Collected Short Fiction, page 312
Some swift decay had attacked the fallen purple thorns, but the native life of Mars was thriving exceedingly. In the changing landscape, it was difficult to find the plane. When at last he reached it, he ate the solitary can of corned beef that remained of his supplies and then rigged up a directional antenna for the transmitter.
For several reasons, this last hopeless message was important. He wanted to end the fears of the Earth; wanted to help Tick Tinker; and he wanted Dr. Elene Kathrine Gayle to know that he had flown nonstop to Mars, usefully, with gasoline.
“Mars, calling Earth,” he repeated. “Carter Leigh, on Mars, calling C Q, Earth. Landed here yesterday. Destroyed invaders last night with gasoline bomb. Anticipate no danger further loss of air. Inform Tick Tinker, New York, nonstop flight to Mars made with Zerolube oil. Now marooned on Mars. Goodbye, Earth.”
He repeated that message, between intervals of sleep, until the little battery was exhausted. Then he set himself, wearily and without hope, to begin the life of the first Robinson Crusoe of space.
In a pot cut from the end of a gasoline tank, he made stews, queer-flavored but edible, from the fruits and seed of some of the native plants. Hoping to reach a less severe climate in the equatorial regions and driven by a desire to learn more of whatever lost people had built the road, he stowed all the useful articles he could salvage upon a sledge made from the elevator of the Phoenix, and set off northward along the straight green pave.
The Earth, now drawing away from Mars, was a splendid golden morning star. Sight of it, in the frosty dawns when he could not keep warm enough to sleep, filled him with tragic loneliness.
One day he threw away the gun, to end his desire to use it on himself. The next he turned back along the road, and spent all the day to find it and clean it again. But when it was ready he put it. on the sledge and plodded on down the glassy pavement.
He had counted thirty Martian days. With the slow advance of spring, and his weary progress northward, the climate had become a little more endurable. He was cheered sometimes by the sight of young, familiar-looking shoots—grown from seed borne upon that interplanetary wind.
But his body was gaunt with privation. He had a recurrent painful cough. Sometimes his meals from the Martian plants brought violent indigestion. The end, he clearly saw, would be the same, whether he used the gun or not.
Then the night, the incredible night, when he woke in his chill bed beside a smouldering fire to hear the familiar rhythmic drum of cathion rockets. He saw a blue star following down the roadway from the south. Breathless and quivering, he sprang up to feed his fire.
MANTLED in the blue flame of its forward jets, the rocket came down upon the road. His firelight showed the legend on its side: Gayle Foundation. It would be Laird Cragin, he supposed, another exile—
But the bare grimy yellow head that appeared, when its thick door swung open, was the head of Elene Gavle.
“Greetings, Mr. Lucky Leigh,” her brisk voice said. “And congratulations on the aptness of your nickname. . . . You are all right?”
“Right as rain,” he croaked hoarsely. “Only—surprised!”
“We finished the rocket.” She was oddly breathless. “When the guns and explosives were no longer necessary, we loaded it with return fuel and supplies for a few weeks of exploration.”
“Cragin?” demanded Leigh.
“There were two places,” said the girl. “After we took off, I made him drop back by parachute.” Her voice was suddenly very crisp. “I have the honor to bring you, Leigh, in token of the gratitude of Earth for your recent remarkable nonstop flight, the medals and awards—”
Her voice broke abruptly. She stumbled out of the rocket, and came running across the strange pavement to meet him. In his arms, trembling, she clung to him.
After World’s End
Could the Earthmen ever win against Malgarth, the Robot monster? Was their only hope Barry Horn, who had waked from the age-long amnesic sleep of the cosmic rays, and Dona Keradin, the wonder=girl in the carbon crystal?
HE found the stranger, when we unlocked the bungalow after a week on the lakes, seated at my big desk in the study. His face was an enigma of youth and age. Lean beneath his long white hair, it was gray and drawn and hob lowed as if with an infinite heartbreak—and yet it smiled. His emaciated hand, thrust out across the pile of loose yellow sheets he had written, gripped an incredible thing.
Queerly lifelike, he was yet more queerly still.
“Why, hello!” I said.
And then, when he remained stiffly staring at that scintillating glory in his rigid hand, we knew that he was dead.
His injuries, when we came to discover them, were dreadful as they were inexplicable. All his gaunt, shrunken body—torso, neck, and limbs—showed dark purple ridges. It looked as the body of Laocoon must have looked, when the serpents were done. But we found no snakes in the bungalow.
“The man was tortured,” asserted the examining doctor. “By ropes, from the looks of it, drawn mercilessly tighter. Flesh pulped beneath the skin. Grave internal injuries. A miracle he lived as long as he did!”
For four or five days had passed, the doctors agreed, since the stranger received his injuries. He had been dead, by the coroner’s estimate, about twenty hours when we found his body.
It is fortunate indeed for us all, the way, that we had been together at the lakes and that friends there were able to substantiate our mutual alibi. Otherwise, in view of the incredible circumstances, ugly suspicion must have fallen upon us.
“Death,” ran the oddly phrased verdict of the coroner’s jury, after we all had been questioned, and the premises, the manuscript, and the stone examined, “resulting from injuries sustained through the act of persons or things unknown.”
The stranger’s life, as much as his death, remains a mystery. The sheriff and the aiding state police have failed to identify him. The manuscript is signed, “Barry Horn,” but no record has been found that such a man is missing. The medical examiners agreed that he was of contemporary American stock; but they were mystified by the freaks of cell structure indicating extreme age in a man apparently young.
His clothing, even, is enigma. Textile experts have failed to name the fine rayon-like fibers of his odd gray tunic and the soiled, torn cloak we found on the couch. The hard shiny buttons and buckle, like the bright pliant stuff of his belt and sandals, have baffled the synthetic chemists.
The weapon we found in the yellow belt seems worth the study of science, but no scientist yet has made anything of it. It looks like a big, queer pistol, with a barrel of glass. Its mechanism is obviously broken, and my attempts to fire it have proved unsuccessful. How he came into the bungalow—unless in the strange way his manuscript suggests—we have been unable to conjecture. For the house was securely locked before we started to the lakes, and no fastening shows to have been disturbed. A tramp, so the baffled sheriff argues, might break undetected into an empty house—but, if anything seems certain about Barry Horn, it is that he was not a common tramp.
The manuscript was written with my own pen, on paper he found in the desk. The task must have taken him three or four days. The doctors seem astonished that he was able to complete it. And it must have been a race with pain and death, for the script is continually more hurried and uneven, until, toward the end, it is barely legible.
The used dishes and empty cans on the kitchen table show that he found several meals for himself—the last of which, evidently, he was unable to eat, for the food was left untouched on the plate. A wrinkled rug lay with his cloak on the couch, where he slept and rested.
HE must have rummaged for something in the medicine cabinet, for we found that open, and a bottle of mercurichrome smashed on the bathroom floor. He seems to have made no effort, however, to get medical assistance. For my telephone was sitting, dusty and untouched, on the desk where he wrote and died.
He surely perceived the end, for the page beneath his hand was the opening of a will. Had he lived to complete it, his instructions might have cleared up much of the monstrous riddle. He had written:
To Whom It May Concern:
I, Barry Horn, being lately returned out of Space and Time to this my own beloved land and era, finding myself yet clear in mind but unregretfully aware of approaching death, do make this my last will and testament.
First I must offer belated apology to the Carridans, the relatives of my dead wife Dona, for the long bitterness I felt toward them because they took from me, I felt unjustly, my only son.
Second, to the unknown holder of this house, in repayment for his unwitting hospitality while it was being written, I bequeath this manuscript, with all rights thereto. I hope that it may be published, so that men may know something of the splendors and the dangers awaiting their race in the far-off future. So that others, perhaps, may share something of the love I feel for Eel Aran, the last man of Earth; and for those two great women, equally beauteous—Dondara Keradin, the Shadow of the Stone; and Verel Erin, the Stone’s Custodian and Kel’s brave beloved. For those three are more to me than any others I have known, save only Dona Carridan.
Third, to my sole son and child, Barry, upon his being released from the too-jealous guardianship of his mother’s relatives, I bequeath my clothing and weapon and the large diamond block I have with me, requesting that he read the narrative I have written before making any disposition of the diamond, which was the Stone of Dondara.
Fourth, as Executor of this Will, I do hereby appoint my old friend and attorney, Peter—
At that point the last agony must have struck. The pen wandered away on an aimless track, dropped from dying fingers. The attorney’s last name, and Barry Horn’s instructions for finding his son, remain unknown.
Weird riddles enough! But the most astounding puzzle is the diamond block. An incredible brick of water-white crystalline fire, four inches long, it weighs eleven hundred carats—nearly half a pound! It is quite flawless, save for that singular shadow which certain lights show in its pellucid core—if that white ghost could be termed a flaw.
Such a stone is beyond price—but for the mutual support of jewel and manuscript, it would be beyond belief. For, while the famous Cullinan Diamond was far larger in the rough, there is no credible record of any cut stone weighing even half as much. Dealers, skeptical of its description and astonished by its reality, have been reluctant to set any valuation upon it.
“By the carat, millions!” cried one startled jeweler, “But I should cut up such a stone, like a cheese, never! Wait for some prince to giff his kingdom!” We have hesitated, despite the request in the unfinished will, to publish this manuscript, especially since so large a part of the mystery is still unsolved. For it is sure to be received with skepticism in the scientific world, and its acceptance elsewhere may endanger the safety of the diamond.
But all other efforts to find Barry Horn’s attorney and his son have failed. Publication holds the only remaining hope of clearing up the mystery and establishing the ownership of the jewel. Any person knowing the whereabouts of the younger Barry Horn, or the identity of his father’s attorney, is requested to communicate immediately with the publishers.
I
THE ROCKET ASTRONAUT
“MOUGHT dis be of interest to yuh, suh?”
The advertisement was pointed out to me by a friendly elevator operator at the Explorer’s Club. Placed in the classified columns of the New York Standard, for October 8, 1938, it ran:
WANTED: Vigorous man, with training and experience in scientific exploration, to undertake dangerous and unusual assignment. Apply in person, this evening, 6 to 10. Dr. Hilaire Crosno, Hotel Crichton.
That sounded good. I had been in New York just twice too long. Always, when I had come back from the long solitudes of desert or jungle, the first fortnight on Broadway was a promised paradise, and the second began to be hell.
I gave the grinning boy a dollar, stuffed an envelope with credentials, downed another stiff peg of whiskey, and walked into the glittering chromium lobby on the stroke of six. My inquiry for Dr. Crosno worked magic on the supercilious clerk.
Crosno proved to be a big man, with huge bald head and deep-sunken, dark, magnetic eyes. The tension of his mouth hinted of some hidden strain, and extreme pallor suggested that, physically, he was near the breaking point.
“Barry Horn?” His voice was deep and calm—yet somehow terrible with a haunting echo of panic. He was shuffling through my references. “Qualifications seem sound enough. Your doctorate?”
“Honorary,” I told him. “For a pyramid I dug out of the jungle in Quintana Roo.” I glanced at the room’s austere luxury, still trying to size him up. “Just what, Doctor, is your ‘unusual assignment—?’ ”
Majestically, he ignored my question. Gray eyes studied me.
“You look physically fit, but there must be an examination.” He checked a card in his hand. “You know something of astronomy and navigation?”
“Once I sailed the hull of a smashed seaplane a thousand miles across the Indian Ocean.”
The big head nodded, slowly.
“You could leave at once, for an—indefinite time?”
I said yes.
“Dependents?”
“I’ve a son, four years old.” The bitterness must have shadowed my voice. “But he’s not dependent on me. His mother is dead, and her people convinced the courts that a footloose explorer wasn’t the proper guardian for little Barry.”
Dona Carridan was again before me, tall and proud and lovely. The one year I had known her, when she had tempestuously left her wealthy family to go with me to Mesopotamia, had been the happiest of my life. Suddenly I was trembling again with the terror of the plane crash in the desert; our son born in an Arab’s tent; Dona, far from medical aid, dying in agony . . .
“Then, Horn,” Crosno was asking, “you’re ready to cut loose from—everything?”
“I am.”
He stared at me. His long-fingered hands, so very white, were trembling with the papers. Suddenly he said, decisively:
“All right, Horn. You’ll do.”
“Now,” I demanded again, “what’s the job?”
“Come.” He rose. “I’ll show you.” A huge, shabby old car carried us uptown, across the George Washington bridge, and up the river to a big, wooded estate. A uniformed butler let us into an immense old house, as shabby as the car.
“My library.”
Guiding me back through the house, Crosno paused as if he wished me to look into the room. An intricate planetarium was suspended from the ceiling. Glass cases held models of things that I took to be experimental rockets. The big man silently pointed out shelves of books on explosives, gases, aerodynamic design, celestial mechanics, and astrophysics. Startled, I met Crosno’s piercing eyes.
“Yes, Horn,” he told me. “You’re to be the first rocketeer.”
“Eh?” I stared at him. “You don’t mean—outer space?”
I wondered at the shadow of bleak despair that had fallen across his cragged, dead-white features.
“Come,” he said. “Into the garden.”
THE night had a frosty brilliance.
Moonlight spilled over the trees and neglected lawns; and Venus, westward, hung like a solitary drop of molten silver. I stopped with a gasp of wonderment.
Weathered boards were stacked around the foundation of a dismantled building. Upon the massive concrete floor, shimmering under the moon, stood a tall bright cylinder. Bell-flared muzzles cast black shadows below, A frail ladder led up its shimmering side, sixty feet at least, to the tiny black circle of an entrance port.
“That—” A queer, stunned feeling had seized me, “That—”
“That is my rocket.” The deep voice was ragged, choked. “The Astronaut.” His face was bleak with agony. “I’ve given twenty years of my life to go, Horn. And now I must send another. An unsuspected weakness of my heart—couldn’t survive the acceleration.”
The white lofty cylinder was suddenly a dreadful thing. There is a feeling that comes upon me, definite as a grasping hand and a whispered warning. Sometimes I have not heeded it, and always, in the end, found myself face to face with death. Now that feeling said, There lies ghastly peril.
Slowly I turned to the tall pale man.
“I’m an explorer, all right, Crosno,” I said, “I’ve taken risks, and I’m willing to take more. But if you think I’m going to climb into that contraption, and be blown off to the moon—”
The hurt on his gaunt bloodless face stopped my voice.
“Not the moon, Horn.” A gesture of his long arm carried my gaze from the mottled lunar disk, westward to the evening star. “To Venus,” he said. “First.”
I caught my breath, staring in awe at the white planet.
“The range of the Astronaut,” he said, “should enable you to reach there, land, spend several months in exploration, and time your return to reach Earth safely at the next conjunction—if you are very lucky.”
His dark, magnetic eyes probed me.
“What do you say, Horn?”
“Give me a little while,” I said. “Alone.”
I walked out of the garden, and up through dark-massed trees to the open summit of a little hill beyond. The autumn constellations flamed near and bright above; yet I could hear cricke ts below, and a distant frog; could sometimes catch a haunting flower-odor from the meadows.
A long time I stood there, gazing up at Venus and the stars. Earth, I thought, had not been kind to me; life, since Dona’s death, had seemed all weariness and pain. Yet—could I leave it, willingly and forever?
Indecision tortured me, until I saw a shooting star. A white stellar bullet, out of the black mystery of space, it flamed down across Cassiopeia and Perseus; and somehow its fire rekindled in me that vague and yet intense knowledge-lust that is the heart of any scientist.
