Collected Short Fiction, page 326
“Trust-busting” legislation was passed by embittered liberal and labor groups—in vain. For national law ceased at the stratosphere. The only ships in space were those marked SPC, and the only law was that enforced by my father’s corporation police, the famous Sun Patrol.
The law, as always, adapted itself to current reality. SPC was recognized as virtually an independent state, with jurisdiction everywhere beyond Earth’s stratosphere. And Garth Hammond was its absolute ruler—though legally still a citizen of the United States, granted certain immunities as an “employee” of SPC, his only title being chairman of the board of a corporation chartered in New Jersey.
He was master of the law. The law helped suppress a hundred strikes aimed at SPC. It helped the Sun Patrol to thwart a dozen attempts against his life—in some of which Anak and the fanatical Martian émigrés were suspected of being involved.
THE GRAVEST blow against him came from outside the law, and outside the Earth. The Solarion, in 2146, returning with her seventh cargo of sun-stone, was accosted by a strange vessel in space—a slim red arrow of a ship, unlike the mirror spheres of SPC. Heliographs flashed a message, signed “Redlance,” demanding surrender of the ship and cargo, “in the name of liberty and human right.” The captain refused to surrender, and escaped after a running fight. Next year the Solarion went out again, better armed—and never came back.
When the first attack on the relief ship became known, Anak had let newsmen through the valve into the great steel tank that held a fragment of exiled Mars. His dark-scaled body was now withered and bent, his strange face lined and haggard and terrible with bitterness and hate. Stalking back and forth, like some restless, caged beast, beneath the glowing Sun disk that he had brought from the temple on Mars, he shook a lean, unearthly arm at them.
“It is the judgment of the Sun,” his flat, guttural voice rasped barely intelligible English. “Garth Hammond despoiled the jewel of the Sun. He defiled the sacred places, and stole the holy secret. He spilled the blood of the Sun, slew my Wahneema!” His black, yellow-rimmed eyes glared with fanatical malice. “And he shall know the judgment of the Sun!”
Trembling, then, with a savage wrath, he drove the newsmen out.
It was soon certain, now, that “Redlance” had taken the Solarion, for the Earth was flooded with “bootleg” sun-stone. And it seemed probable that the pirates, or at least their leaders, must be vengeful Martians, because the secret of the drive field had never been made public on Earth.
Trying to run down the sunstone smugglers, Sun Patrol operatives found evidence that linked the ring with Anak’s daughter, Asthore. Grown now, she had become a peculiarly beautiful being, tall and graceful, her fine-scaled skin a nacerous white, her eyes huge and purple beneath a crimson coronal. But her uncanny beauty was quite inhuman, and she shared all her father’s hatred of mankind and Garth Hammond.
Sun Patrol men, aided by Federal agents, finally closed in on the old house in Washington, with warrants for Anak and his daughter. But the tank was deserted. The exiles had fled. A planetwide search failed to discover them.
The fleets of the SPC scoured space for the pirate, searched planets and asteroids for a base, in vain. A second, hurriedly constructed relief ship, the Solarion II, was also lost, her wrecked and looted hull being discovered adrift near the orbit of Mercury. The Solarion III, in 2148, safely reached the Sun and returned. But her holds were empty and she brought appalling news. The Station itself was lost!
The cause of the disaster could only be surmised. The great plant might have been captured or destroyed by the pirates. Or, frail as a bubble floating in the flaming ocean of the solar photosphere, it might have been obliterated by the titanic forces of the Sun: cyclonic storms of sunspots, whose tremendous vortices might have dragged it down into a very atomic furnace; super-hurricanes of prominences, blasts of flaming hydrogen flung upward at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour; heat inconceivable, 6000 degrees at the surface, intense enough to destroy the Station in an instant if deflection fields or conversion batteries failed. Or it was possible that mutiny or the Falling Sickness had annihilated the crew.
Whatever its cause, the disaster was crushing. Stocks and bonds of SPC crashed ruinously. My father found it difficult to get capital to begin construction of a new power station, and strikes and sabotage hindered the work.
THE SMUGGLED supplies of sun-stone ceased as mysteriously as they had begun. Rusty windmills and turbines turned again. Men groped into abandoned coal mines. Prices rose enormously. Unemployment soared. Farm machines stood idle for want of power. Famine pinched the world—and malnutrition invited a hideous new wave of the Falling Sickness.
And on my father’s shoulders fell the blame for all these misfortunes of humanity. I was near him, in those black days—with a court order, when I was twelve, he had taken me from my mother. At first I had been resentful. I had hated his luxurious home, and hated his new wife, Doris, for taking my mother’s place. But she had been always kind. I had come to like her. And I couldn’t help a vast admiration for my father, now, and a sympathy for him in his sea of troubles.
“It’s just about the finish, Chan,” he told me wearily, one day, when I had found him sitting motionless as a black statue at the big desk in his sumptuous office. “It would be four years, or five, before the new station could furnish any revenue—even if the pirates let it be. SPC can’t hold out that long.”
I tried to encourage him.
“One chance,” he admitted. “If I could get Trent. The best mind I ever knew. If he would forget—”
But the search for Trent failed. Years before, with my father’s gift, he had built a great laboratory in South Africa. But the isolated buildings had now been for several years abandoned. And Ared Trent was gone without a trace.
Upon that failure came the thrust of sharper disaster. My father’s wife, the former Doris Wayne, contracted the Falling Sickness. After two days of agony, clinging to the bed and screaming with that frightful vertigo, she died. It was after that that my father’s hair began to turn white. His big shoulders sagged. Turned to a grim machine, he refused to leave the office for rest or sufficient sleep.
Without sunstone, it would soon be impossible to navigate space. Revenues from the mines would stop, and the colonies would have to be abandoned. The interplanetary prestige of SPC was vanishing. Hostile groups passed ruinous restriction and taxation measures.
“Bankruptcy, Chan!” I had gone to the silver tower of SPC, in Manhattan, to try to persuade my father to come home for the week end and rest. He was leaning heavily on the big polished desk, staring down at a dusty blue bottle labeled “Hammond’s Lunar Oil.”
His eyes looked up at me, hollow, dead. “I’ve kept this, Chan,” he said. “To remind myself that it all began with a little colored water. But I guess I forgot. All this doesn’t seem real. Not possible!” He ran a tired hand back through his thick white hair. “But I began by shining boots, Chan. And it looks as if you will, too.”
It was then, when his troubles seemed to have reached the last extremity, that the thing came, the stunning revelation, that reduced them all, by comparison, to nothing.
A strange space vessel was seen above New York. It landed on the great Long Island field of SPC. It was a long, sinister bolt of crimson. Its hull bore scars of battle, and it was black-lettered with the name Redlance.
The port authorities were in a flurry of fear, but they soon discovered that the pirate designed no harm. A haggard, white-haired man stumbled out of the valve, and wildly demanded to be taken at once to my father.
I WAS IN the office when they met. My father was wearing a white laboratory apron, and his fingers were stained with chemicals. He smiled—and suddenly recklessly invincible as in the old days—and then seized Trent’s hand with evident warm emotion.
“Well, Ared! So you are Redlance. After all, who else could have done it?” He stepped closer, earnestly. “Can we be friends again? I’ve made mistakes, Trent, and I’m sorry for them. The SPC is beaten. But now I’m come on something new. If you will help me, together we—”
The lean man had been staring at him with feverish, bloodshot eyes. And Trent’s voice rasped suddenly out, hoarse and desperate: “No, Hammond! There’s nothing left.” He licked his cracked lips. “Forget your schemes, man. We’re finished. Done!”
My father quickly caught his arm. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been a damned fool, Hammond. Yes, I was the pirate. I hated you; Hammond. Because you wanted too much power. And . . . Nada—But forget all that. I built the ship—in Africa. I gathered a crew of human scum and Martian fanatics. Joined old Anak’s plotters. God help me, Hammond!
“We took your two relief ships. And then, using the first Solarion to trick Cornwall, we took the Station. And then Anak, with his Martian devils, and his lovely, lying snake of a daughter, took it from me. I’d no idea what an awful thing they planned—believe me, Hammond!”
My father caught his breath, stiffened, waited.
“You can’t understand how desperate they are, how bitter,” came Trent’s hoarse voice. “The religious outrage, you know. And then the Falling Sickness . . . it would have wiped them out in fifty years, anyhow.”
My father gulped.
“My God, Trent!” His voice trembled. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“They’re going to load the Station with sunstone.” Trent’s red, hollow eyes stared unseeingly. “Four thousand tons of pure energy. Then sink it into the photosphere as far as the screens will hold.” His dead flat voice had no emphasis, as if his feeling were already killed. “And then blow it up.”
Soundlessly, my father’s lips whispered, “What then?”
“A new focus of disintegration, like that at the center of the Sun. A wave of matter-annihilating concussion. It will blow out, of course. Rip a hole in the photosphere. Expansion will kill it. Not that that matters.”
My father was staring stupidly.
“A minor nova outburst,” Trent amplified. “A quite insignificant flash among the stars. The safety mechanism of the Sun will adjust itself. Its radiation, within a week, will be back to normal.
“But that shell of flaming gas will sweep all the planets, out to Jupiter.”
“Old Anak!” whispered my father. “What was it he said? ‘Judgment of the Sun!’ ”
And he burst suddenly into a roar of senseless laughter.
V.
ANY OTHER MAN would have been unnerved by Trent’s revelation. Even the vague rumors that escaped a hurriedly applied censorship were enough to throw the world into panic. But Garth Hammond, when he had time to recover from the impact, displayed a curious equanimity.
Would it be possible to reach the Sun before the explosion?
“Possible, yes,” said Trent. “Possibly the Redlance could do it, though she’s crippled. I don’t know. But why?”
Could any attack hope for success?
Trent shook his haggard head.
“I know the reputation of your Sun Patrol, Hammond,” he said. “I know your men would give their lives. And, given time, we could rig part of your fleet with shields for flight into the Sun. But it’s no use.”
He shrugged hopelessly.
“Don’t think of force. The Station is invincible. There’s no weapon that could even match the beating it is always getting from the Sun. We tricked Cornwall. We’d never have gotten aboard if he hadn’t thought there were friends on the Solarion.
“But Anak has no friends.”
Well, if they couldn’t get aboard, could they get even into telephone contact with the Station?
“Just possible,” Trent admitted. “But that means a very close approach, even with a tight cosmo-beam. But what arguments would you use on Anak? What could you promise him, when his very race is doomed? No, Hammond, it’s no use,” Trent insisted bitterly. “Unless we send a ship or two out beyond Jupiter. So, a few might survive—”
“No, Trent,” my father said abruptly.
“We’re going to the Sun.”
I would gladly have given my right hand to go with the Redlance, for it seemed that the expedition would probably be the last and most dramatic event in human history. But my father gruffly told me to go back to mother and wait with her.
Hurt—it is queer how one could nurse an injured private vanity while such great things were at stake—I returned to the marble villa on the Aegean. The wild rumors of doom had reached my mother. She was pathetically glad to see me. She asked many questions about my father, whom she had not seen since I was a tiny child. I knew that she loved him still.
For weary weeks, we waited. A trip by sail, down among the Cyclades, failed to ease the suspense. My mother fell ill with the strain—and I feared, for a dreadful hour, that she was a victim of the Falling Sickness, then raging through the islands.
No word came back from the Redlance. But fevered imagination pictured the details of the desperate voyage. The battered red hull shielded in the silver fog of deflection fields. The plunge into the Sun’s fiery ocean. The frightful dive in quest of the Station, menaced with an intensity of heat beyond conception, battered with incredible storms, crushed with the pressure of a gravitation twenty-eight times that of Earth.
It was a period of sunspot maxima. Magnetic storms disturbed communication. One night was splendid with the cold flames of the aurora. I remember looking at the Sun through a dark glass, its round face pocked with a dozen angry vortices, each large enough to swallow an Earth. Dazzled, I went back to my mother, shuddering. If the power of the Sun could do all these things across 93,000,000 miles, what could it not do to men in its very flaming grasp?
To quiet the rumors, desperate officials had finally announced the truth. Depression and despair ruled the Earth. As if it fed on fear, a fresh epidemic spread, until it seemed that the Falling Sickness raced with astronomical cataclysm to wipe out mankind.
Then, to a stunned and incredulous planet, came the brief heliographic dispatch picked up and relayed from the colony on the Moon:
TO EARTH:
DANGER ENDED. ANAK SURRENDERED STATION INTACT. SPC RECOGNIZES INDEPENDENCE OF MARS. ANAK WILL BE RESTORED. STATION BACK IN OPERATION. REDLANCE BRINGING SUNSTONE TO EARTH.
GARTH HAMMOND
That was too good to believe. Many of use refused to believe it—until the Redlance landed on Long Island, thirty hours later. Trent left my father and two thousand tons of sunstone, and went on to carry Anak back to Mars.
But why had Anak, so grimly bent upon revenge—why had he surrendered?
My father himself brought the answer to that. His private stratoplane landed unwarned in the lee of our island, and taxied shoreward. Garth Hammond leaped out and waded up the beach. The ruggedly handsome face beneath his thick white hair was smiling gayly as ever, but his gray eyes held a wistful tenderness that I had never seen.
I ran to meet him, shouting incoherent questions.
“Run this.” He thrust a visivox spool into my hand. “Where’s your mother, Chan?”
I pointed, wondering briefly at the husky catch in his voice, and then ran to put the spool on a machine. The bright screen showed the Redlance landing, and then my father speaking to the tremendous crowd on the field in his old grand manner.
“You wonder, perhaps, why Anak gave up his frightful plan and surrendered?”
He paused for silence and effect.
“It is because I traded him something. For the Station, I traded him life. And the life of his race. The life of Mars! And I bring the same boon, a free gift to you and to all the Earth.”
Another dramatic halt.
“I have conquered the Falling Sickness.” There was a sound like a sob from all that multitude. A burst of clapping, quickly hushed. A breathless quiet. “It was the cure for that disease that I gave Anak and his men. And that I give the Earth.”
There was an utter, queerly painful stillness. A great choking lump rose in my own throat. My father, on that tiny screen, made an oddly diffident little smile.
“I mean it,” he said. “Free clinics will be opened at once by the Hammond Foundation. A harmless chemical renders the body proteins insensitive to the virus. Immunization is complete. There will be no more Falling Sickness!”
I found my father and my mother sitting side by side in her quiet, fragrant room. Her face was stained with tears, and her smile was very happy. My father had been telling her what I had learned from the spool. His great laugh boomed out softly.
“Funny thing!” he told her. “That chemical was formed in an old bottle of the Lunar Oil. The cheap, impure stuff we used at the last. I happened to hold it against the light, and saw the change in color. When I analyzed it—”
I turned back, silently, and left them alone.
One Against the Legion
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO “THE COMETEERS” BRINGS BACK GILES HABIBULA IN A LONG THREE-PART NOVEL.
UNUSUAL. Important. Indubitably dangerous.” The low, grave voice of Commander Kalam, without losing its deliberate calm, had emphasized every word. “You have been selected for this duty, Captain Derron, because the legion feels that you have earned implicit trust.”
After four grim years, that scene was still as vivid in the mind of Chan Derron as if a red-hot stamp had seared it there. For that strange assignment had turned all his life, out of beckoning promise, into the dark, incredible web of mystery and terror and despair. “Yes, sir.”
Chan Derron saluted, briskly. He stood eagerly at attention, waiting in that huge, simply furnished chamber in the Green Hall that was the office of the commander of the legion of space.
A big man, lean and trim and straight in the green of the legion, he looked rugged as a statue of bronze. His hair, rebellious against the comb, was like red-bronze wire. His skin was deeply bronzed with spaceburn. Even his eyes held little glints of steadfast bronze. His whole bearing held a promise of uncrushable strength that it warmed the commander’s heart to see.
