Collected Short Fiction, page 309
“I am,” she said gravely. “Dr. Elene Kathrine Gayle.”
His red eyes blinked at her.
“You—you aren’t the Dr. Gayle who discovered the Stellar Shell?”
She nodded.
“My father was a leader in his field of science. He established the Gayle Foundation. But he has been dead five years. I have been trying to carry on his work.” She studied him gravely. “Do you object to my discovery?”
“You ruined my last flight,” he told her. “I lived through seventy-six hours of hell; I set a record for gasoline flight over both poles. And what with your Stellar Shell, the world never knew I had been off the ground.”
“And, I suspect, was little the worse for the fact.” Leigh flushed at the hint of sarcasm in her voice. “However—are you hungry?”
“Famished,” he told her.
ON A rough pine table in the white tent, she slapped down two tin plates, split open cans of meat and butter, indicated a big vacuum urn of coffee, a huge jar of marmalade.
“Proceed,” she said.
Leigh’s dull eyes were watching her.
“You’re the whole crew here?”
Her boyish yellow head nodded.
“Emergency,” she said. “The Foundation is establishing twenty new meteorological observatories. Manumotu Station was the most important, because it is directly in the track of the phenomena we are investigating. Therefore, I took charge here myself.”
“Alone?”
“I had two assistants. But Dr. French took acute appendicitis, and Cragin flew him out in the rocket. Should have been back yesterday. But didn’t show up. I’m carrying on. . . . You said you were hungry.”
She dumped half a can of corned beef into her tin plate, passed the remainder to Leigh. But he sat, wonderment rising against his mist of sleep, staring at her.
“Emergency?” he questioned.
She nodded.
“Something is happening to the atmosphere.”
“I thought conditions were strange,” he said, “flying over the pole.”
She pushed back her plate to seize a notebook.
“What phenomena did you observe?” she demanded eagerly.
He told her in a tired sleep-fogged voice about the strangely gaudy sunset, the aurora, the phenomenal cold, the unaccountably low barometric pressures, the singular tornado that had crippled the Phoenix.
“What does it all mean?” he concluded. “What is happening?”
“I’m here to find out,” she told him. “Sunset and aurora probably due to abnormal electronic bombardment of the ionosphere. But the storms and pressure disturbances are still not accounted for. Unless—”
Her yellow head shook.
“The only conceivable answer is too appalling.”
She looked quickly at her wrist watch, dumped the debris from her plate into a pail beside the table, wiped plate and spoon clean with a paper napkin. She rose.
“Excuse me. But the duties of both my assistants have fallen upon me. My time is budgeted. I have forty-eight minutes a day for meals. Now I have instruments to read.”
“So that’s how a lady astronomer lives.” Leigh grinned. “If I can help you—”
She shook her head with evident disapproval.
“I doubt it. Our work here doesn’t consist of publicity stunts. . . . Eat as much as you like. You’ll find a cot behind the partition. I’ll radio directions to your rescue party. Please keep in mind, when you leave, that it is the policy of the Gayle Foundation to avoid unnecessary publicity. Especially, we don’t want to alarm the world about these current meteorological phenomena, until we have more comprehensive data.”
LEIGH was staring at her, a slow anger rising in him. “Look here, you think I’m a pretty bad egg?”
Her keen eyes swept him impersonally. “Frankly, Mr. Lucky Leigh,” her cool voice said, “your existence and your stunts annoy me. I can’t see that you serve any creative function. In the precarious early days of gasoline aviation such men as you, testing equipment and exploring routes, may have served a useful end. But now that rockets are as fast and as certain as the sun, you are a mere anachronism.”
Leigh opened his mouth to protest. But the girl held up a brown imperative hand.
“I’ve got no time to listen to you,” she said. “Because I have vitally urgent work to do. I am already upsetting my schedule. But I’ve wanted for a long time to tell you a thing or two.”
Her smooth face was flushed a little. He listened to her, grinning.
“Now,” she went on swiftly, “if you were trying to fly nonstop to Mars, even if you never got there, that would be a different proposition. Because you would be expanding the horizons of science. You would be doing something different and important.
“But your old gasoline wreck is as far behind the times as you are, Leigh. It is a rocket that will make the first flight to Mars. I know a man who may pilot the first rocket there. He is Laird Cragin—you never heard of him, because he isn’t a publicity flyer. But he is test pilot for the experimental space rockets that the Foundation has been working on, in association with some Army engineers. You ought to meet hint. Because whether he ever gets to Mars or not, he’s trying to do something real.”
Carter Leigh gulped.
“Listen, Miss Gayle,” he protested. “You’ve got me all wrong. I used to like the glory, I admit. But now it’s just a business. I’ve come to hate the clamor and the crowds, and I always skip the banquets. Tick Tinker is my contact man; he releases the publicity, does the testimonials, handles ill the business end. We’re just trying to make a living.”
Her brown chin squared. And, through the gray haze of fatigue that filled his mind, Leigh suddenly perceived that a lady astronomer could still be very good to look at.
“It is possible,” her cool crisp voice was saying, “to make a living in a way that helps others besides yourself. Here you are hopping about the planet, with about as much aim and intelligence as a beheaded flea, while God-knows-what is happening to the very air we breathe!” She turned decisively away from him. “You are as extinct as the dodo, Mr. Nonstop Leigh,” she told him. “The only difference is that you don’t know it. Sleep on that. I’ve got a barocyclonometer to read.”
II
CHARTER LEIGH sat over the rough table, staring out of the tent after her hastening boyish figure. He had seen suddenly, behind her brisk impersonal efficiency, that she was very tired—and somewhat frightened.
His brief anger at her frank criticism was all turned back upon himself. After all, it was true that such men as Lindbergh and Byrd and Post and Corrigan hadn’t left much to be accomplished in the field of nonstop gasoline flight.
No, he deserved her scorn.
But what had frightened her? What was happening to the atmosphere? Leigh’s mind grappled for a vain moment with the problem, but he could not concentrate now. All he wanted was a chance to sleep.
He stood up, his body stiff and wooden, and reeled to the cot beyond the canvas partition.
“Dammit,” he muttered, “what do I care if Lieutenant Laird Cragin flies to Mars on a tissue-paper kite?”
He was asleep before his head touched the pillow. . . .
“Leigh!”
The crisp voice of Elene Gayle awakened him. tense with a suppressed alarm. The tent was dim in the light of an oddly purple dawn. Pausing at the entrance of the tent, her face so gray and tired he knew she had not slept, she called urgently:
“That tornado is coning again. You had better see after your ship.”
He tumbled out of the tent and saw her running ahead toward the long metal shed that covered her precious instruments. The dark ocean seemed ominously calm, arid the sunrise above it was as splendid as the last.
Against it he saw what the girl, with obvious hesitation, had called a tornado.
It walked out of the flaming east—an endless spiral filament of silver, dropped like some cosmic fishing line from the depthless purple above the fiery sunrise. The foot of it danced across the sea. It moved by incredible bounds. And it was wrapped in a gray wisp of storm.
Leigh caught his breath and started running toward the plane that was standing unmoored on the long white beach where he had climbed out of her on the day before.
But this white funnel of destruction came with the same unthinkable velocity that he had witnessed before. Before he had moved a dozen steps, the white tent sailed over his head. The abrupt, freakish blast of air hurled him flat. His eyes and ears and nostrils were filled with coral sand.
For no more than twenty seconds the tempest shrieked against the black peak above. Abruptly, then, the air was almost still again. There was only a fluttering queerly chill breeze from the east, following in the storm’s wake.
Spitting sand and gasping for breath, Leigh staggered to his feet. The funnel of the storm, like the guide-rope, he thought, dangling from some unseen balloon, was bounding away into the gray west. Its sorrowful howling swiftly diminished.
Leigh turned ruefully toward where he had left the Phoenix. The battered old crate had been neatly flipped over on her back by the prankish blast of wind. Leigh shook his head and whistled a few bars of Barbara Allen.
“Too bad, old girl,” he muttered. “But, considering the state of Tick’s exchequer and the high cost of salvage, it looks like goodbye for us.”
HE TURNED to survey the station.
The tent was gone. The supplies, cooking utensile and blankets that it had covered were scattered across the beach to the uneasy sea. The tarpaulins had been ripped off the long stack of crates; tumbled in confusion were red drums of Kappa-concentrate rocket fuel, long cylinders of oxygen, bright tins of gasoline, miscellaneous cases of food and equipment. But where was the lady astronomer?
A sudden unreasonable alarm tightened Leigh’s throat. He was too well seasoned, he kept telling himself, to get unduly excited over any girl—especially a female scientist who didn’t like him anyhow. But he was running through the wrecked camp, shouting her name with a quaver in his voice.
“Miss Gayle! Can you hear me? Elene!”
“Dr. Gayle, if you please.”
Her crisp voice came from the interior of the long observatory shed. Half the metal roof had been ripped off. Most of the equipment inside seemed to have been demolished by a huge boulder the wind had hurled from the dark cliffs above. But the slim calm girl, save for the disorder of her short yellow hair and a smudge of grease on her brown cheek, looked untouched. She was ruefully fingering a tangle of twisted levers and crumpled recording drums.
“No more barocyclonometer,” she said. “But my visual observations make it imperative that we get in touch with the outside world at once. I believe my worst fears are justified.”
“Well, Dr. Gayle,” Leigh offered, “if you discover any need of my services, just say so.”
“I doubt that you would be very useful.” From the preoccupation of her voice, he knew she gave him less than half her mind; her eyes still measured the smashed equipment. “If you can repair your plane, you had better get away from here before tomorrow morning. Manumotu is an unhealthy locality, just now. And I’m afraid you’ll find that the world has got more pressing matters to attend to than organizing relief expeditions to rescue stunt fliers.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Leigh bowed. “I hope you can stand a shock. I believe the flying days of the old Phoenix are over.”
“In that case”—her voice was still abstracted—“you had better salvage what you can of the supplies and equipment. After all, if what I fear is true, it won’t make any great difference whether you ever leave Manumotu or not.”
Leigh spent all morning stacking the tumbled crates and drums so that they made three walls of a tiny low shelter, roofing it with the torn tarpaulins, and collecting there the food and useful articles he found on the beach.
AT NOON, when he carried a plate of food and a steaming tin of fresh coffee to the girl in the observatory building, he found her covered with grime, laboring in tight-lipped silence with the starting-crank of a little motor-generator. She waved him aside.
“I’ve no time to eat,” she told him. “I’ve data of the utmost importance to send. It’s urgent that I get in touch with Washington and our rocket laboratory at Alamogordo. And there’s something wrong with this plant.”
Leigh glanced at the balky mechanism. He set the plate on an empty packing box beside her and rolled up his sleeves.
“Did it occur to you,” he inquired, “that, having made a living out of flying gasoline engines for the past ten years, I might know something about them? I see that your carburetor is smashed. If you’ll eat your dinner, I’ll make you a new carburetor out of a milk can.”
Her face showed a weary relief. “If you can do it,” she agreed.
While Leigh found tin snips and an empty can, she sat down on the concrete floor beside the packing box. She gulped the hot coffee, wolfed a sandwich of canned ham, and reached for another. In the middle of it, her yellow head dropped forward on her knees. Leigh heard a long sigh and knew she was asleep.
“Poor kid,” he muttered.
Even the staccato chek-chek-chek of the little motor ten minutes later did not wake her. Leigh twisted the flap of tin that regulated the mixture, then swiftly checked the hookup of the short-wave transmitter.
He snapped or the receiver. Static snarled at him. An unfamiliar sort of static. The whining ululat on of it was oddly like the howling of the storm that had passed. It rose and fell regularly.
Through it, however, he picked up some station—and what he heard stiffened him with fear. For a time he listened, absorbed; then suddenly he hurried to wake the girl.
“It’s fixed?” she gasped, starting up. “I didn’t mean to sleep—there isn’t time.”
He caught anxiously at her slim brown arm.
“Elene,” he demanded, “what’s happening? I was just listening. There’s something frightful going on What is it? Do you know?”
Her blue eyes stared at him. They were dark with sleep—and, he thought, terror. Quick and anxious, her low voice demanded:
“Just what did you get?”
“Storms,” he said briefly. “Phenomenal storms. Unseasonable bitter cold. Ice storms even in the tropics. Tidal waves. One against the Atlantic seaboard has probably killed a hundred thousand already. Communications broken everywhere, of course. Panic increasing.”
He drew her light body toward him. “Something has gone wrong with the air, Elene. Do you know what it is? And when it is going to stop?”
Her head nodded slowly.
“I’m afraid I know what it is,” she said. “My dispatches can’t bring any comfort to the world.”
“What is it?”
Her arm twisted free.
“No time to tell you now,” she said. “I’ve got to talk to Washington and New Mexico. And to Laird Cragin—if he’s still alive. Our work here has got to be finished tonight. After dawn tomorrow, there may not be any Manumotu.”
Leigh gasped. “But—”
Hastening toward the radio, she paused briefly.
“I’ll show you tonight,” she promised him. “If the seeing is good enough for the telescope, and if we’re still alive by then.” She had no more attention for him. He prepared food for himself, ate, and then spent an hour making the tiny little shelter more secure against whatever the girl expected to happen at dawn. And then, heavy with accumulated fatigue, he slept again.
THE air was unwontedly cool on the beach when he woke, and another sunset of uncanny splendor flamed red to the zenith. He kindled a fire of driftwood, set out another meal, and called the girl. Sipping gratefully from a tin of scalding coffee, she gave him a brief smile. “You have ability, Leigh,” she told him.
“Ability that has been wasted.” Her dark eyes studied him. “Now, I’m afraid, you’ve very little opportunity left to make use of it.”
Sitting silent for a moment in the dancing firelight, she began pouring the cool coral sand through her fingers into little white pyramids.
“If my deductions check out tonight,” she said, “I’m afraid the creative functions of our present civilization are just about at an end. The planet will doubtless remain habitable for certain forms of life. Men may even survive in such places as Death Valley. But it will be a little strange if the human race ever recovers its supremacy.”
“Tell me—” Leigh began.
She looked at her watch and studied the darkling eastward sky.
“In ten minutes,” she said, “I can show you—show you why the earth is no longer a very safe place for nonstop fliers.”
Leigh caught his breath.
He looked from the girl into the low, many-colored flames of the driftwood and slowly back again.
“Dr. Elene Gayle,” he told her very gravely, “I feel that your frank comments have given me the right to express an equally candid opinion of female astronomers.”
She nodded and looked back into the east.
“I haven’t been following my profession altogether for fun, although I enjoy it,” he told her. “I have been trying to save up two hundred thousand dollars. That would be enough to begin the manufacture of a gadget I have invented for the greater comfort of rocket passengers, and to build a home.”
There was weary loneliness in his voice now.
“For hundreds and thousands of hours, cramped in the cockpit of the old Phoenix, I have endured fatigue and the need of sleep by dreaming of that home. Sometimes it is on a Florida key and sometimes it is in a little green valley that I have seen in the Colorado Rockies.”
He looked at the girl across the fire.
“But always the most important thing about it was the woman who would live in it with me. I have had one in mind and then another. But none of them, Dr. Gayle, has fitted as well as you do—except, I must hasten to add, in certain regards.
“You must realize that I am telling you this just to make a point—since, what with crackups and your Stellar Shell, Tick Tinker and I have never had more than fifty thousand in a joint account.”
A smile touched his lean face in the firelight.
