Collected Short Fiction, page 308
A weakening voice sobbed his name. Arthedne dropped beside him. Her bright wings turned pallid, vanished. She swayed. He caught her in his arms.
“Arthedne,” he whispered. “My darling—what—?”
“I did it, Ames—for you. Invisible, I escaped them, and flew to the tower. I reversed the sigma-field—Dr. Hope gave us the secret of that. It ended the New Lands—and the Tech-men—and—me!”
She shuddered in his arms.
“Good-by, Ames, dear. But, try—”
She clung to him. He kissed her lips—they seemed already cold. Her arms stiffened suddenly. A clear crimson gleam pulsed through her antennae. Trembling, she gasped:
“Quick, Ames! The tower! The Tech-Czar—still alive—”
The warning uttered, she went limp in his arms. The antennae drooped, turned lifeless gray. Heavy lids fell wearily across the pools of her eyes. Ames laid her down tenderly, and ran into the tower.
An elevator, when his fumbling had mastered the controls, shot him upward. He leapt out, into the vast, red-litten hall of the Tech-Czar.
The seat behind the desk was empty, the metal-bodied ruler gone. Had the Tech-Czar protected himself against reversal of the field? Ames caught a gleam from the desk—a tiny hypodermic, lying in a stain of spilled green liquid.
Meshing gears clashed, beyond, followed by a rising whine. Terror struck Ames, a stunning avalanche. That must be the sigma-field generator, that Arthedne had stopped. The Tech-Czar must be setting it going again, to restore the Dead Spot!
Staggered with despair, Ames realized that he was unarmed. He ran back toward the elevator, snatched from a dead Tech-man a heavy thing of crystal and white metal that might serve as a club.
With that, he stumbled into the vast room beyond the desk of the Tech-Czar. It was crowded with tremendous mechanisms. Some he could recognize. Atomic converters, evidently based on the same principles he had discovered. Colossal generators, transformers, thirty-foot vacuum tubes. Vast coils wound on a cylindrical core that must be the base, he thought, of the purple-shining spire.
That thing made the Dead Spot!
His bewildered, racing eyes found another thing he recognized: a replica of his own super-cyclotron. Its 400-ton electro-magnet loomed forty feet above. He saw its ray-screened observation cage, far across the room. Had his own discovery been turned against the world?
THEN he saw the Tech-Czar, towering beside the switchboard of the sigma-field generator. Ames shuddered, his fingers tense on the club. What could he do, against the steel tons of that fifteen-foot colossus?
Yet he made himself slip forward. The mounting river of tremendous sound swept away the little noise he made. Faint hope lifted him. Perhaps, one sudden blow—
But that lofty head turned abruptly. Huge lenses stared at him, out of that monstrous metal visage. And a great metal voice grated out:
“Well, Ryeland Ames! You come in time to witness the finish of your race. We had been expanding the New Lands slowly, to make room for Technopolis only as we required it. But now I am stepping up the field to embrace all the planet—and blot out your degraded and obsolescent breed!”
The Tech-Czar bent ominously toward the control board. And the aching body of Ames tensed, quivered. He steadied himself against the cold mass of the super-cyclotron, tried to calm his spinning brain.
“You have not destroyed Technopolis, Ryeland Ames.” The huge lenses glittered at him, like blue orbs of evil. “For I am Technopolis!”
A giant arm dropped toward the dials and switches.
“Wait!” The voice of Ames came hoarse and breathless, choked with a startled incredulity. “Tech-Czar!—I know who you are! And I know how to stop you—and Technopolis!”
Slowly, his trembling hands lifted the unfamiliar weapon.
“And I know why the SSS failed to stop the Dead Lands,” rang his hard accusations. “And why my plane fell in the Dead Lands! And why my atomic bomb did not explode—”
The metal colossus had reeled away from the control-board. It came lumbering toward him with a tread that shook the floor. The frantic fingers of Ames fumbled with the unknown device, as if he half-understood it.
“I know why you survived the Tech-men!”
The shining giant towered over him. Steel limbs crushed down, like colossal hammers. Ames dropped the unfamiliar weapon, flung himself back against the super-cyclotron.
“Die!” rasped the Tech-Czar. “With your evil breed—”
But the groping fingers of Ames found a familiar lever. Blue sparks leapt from an automatic switch. The hum of the generators deepened, to a new load. The dropped weapon flew toward the colossal magnet, crashed and clung against it.
The brazen voice of the Tech-Czar instantly stopped. And the great metal body toppled deliberately forward. Ames pushed back the little lever, to stop the super-cyclotron, stepped quickly aside. The Tech-Czar crashed down where he had stood.
“No, your metal disguise didn’t take me in,” he whispered softly to the inert, colossal mechanism. “Because I saw the needle on your desk, and the spilled catalyst. And I knew how to stop you, because once I ruined a good watch by coming too near when the super-cyclotron was running—and I knew that the magnetic relay in your head was a good deal more delicate than a watch.”
The fall had shattered the crystal panels from the turret. And the gaunt gray face that stared up at Ames, rigid and hideous in the unseeing agony of death, was the face of Dr. Gresham Rathbone!
“When the Tech-Czar didn’t die,” whispered Ames, “I knew he was a man. And you were the logical one. Because you had worked with Dr. Hope, and knew all about the Tech-men—more than you ever told me.
“You were jealous of Hope, and hated him—that’s clear from your lies about him. You must have been eager enough to lead the revolt of the Tech-men. And you must have made millions out of the transmuted metals, slipping in and out by rocket!”
Ames stopped the atomic converters, stilled that thundering river of power. He went back, weary and alone, through the Tech-Czar’s silent hall, and down to the voiceless streets.
IN the gray cold light of a cheerless dawn, he sought Arthedne. Chilled, shivering, he peered up and down the shadowed canyon. In its hushed quiet, death was a near reality. Ames hadn’t realized how tired he was, or what irreparable damage the radiations of the Dead Lands had done his big body. He reeled. His vision blurred. All his being was a flame of slow, quenchless fire.
But he stumbled on. At last his failing eyes glimpsed a shapeless blot of white, unmoving on the pavement. That must be Arthedne. Last of the wondrous race that might have come—
He halted, groping, bewildered.
Light as a breath of wind, something had brushed his stinging face. His dimming eyes caught a flicker of gay color, tenuous, vanishing. A sweet, familiar voice came to him, faintly:
“Wait, Ames—my darling! Don’t go back to—that. For I am here!”
He put out his hands, fumbling blindly.
“Arthedne?” he whispered incredulously. “You are still—living? Where are you, Arthedne? It is growing so dark! I heard your voice, but I can’t see you.”
“Here I am, Ames,” he thought she said. “Here beside you.”
He felt a light cool touch on his shoulder. Swaying heavily on his feet, he spurred his weary senses, trying to see her again.
“I thought—” he gasped, “thought—you died.”
“Yes, Ames, my body died.” The tiny voice came through thickening mists, from far away. “But there was another power, which I had only suspected, that came to me in the moment of death. Through the same organs that enabled me to fly and to vanish, it created a new field in space, that can be the dwelling of my being, forever.”
He swayed, giddily.
“I feel in you something of the same power, Ames—for in you was evolution following the path of my lost people. With the aid of that—if you will try, Ames dear—you can come to me.”
The mists closed in, dense and black. A cold numbness blotted away all pain. Ames knew, dimly, that he was falling.
“Come to me, Ames.” Small and definitely remote, he still heard Arthedne’s voice. “Come across the barrier!” He tried—
The Special Secret Service discovered, that day, that the Dead-Spot was no longer dead. A plane landed at noon on the gray dust beside Technopolis, and triple S operatives hastened to explore its silent wonders. They found Ryeland Ames and Arthedne, lying side by side. On both their faces was the shadow of a wondering, hopeful smile.
1939
Nonstop to Mars
Here is the record of Lucky Leith’s incredible flight; how he piloted his ancient ship through the thunder between two worlds—to become the first Robinson Crusoe of space. A complete novelet
I
SOMETHING was queerly wrong—with either the ship or the air. And Carter Leigh knew that it couldn’t be the ship. The creaking old Phoenix might be obsolescent in a world that the new cathion rockets had conquered, but he knew every bolt and strut of her. Knew her well enough to take her apart and put her up again, in the dark. And loved her, for her loyalty through six years and half a million miles of solo flight.
No, the trouble couldn’t be in the Phoenix. It had to be the atmosphere.
He couldn’t understand it. But the barometric altimeter had kept luring him down, toward frozen peaks that loomed a thousand feet higher than they should have been. The engine labored, and the thrust of it weakened dangerously. And the wind that struck him over the pole was a screaming demon, more freakishly violent than he had ever met before.
It baffled him. Through all the endless, weary night, deaf with the long thunder of the loyal old engine, sitting stiff with cold even in his electrically heated suit, gulping coffee from a vacuum jug, pouring over charts and studying instruments with aching blood-shot eyes—ever since the last strange sunset, he had hopelessly picked at the sinister riddle.
Nonstop flights were nothing new to Carter Leigh. Men. locking at the long record of his feats, had nicknamed him “Lucky.” But he had something more than luck. In his lean body there was the tremendous endurance that it took to fly on. hour after straining hour, when most men would have dropped over the stick.
And this flight—nonstop from Capetown to Honolulu, across the bottom of the world—had promised to be no harder than the rest. Not until he saw that last sunset.
Behind him, beyond toe cragged granite fangs of Enderby Land, as he climbed above the ramparts of the polar plateau, the sunset had been frighteningly strange. An incredible wheel of crimson, rolling along the rim of the world, it had been winged and tufted with eldritch green.
The aurora was another disquieting scrap of the puzzle. It burned above him all that night, whenever the sky was clear, until all the white antarctic wilderness seemed on fire with its sinister and shifting brilliance.
The cold was another thing. Leigh had made polar flights be fire. But never had he met such merciless temperatures. The motor, even with cowl ventilators closed, grew sluggish with it. It crept into the cockpit and probed deep into his body.
Beyond the pole and Marie Byrd Land, over the dark Antarctic again, he met a wall of cloud. He tried to climb over it. Heavy and dull with altitude and fatigue, he opened the oxygen valve. The vital gas revived him a little. But the plane could not scale the summits of vapor. He flew into them—wondering.
SAVAGE winds battled in the cloud, and it was riven with lightning. Rain hammered the ship, and froze on it, until the ice dragged it almost to the surface. Leigh fought the elements, and fought the mounting weariness in him, and came at last unexpectedly into the calm of a strange northward dawn.
The aurora was fading from a sky grown brilliantly clear. Studded with white points of icebergs, the gray South Pacific was sliding back at three hundred and fifty miles an hour—still a good pace, he thought stubbornly, even if the rockets were three times as fast.
Leigh was peeling an orange, beginning to hope that all the terror of the night had been the child of fancy and fatigue, when he saw the thing in the northeast. Against the red and green of a suddenly disturbing dawn, it fell like a silver thread.
A white, spiral vortex—the funnel of a great tornado. He saw a blob of gray mist about the foot of it, marching over the sea. The upper end of it, oddly, was lost above the bright wings of dawn.
Leigh had never seen a storm just like this one. At first he thought there was no danger to him. But the white, writhing snake of it whipped toward him with an appalling quickness.
It seized the Phoenix in a sudden blast of wind, sucking the ship toward that racing funnel. Sea and sky spun madly. He was lifted so swiftly that his eardrums ached. Grimly he fought it, with all his calm skill and all the familiar strength of the ship.
He fought—and won. The white pillar left him fluttering in its wake and marched on into the west. Hurried observation of the higher sun told Leigh that he had been flung fifteen hundred miles northward.
But he knew, with a sinking in his heart, that the Phoenix was crippled. Her right aileron had been twisted and jammed by the force of that incredible wind. He would have to set her down.
Whistling the tune of Barbara Allen, which always seemed to cheer him, Leigh searched the maps. He found a pinprick of land named Manumotu—the only possible haven in a thousand miles—and turned the limping amphibian toward it, flying with rudder and throttle.
One more failure. Two, he reflected bitterly, in a row. For the last flight, two months ago, had failed also, from a cause as strange as that tornado.
A “bipolar” flight, Tick Tinker had called the last one. Tick was the tireless little publicity man, one-legged and one-eyed, who was Leigh’s partner in his singular business of wresting a living from the air. “Bipolar,” because the route from Croydon back to Croydon along the prime meridian included both the poles. Leigh had safely rounded the planet, with but three scheduled stops. But the flight had failed just the same, because of the Stellar Shell.
“We’re an out-of-doors advertising firm, Lucky,” Tick used to say. “You fly for attention value. And I sell it to the makers of oil and piston rings and what-have-you. And it’s a legitimate business, so long as you can keep in the headlines.”
But all the headlines two months ago had been about the Stellar Shell. Some astronomer named Gayle, the day Leigh took off from Croydon, announced discovery of a mysterious missile plunging out of the depths of space, toward the solar system. The “bipolar” flight had earned no more than a few sticks of space on the inside pages. For the black streamers ran:
STELLAR SHELL SHOT AT PLANETS;
WILL OBJECT STRIKE EARTH?
ASTRONOMERS BAEFLED
When Leigh came in to Croydon again, the flight completed in three grueling days, there was no crowd to meet him, Staggering away from the dusty, oil-spattered Phoenix, he himself paused to buy a paper.
COSMIC BULLET HITS MARS;
EARTH SPARED;
NATURE OF OBJECT UNKNOWN
There had been no more news of the Stellar Shell, nothing more than the speculations of bewildered scientists. But the flight was already ruined. Tick Tinker had radiographed:
CONGRATS ON BIPOLAR FLIGHT. BUT STELLAR SHELL HOGGED THE HEADLINES. FLIGHT TOTAL LOSS FINANCIALLY. YOUR NAME GETTING RAPIDLY UNKNOWN. TESTIMONIALS BEGGING AT CUT RATES. URGENT RELEASE DETAILS NEW PUBLICITY FLIGHT. SUGGEST SOMETHING NONSTOP POLAR. USE ZEROLUBE BRAND OILS FOR TESTIMONIAL.
And so Tick’s message had brought him here, dead with fatigue and heading toward a speck of reck that probably had no inhabitant.
THE motor covered the windshield with a thin spray of oil, and Leigh stopped his whistling briefly to curse all Zerolube products. He plugged in his helmet phones and switched on the little battery transmitter. It was good for just ten minutes of continuous sending—the Phoenix had no room for heavier equipment, not even emergency rations.
“SOS!” he called. “Pilot Leigh in airplane Phoenix for red down by storm. Will try to land on Manumotu. SOS—” The instant reply surprised him: “Manumotu Station, Gayle Foundation, calling airplane Phoenix. Dr. E.K. Gayle speaking. Land on north beach. I will stand by to assist you Come in, airplane Phoenix.”
“Airplane Phoenix calling Manumotu Station,” gasped Leigh, relieved. “Thanks, doc. I’ll be seeing you, if I can keep out of the water half ai hour longer. Signing off.”
It took an hour—an hour that seemed endless to Carter Leigh fighting the fatigue in him and nursing the crippled plane. But at last Manumotu came out of the sparkling northward haze. A cragged volcanic summit appeared sheer on three sides, edged on the north with a scrap of coral beach.
He crossed the beach. A broad rocky bench above it was tufted with tropical green. A long shed-like building of white sheet metal stood upon it, a white tent, and a great pile of crates covered with brown tarpaulins. A white flag waved. Then he saw the tiny figure running from the tent toward the beach.
The landing was hazardous. The crippled wing caught the crest of a wave and covered the plane with spray. She staggered, but came up bravely. He taxied in and rolled up on the blinding coral sand.
Following the signals of the flag, he brought the Phoenix to a safe dry stop where a rocket must have been moored, for there were deep wheel-marks in the sand, and the hibiscus bushes beyond were scorched black as if from rocket jets.
Heavily, his legs as stiff as if they never had been straightened before, he climbed out of the cockpit. The person with the flag came to meet him. A slim young figure, in boots and breeches, khaki shirt open at the throat, yellow head bare. A crisp voice, brisk, impersonal, greeted him:
“Hello. You are the famous Lucky Leigh?”
“In person,” he grinned. “And thanks for showing me the way in, doc—”
His jaw fell. This was a woman—a girl. Her intent oval face was dark with sun. Her keen blue eyes were scanning his heavy, swaying body—not altogether, he thought, with approval.
“Oh!” he said. “I thought you were Dr. Gayle.”
“Arthedne,” he whispered. “My darling—what—?”
“I did it, Ames—for you. Invisible, I escaped them, and flew to the tower. I reversed the sigma-field—Dr. Hope gave us the secret of that. It ended the New Lands—and the Tech-men—and—me!”
She shuddered in his arms.
“Good-by, Ames, dear. But, try—”
She clung to him. He kissed her lips—they seemed already cold. Her arms stiffened suddenly. A clear crimson gleam pulsed through her antennae. Trembling, she gasped:
“Quick, Ames! The tower! The Tech-Czar—still alive—”
The warning uttered, she went limp in his arms. The antennae drooped, turned lifeless gray. Heavy lids fell wearily across the pools of her eyes. Ames laid her down tenderly, and ran into the tower.
An elevator, when his fumbling had mastered the controls, shot him upward. He leapt out, into the vast, red-litten hall of the Tech-Czar.
The seat behind the desk was empty, the metal-bodied ruler gone. Had the Tech-Czar protected himself against reversal of the field? Ames caught a gleam from the desk—a tiny hypodermic, lying in a stain of spilled green liquid.
Meshing gears clashed, beyond, followed by a rising whine. Terror struck Ames, a stunning avalanche. That must be the sigma-field generator, that Arthedne had stopped. The Tech-Czar must be setting it going again, to restore the Dead Spot!
Staggered with despair, Ames realized that he was unarmed. He ran back toward the elevator, snatched from a dead Tech-man a heavy thing of crystal and white metal that might serve as a club.
With that, he stumbled into the vast room beyond the desk of the Tech-Czar. It was crowded with tremendous mechanisms. Some he could recognize. Atomic converters, evidently based on the same principles he had discovered. Colossal generators, transformers, thirty-foot vacuum tubes. Vast coils wound on a cylindrical core that must be the base, he thought, of the purple-shining spire.
That thing made the Dead Spot!
His bewildered, racing eyes found another thing he recognized: a replica of his own super-cyclotron. Its 400-ton electro-magnet loomed forty feet above. He saw its ray-screened observation cage, far across the room. Had his own discovery been turned against the world?
THEN he saw the Tech-Czar, towering beside the switchboard of the sigma-field generator. Ames shuddered, his fingers tense on the club. What could he do, against the steel tons of that fifteen-foot colossus?
Yet he made himself slip forward. The mounting river of tremendous sound swept away the little noise he made. Faint hope lifted him. Perhaps, one sudden blow—
But that lofty head turned abruptly. Huge lenses stared at him, out of that monstrous metal visage. And a great metal voice grated out:
“Well, Ryeland Ames! You come in time to witness the finish of your race. We had been expanding the New Lands slowly, to make room for Technopolis only as we required it. But now I am stepping up the field to embrace all the planet—and blot out your degraded and obsolescent breed!”
The Tech-Czar bent ominously toward the control board. And the aching body of Ames tensed, quivered. He steadied himself against the cold mass of the super-cyclotron, tried to calm his spinning brain.
“You have not destroyed Technopolis, Ryeland Ames.” The huge lenses glittered at him, like blue orbs of evil. “For I am Technopolis!”
A giant arm dropped toward the dials and switches.
“Wait!” The voice of Ames came hoarse and breathless, choked with a startled incredulity. “Tech-Czar!—I know who you are! And I know how to stop you—and Technopolis!”
Slowly, his trembling hands lifted the unfamiliar weapon.
“And I know why the SSS failed to stop the Dead Lands,” rang his hard accusations. “And why my plane fell in the Dead Lands! And why my atomic bomb did not explode—”
The metal colossus had reeled away from the control-board. It came lumbering toward him with a tread that shook the floor. The frantic fingers of Ames fumbled with the unknown device, as if he half-understood it.
“I know why you survived the Tech-men!”
The shining giant towered over him. Steel limbs crushed down, like colossal hammers. Ames dropped the unfamiliar weapon, flung himself back against the super-cyclotron.
“Die!” rasped the Tech-Czar. “With your evil breed—”
But the groping fingers of Ames found a familiar lever. Blue sparks leapt from an automatic switch. The hum of the generators deepened, to a new load. The dropped weapon flew toward the colossal magnet, crashed and clung against it.
The brazen voice of the Tech-Czar instantly stopped. And the great metal body toppled deliberately forward. Ames pushed back the little lever, to stop the super-cyclotron, stepped quickly aside. The Tech-Czar crashed down where he had stood.
“No, your metal disguise didn’t take me in,” he whispered softly to the inert, colossal mechanism. “Because I saw the needle on your desk, and the spilled catalyst. And I knew how to stop you, because once I ruined a good watch by coming too near when the super-cyclotron was running—and I knew that the magnetic relay in your head was a good deal more delicate than a watch.”
The fall had shattered the crystal panels from the turret. And the gaunt gray face that stared up at Ames, rigid and hideous in the unseeing agony of death, was the face of Dr. Gresham Rathbone!
“When the Tech-Czar didn’t die,” whispered Ames, “I knew he was a man. And you were the logical one. Because you had worked with Dr. Hope, and knew all about the Tech-men—more than you ever told me.
“You were jealous of Hope, and hated him—that’s clear from your lies about him. You must have been eager enough to lead the revolt of the Tech-men. And you must have made millions out of the transmuted metals, slipping in and out by rocket!”
Ames stopped the atomic converters, stilled that thundering river of power. He went back, weary and alone, through the Tech-Czar’s silent hall, and down to the voiceless streets.
IN the gray cold light of a cheerless dawn, he sought Arthedne. Chilled, shivering, he peered up and down the shadowed canyon. In its hushed quiet, death was a near reality. Ames hadn’t realized how tired he was, or what irreparable damage the radiations of the Dead Lands had done his big body. He reeled. His vision blurred. All his being was a flame of slow, quenchless fire.
But he stumbled on. At last his failing eyes glimpsed a shapeless blot of white, unmoving on the pavement. That must be Arthedne. Last of the wondrous race that might have come—
He halted, groping, bewildered.
Light as a breath of wind, something had brushed his stinging face. His dimming eyes caught a flicker of gay color, tenuous, vanishing. A sweet, familiar voice came to him, faintly:
“Wait, Ames—my darling! Don’t go back to—that. For I am here!”
He put out his hands, fumbling blindly.
“Arthedne?” he whispered incredulously. “You are still—living? Where are you, Arthedne? It is growing so dark! I heard your voice, but I can’t see you.”
“Here I am, Ames,” he thought she said. “Here beside you.”
He felt a light cool touch on his shoulder. Swaying heavily on his feet, he spurred his weary senses, trying to see her again.
“I thought—” he gasped, “thought—you died.”
“Yes, Ames, my body died.” The tiny voice came through thickening mists, from far away. “But there was another power, which I had only suspected, that came to me in the moment of death. Through the same organs that enabled me to fly and to vanish, it created a new field in space, that can be the dwelling of my being, forever.”
He swayed, giddily.
“I feel in you something of the same power, Ames—for in you was evolution following the path of my lost people. With the aid of that—if you will try, Ames dear—you can come to me.”
The mists closed in, dense and black. A cold numbness blotted away all pain. Ames knew, dimly, that he was falling.
“Come to me, Ames.” Small and definitely remote, he still heard Arthedne’s voice. “Come across the barrier!” He tried—
The Special Secret Service discovered, that day, that the Dead-Spot was no longer dead. A plane landed at noon on the gray dust beside Technopolis, and triple S operatives hastened to explore its silent wonders. They found Ryeland Ames and Arthedne, lying side by side. On both their faces was the shadow of a wondering, hopeful smile.
1939
Nonstop to Mars
Here is the record of Lucky Leith’s incredible flight; how he piloted his ancient ship through the thunder between two worlds—to become the first Robinson Crusoe of space. A complete novelet
I
SOMETHING was queerly wrong—with either the ship or the air. And Carter Leigh knew that it couldn’t be the ship. The creaking old Phoenix might be obsolescent in a world that the new cathion rockets had conquered, but he knew every bolt and strut of her. Knew her well enough to take her apart and put her up again, in the dark. And loved her, for her loyalty through six years and half a million miles of solo flight.
No, the trouble couldn’t be in the Phoenix. It had to be the atmosphere.
He couldn’t understand it. But the barometric altimeter had kept luring him down, toward frozen peaks that loomed a thousand feet higher than they should have been. The engine labored, and the thrust of it weakened dangerously. And the wind that struck him over the pole was a screaming demon, more freakishly violent than he had ever met before.
It baffled him. Through all the endless, weary night, deaf with the long thunder of the loyal old engine, sitting stiff with cold even in his electrically heated suit, gulping coffee from a vacuum jug, pouring over charts and studying instruments with aching blood-shot eyes—ever since the last strange sunset, he had hopelessly picked at the sinister riddle.
Nonstop flights were nothing new to Carter Leigh. Men. locking at the long record of his feats, had nicknamed him “Lucky.” But he had something more than luck. In his lean body there was the tremendous endurance that it took to fly on. hour after straining hour, when most men would have dropped over the stick.
And this flight—nonstop from Capetown to Honolulu, across the bottom of the world—had promised to be no harder than the rest. Not until he saw that last sunset.
Behind him, beyond toe cragged granite fangs of Enderby Land, as he climbed above the ramparts of the polar plateau, the sunset had been frighteningly strange. An incredible wheel of crimson, rolling along the rim of the world, it had been winged and tufted with eldritch green.
The aurora was another disquieting scrap of the puzzle. It burned above him all that night, whenever the sky was clear, until all the white antarctic wilderness seemed on fire with its sinister and shifting brilliance.
The cold was another thing. Leigh had made polar flights be fire. But never had he met such merciless temperatures. The motor, even with cowl ventilators closed, grew sluggish with it. It crept into the cockpit and probed deep into his body.
Beyond the pole and Marie Byrd Land, over the dark Antarctic again, he met a wall of cloud. He tried to climb over it. Heavy and dull with altitude and fatigue, he opened the oxygen valve. The vital gas revived him a little. But the plane could not scale the summits of vapor. He flew into them—wondering.
SAVAGE winds battled in the cloud, and it was riven with lightning. Rain hammered the ship, and froze on it, until the ice dragged it almost to the surface. Leigh fought the elements, and fought the mounting weariness in him, and came at last unexpectedly into the calm of a strange northward dawn.
The aurora was fading from a sky grown brilliantly clear. Studded with white points of icebergs, the gray South Pacific was sliding back at three hundred and fifty miles an hour—still a good pace, he thought stubbornly, even if the rockets were three times as fast.
Leigh was peeling an orange, beginning to hope that all the terror of the night had been the child of fancy and fatigue, when he saw the thing in the northeast. Against the red and green of a suddenly disturbing dawn, it fell like a silver thread.
A white, spiral vortex—the funnel of a great tornado. He saw a blob of gray mist about the foot of it, marching over the sea. The upper end of it, oddly, was lost above the bright wings of dawn.
Leigh had never seen a storm just like this one. At first he thought there was no danger to him. But the white, writhing snake of it whipped toward him with an appalling quickness.
It seized the Phoenix in a sudden blast of wind, sucking the ship toward that racing funnel. Sea and sky spun madly. He was lifted so swiftly that his eardrums ached. Grimly he fought it, with all his calm skill and all the familiar strength of the ship.
He fought—and won. The white pillar left him fluttering in its wake and marched on into the west. Hurried observation of the higher sun told Leigh that he had been flung fifteen hundred miles northward.
But he knew, with a sinking in his heart, that the Phoenix was crippled. Her right aileron had been twisted and jammed by the force of that incredible wind. He would have to set her down.
Whistling the tune of Barbara Allen, which always seemed to cheer him, Leigh searched the maps. He found a pinprick of land named Manumotu—the only possible haven in a thousand miles—and turned the limping amphibian toward it, flying with rudder and throttle.
One more failure. Two, he reflected bitterly, in a row. For the last flight, two months ago, had failed also, from a cause as strange as that tornado.
A “bipolar” flight, Tick Tinker had called the last one. Tick was the tireless little publicity man, one-legged and one-eyed, who was Leigh’s partner in his singular business of wresting a living from the air. “Bipolar,” because the route from Croydon back to Croydon along the prime meridian included both the poles. Leigh had safely rounded the planet, with but three scheduled stops. But the flight had failed just the same, because of the Stellar Shell.
“We’re an out-of-doors advertising firm, Lucky,” Tick used to say. “You fly for attention value. And I sell it to the makers of oil and piston rings and what-have-you. And it’s a legitimate business, so long as you can keep in the headlines.”
But all the headlines two months ago had been about the Stellar Shell. Some astronomer named Gayle, the day Leigh took off from Croydon, announced discovery of a mysterious missile plunging out of the depths of space, toward the solar system. The “bipolar” flight had earned no more than a few sticks of space on the inside pages. For the black streamers ran:
STELLAR SHELL SHOT AT PLANETS;
WILL OBJECT STRIKE EARTH?
ASTRONOMERS BAEFLED
When Leigh came in to Croydon again, the flight completed in three grueling days, there was no crowd to meet him, Staggering away from the dusty, oil-spattered Phoenix, he himself paused to buy a paper.
COSMIC BULLET HITS MARS;
EARTH SPARED;
NATURE OF OBJECT UNKNOWN
There had been no more news of the Stellar Shell, nothing more than the speculations of bewildered scientists. But the flight was already ruined. Tick Tinker had radiographed:
CONGRATS ON BIPOLAR FLIGHT. BUT STELLAR SHELL HOGGED THE HEADLINES. FLIGHT TOTAL LOSS FINANCIALLY. YOUR NAME GETTING RAPIDLY UNKNOWN. TESTIMONIALS BEGGING AT CUT RATES. URGENT RELEASE DETAILS NEW PUBLICITY FLIGHT. SUGGEST SOMETHING NONSTOP POLAR. USE ZEROLUBE BRAND OILS FOR TESTIMONIAL.
And so Tick’s message had brought him here, dead with fatigue and heading toward a speck of reck that probably had no inhabitant.
THE motor covered the windshield with a thin spray of oil, and Leigh stopped his whistling briefly to curse all Zerolube products. He plugged in his helmet phones and switched on the little battery transmitter. It was good for just ten minutes of continuous sending—the Phoenix had no room for heavier equipment, not even emergency rations.
“SOS!” he called. “Pilot Leigh in airplane Phoenix for red down by storm. Will try to land on Manumotu. SOS—” The instant reply surprised him: “Manumotu Station, Gayle Foundation, calling airplane Phoenix. Dr. E.K. Gayle speaking. Land on north beach. I will stand by to assist you Come in, airplane Phoenix.”
“Airplane Phoenix calling Manumotu Station,” gasped Leigh, relieved. “Thanks, doc. I’ll be seeing you, if I can keep out of the water half ai hour longer. Signing off.”
It took an hour—an hour that seemed endless to Carter Leigh fighting the fatigue in him and nursing the crippled plane. But at last Manumotu came out of the sparkling northward haze. A cragged volcanic summit appeared sheer on three sides, edged on the north with a scrap of coral beach.
He crossed the beach. A broad rocky bench above it was tufted with tropical green. A long shed-like building of white sheet metal stood upon it, a white tent, and a great pile of crates covered with brown tarpaulins. A white flag waved. Then he saw the tiny figure running from the tent toward the beach.
The landing was hazardous. The crippled wing caught the crest of a wave and covered the plane with spray. She staggered, but came up bravely. He taxied in and rolled up on the blinding coral sand.
Following the signals of the flag, he brought the Phoenix to a safe dry stop where a rocket must have been moored, for there were deep wheel-marks in the sand, and the hibiscus bushes beyond were scorched black as if from rocket jets.
Heavily, his legs as stiff as if they never had been straightened before, he climbed out of the cockpit. The person with the flag came to meet him. A slim young figure, in boots and breeches, khaki shirt open at the throat, yellow head bare. A crisp voice, brisk, impersonal, greeted him:
“Hello. You are the famous Lucky Leigh?”
“In person,” he grinned. “And thanks for showing me the way in, doc—”
His jaw fell. This was a woman—a girl. Her intent oval face was dark with sun. Her keen blue eyes were scanning his heavy, swaying body—not altogether, he thought, with approval.
“Oh!” he said. “I thought you were Dr. Gayle.”
