of man. It was she whom he must save.
Onward he flashed, toward Persephone.
To Be Concluded.
The Blue Spot
Concluding a great scientific two-part novel.
UP TO NOW:
The rivalry between the families of Andrel and Jildo is almost a feud. In spite of this, Ivec Andrel loves Thadre Jildo. The thought of seeing her almost wipes out the horrible knowledge of the impending doom of the Earth.
The Sun and its family of planets must pass through a dusty nebula—a colossal cloud of nonluminous particles. This will result in an ice age so terrible that even the air will freeze and fall like snow.
Ivec’s father, knowing all this, and explaining it to his son, tells him that, with enough power, independent of the Sun, a we other-control system can be extended over the entire planet, which would keep it warm, in spite of the nebula.
The only source of this power is in the liberation of material energy. In certain laboratory experiments, the energy of the atom had been set free, but such experiments, without some catalyst to control the process, threatened to burn up the Earth.
Ivec’s grandfather had devoted his life to searching for a clue to the catalyst. He discovered a new planet, Persephone, upon which was a Blue Spot, radiating so much energy that it could only come from the controlled conversion of matter. He believed that life and intelligence existed upon Persephone, and that it had discovered the catalytic agent necessary to save Earth from cold.
Ivec’s father, having discovered a means of getting to Persephone and back, sends for his son. He explains to Ivec that he has only four months to make the trip before the nebula overtakes Earth, then he shows Ivec a small cube. By means of a special conversion apparatus, he intends to drain the minute electrical charges from his son’s body—leaving it dead—and cause the energy to reappear in the balance of the cube, making it live. Ivec is given one hour before the change.
During that hour, Barthu Jildo, Thadre’s uncle, crazy from the lust for power and the fear of death, persuades Thadre to convert his life into the cube intended for Ivec. Deceived by lies, Thadre does so.
Barthu attempts to kill Ivec, but is unsuccessful.
Ivec learns that his father has built two cubes, as preliminary attempts, which are weak and unstable. He begs to be put in one of them. His father warns him of the cube’s instability, the insane hatred of Barthu Jildo and the hostility of the masters of Persephone, but finally consents.
Wingless, Ivec Andrel flies at the speed of his will. On past the planets, suffering agonies from the increasing instability of the cube and the terrific demands upon its vital energy, he flashes toward Persephone.
VII.
IVEC drove at last, dazed with pain, through the outermost streamer of the nebula, and found himself close upon Persephone—the smallest of the planets, incalculably the most ancient.
It was smaller and more rugged than the Moon. The blotting out of the Sun would make small difference here—for a thousand million years, to this frozen world of eternal night, the Sun had been but another star. It was black, time-scarred, dead—save for the enigma of the Blue Spot.
Against the grim desolation of jagged, frozen mountains unchanged through a billion years of dark, the Blue Spot shone like a solitary eye of evil mystery. A little oval patch of strange light, its edges were dull, misty. It was like a low-clinging cloud of blue-lighted fog. He could see nothing through it.
Ivec slipped down cautiously, far from it.
Had this bleak globe been the Sun’s first cradle of life? Had warm and kindly seas once filled these black chasms of abysmal mystery? Had vegetation once softened these incredibly lofty mountains?
That seemed at first a fantastic impossibility. Yet, as his father had reasoned, the existence of the Blue Spot, with its peculiar high-energy radiations, was a certain indication of the presence of an ancient and highly developed life.
And, presently, he saw a line drawn across a rugged, riven plain. He dropped toward it. It had been a wall, he saw, a long and massive barrier of something more durable than stone. In this airless, changeless world, erosion would be imperceptibly slow—yet its dark, perdurable blocks had been shattered with the impact of unthinkable aeons of time.
Its purpose was lost with the long-dead hands that built it. But it surely spelled intelligence older than the life of Earth. He left it, drifting low and cautiously toward the Blue Spot.
Two dangers, now, were paramount in his mind.
The first was Barthu Jildo. That other mind, within the swifter, stronger photon cube, crazed with the fear of death and animated by a ruthless power lust, had doubtless arrived here long before him. It might well be that Barthu Jildo had already won the prize. In any event, he would know Ivec for a rival and one of his hated rival family. An encounter would surely mean a battle to the death, fought with the flaming light energy of the cubes.
The second danger—unknown, but, if possible, greater—was from the enigmatic masters of the Blue Spot. Doubtless they would defend the secret of material energy from any invader, which was at the same time their most precious possession and the most powerful weapon conceivable.
His existence meant little to Ivec for his own sake, now—but for the sake of the world, of Thadre Jildo, he advanced with utmost caution, slipping alertly through the eternal shadows of the black, titanic mountains.
Presently, he came within view of the Blue Spot, a hundred-mile bank of haze, shining with a peculiar dull blue, rising in a vague arch against the black and frosty sky. A barrier of fog before him, shining, mysterious. It lay heavily upon black, ragged slopes. Near the edge, a few sharp, tremendous peaks burst above it. Beyond, all was hidden.
Approaching, he was suddenly aware of the tingle of strong radiation beating against the faces of the cube.
Fears, memory, purpose, sensations, all seemed strangely dulled. His strength flowed away. The cube was falling, he knew dimly, into the shining cloud. But he didn’t care. It didn’t matter. A faint sense of danger stung him in vain. Even his life didn’t matter. Why should it? He couldn’t remember.
“UP! Fly upward!”
Although very faint, that sudden, warning voice was as real as any he had ever heard. Its anxious urgency revived his failing senses. Feebly, he tried to check the falling cube. But why should he suffer the pain of effort? What mattered?
“Upward!” the voice reached him again. “Or Gogok will destroy you. And the cold will take your world; the one you call Thadre will perish. Up!”
The name of Thadre awoke his memory. Her face seemed to float above him, white and lovely in the painful blue. He battled his numbness to rise toward it, endured increasing agony. It receded above him, mockingly; he followed through eternities of agonized despair.
Then, suddenly, he was free again, floating above that long bank of shining cloud—whose radiations he now realized, were insidious death to his photon body.
The faint voice spoke again, saying, “Come to me.”
Its slight vibration, he knew now, was not sound. With the analytic energy senses of the cube, he perceived that it was a very weak tight beam of electromagnetic radiation—projected waves of pure thought.
He was able to locate its origin approximately. It had reached him from a thousand miles away, far beneath the north pole of this rugged, night-bound little world. The soft, pure quality of the vibrations led him to think of them as feminine.
Free from the sinister trap of the Blue Spot, he directed a tight wave beam in the same direction, and began the thought emanation: “Who?”
“Do not speak to me now,” the warning reply came swiftly. “But please come and set me free. We can aid one another—if you are not discovered.” The wave was fading, very faint. “My energy is nearly exhausted. Come——”
Puzzled, and somewhat astonished that life should still exist outside the Blue Spot, on this world that must have been within a few degrees of the absolute zero for a billion years, Ivec was delighted at the promise of aid—if a little apprehensive that it might cost too much of his meager energy reserve.
He set off at once in the direction from which the wave had emanated. The cube soared over a bleak mountain range, whose cragged, hostile peaks, Ivec thought, must lift twenty miles against the planet’s feeble gravitation.
Beyond the summits, and beyond a bottomless cavern of fearful darkness, lay a vast, black plain. Upon its frozen waste reared masses of rock that had been grotesquely carved by erosion in the youth of the planet—megalithic monuments and monstrous statues to the departed life of a world long dead.
He flew many hundred miles above that fantastic cemetery, before he approached a mountain looming above it, more colossal than any he had seen. Its unimaginably rugged slopes rose fifty miles, walled with precipitous, cragged barriers of stone forbidding beyond conception.
He was hesitating, puzzled, when the faint, strange vibrations of thought reached him again: “My prison is beneath the mountain. Follow the caverns below the crater——”
Upward he soared, over hostile cliffs and the cruel fangs of minor black peaks, until he found the crater’s black pit, five miles across. He dropped into it. Colossal walls rushed upward, blotting out the stars. They narrowed, like a hideous maw.
He fell, scores of miles, into the cavernous space left by the cooling of the magmas that had formed the giant volcano. The darkness became intense beyond all his experience. In a younger world, he knew, his delicate senses could have perceived the emanation from radioactive elements in the rock. But this world was so ancient that even its uranium was dead.
He was able, at last, to find his way only by emitting a thin, searching beam from the cube—at a painful cost in precious energy.
Life, he perceived, had once reigned within these enormous, frozen caves. Strange patterns were graven here and there within the black walls. He passed above the crumbled ruins of a fantastic city, now fallen into the dust of illimitable ages.
TWICE AGAIN, as he hesitated before dividing passages, the faint thought beam brought him directions. And at last, upon the farther walls of the lowest cavern he had reached, he perceived the stark outlines of an enormous metal door.
Dimly, the fading vibrations reached him: “Here I am. Release me, if you can. Give me energy—or I die——”
No lock or handle, nor any opening, was visible on the time-blackened surface of the massive door. With an effort that cost him dazing pain, and drained his energy alarmingly, Ivec generated a beam of high-frequency radiation, which penetrated the door and revealed the ponderous mechanism of its bolts and tumblers.
The dense, heavy metal tended to dampen the field effects with which the photon body was able to manipulate material objects. Pain of effort staggered Ivec as he lifted the tumblers, slid back the heavy bolts, swung out the door’s weight upon hinges that had not moved for millenia of millenia.
Behind the door was a rectangular space, walled massively with the same dense, black, refractory metal. Within it lay a heavy, dark gray block.
“Within this block,” came the dying wave. “Cut me free——”
He tried first to shatter the block with a field effect, but it proved intensely hard and tough. He hammered at it in vain, with fragments of rock from the cavern floor. At last he was forced to attempt to cut it with a heat ray.
Beneath the thin needle of intense radiation, it proved to be highly refractory. It glowed red beneath the ray, orange, bright-yellow, intensely white. It was too tough to crack from expansion. But, at last, the surface fused, flowed beneath the ray.
Pain from effort and energy loss rose upon Ivec like a red, numbing tide. He was sharply aware of the fatal flaw in the structure of the cube, of the instability that increased with all expense of energy. But the white face of Thadre Jildo seemed to look beseechingly from the cold, gray block; it was for her that he pushed the cutting needle deeper.
The great block, at last, fell in twain. The faint thought wave directed the making of a second, shallower cut. And, at last, the prisoner of the aeons was free.
It was a sphere, less than three inches in diameter—but slightly larger than the green cube. Very feebly it shone, with a pale, milky luster, like a giant dead pearl. It lifted a little, weakly, and fell again upon the fragments of the block.
“Energy,” came the faint desperate plea. “Give me energy—or I shall die.”
Ivec dropped the cube into contact with the sphere, emitted a slight flow of radiant energy. In a few moments stronger, grateful emanations came from the sphere, to tell him which frequencies were needed. Then the entity of the pearly globe seemed to relax, drinking in the life-giving beam. Ivec increased its strength, until the pain of radiation fogged his senses with a crimson mist.
This flow of vital quanta, he knew, decreased his strength and heightened the danger of the cube’s disruption. Yet his strange, new ally was obviously unable to help either of them without such aid. He was moved, moreover, by a quick sympathy for it and the desire to understand its own situation—which, sealed in the prisoning block, must have been desperate indeed.
The nacerous globe ceased, at last, to absorb his energy. Its milky light was steady now, more intense; its voice came to him, thankful and strong: “That is enough; I am sufficiently restored. You are very generous. Let us now discuss our respective situations, and decide what must be done—for we are both in deadly peril.”
Ivec asked, “What is the danger?” The sphere replied: “Our lives are threatened both by Gogok, who is the master of this planet, and by the being Barthu Jildo, who has come from your world. They are now together, yet at peace. And the outcome of their meeting bodes evil indeed for you and me—and the people of your world.”
“I must do—something,” said Ivec uneasily, recalling his recent misadventure in the radiant deadly haze of the Blue Spot. “Who are you?” he inquired. “And why were you—here?”
“Call me Lakne,” came the swift thought radiation from the opalescent globe. “You are Ivec Andrel?”
“I am.” Ivec was somewhat surprised. “Barthu and this—Gogok—are they planning something? What is Gogok?” He hesitated apprehensively. “And what can we do?”
“Listen,” said the sphere. “I must tell you something of this planet, of Gogok and myself, and of my long imprisonment here. Then we can plan what to do. Our time is short, but you must understand.”
“Then,” urged Ivec, “tell me!”
VIII.
THE GREEN CUBE, flawed, flickering, and the softly opalescent sphere lay side by side upon the shattered prison block, beside those time-crumbled ruins that floored that black cavern within a dead and frozen world. Intently, tortured with a straining apprehension, Ivec absorbed the thought waves of the globe.
“This planet is no child of the Sun,” Lakne began the swiftly radiated story. “Ages beyond calculation past, it was born from the tides of another star. A small world, it swiftly cooled; and beneath the kindly rays of its near-by mother sun, it soon gave rise to organic life—as any planet must, when all the conditions are satisfied.
“Life in turn gave birth to intelligence, and intelligence to science. There is no time to detail the long history of the planet, as tidal forces pushed it farther out and its sun grew old and cool. But its people—my forbears—met and conquered many aspects of hostile nature. Many times they were menaced by some astronomical event, and always they survived by the triumph of science.
“But at last, as the dying world grew cold, it seemed that they must ultimately perish for want of the very stuff of life—energy. They had for ages been aware of the illimitable reservoir of power in the matter of the planet; but no scientist had found means to tap it without inviting cataclysmic catastrophe.
