Collected Short Fiction, page 34
I remember a fat, pompous, red-faced gentleman named Kieling, who was several times at our rooms—I think he was interested in some fantastic scheme for smuggling drugs from India by submarine and wanted Father to help design his apparatus. However that may have been he had an excellent standing in Pittsburgh society. He displayed remarkable persistence in coming to see Father about his plan, in the face of every discouragement save actual breach of manners, of which my parent would never have been guilty.
He seemed incredulous when he heard that we were to emigrate to the moon. Young as I was—then hardly five—I remember sitting and looking up at the gross fellow as he sat twisting the blazing rings on his fat fingers and expressed his opinions of such an adventure.
“John, you mean to tell me you’re goin’ to throw over your job for a fool thing like that. The moon’s just a desert—you’ve seen the movies of it, of course. Hot as hell in the day and freezes the air at night. Wild mountains, full of the damned Selenites, looking for a chance to kill and eat you.
“No comforts there—not a beach or a pleasure-palace on the whole damned planet. You’re not even your own boss. Stay here and you may get to be a director of the corporation. On the moon you can’t turn around without a confounded Colonial Secretary of the corporation to give you leave.
“But go ahead, for all of me. I’ll wager Mrs. Adams can find another man.” He grinned at my mother, who was sitting, primly composed in a rocking chair; then suddenly burst out into an uproarious laugh as if he considered that a joke.
Father said nothing. Kieling pulled out a huge black cigar, lit it and puffed out a cloud of choking blue smoke before he went on.
“And think of the voyage. I wouldn’t make it for a case of Bourbon! Not me! Cold, cramped little rooms, passengers crammed in like sardines. Keep you half suffocated. And the space-sickness—one in a dozen dies, you know. The company doesn’t give a damn, just so they get the passage money.
“You know Carlton—the Communications Fifth Vice-President—he had the fool idea of taking his wife to the moon for a trip when they were married. She took space-sickness and died—lack of vitamin J, the medicoes said. And Hamlin—he was a friend of mine—went on a collection trip to Colon and came back with his lungs wrecked. And Smith—he had been a Colonial Secretary on the moon for fourteen years—he was coming back with his family and a meteorite smashed the ship. Gone, just like that!” Kieling snapped his fat fingers.
My father straightened. “I know all about that,” he said in his low, courteous voice. “But nearly two million people have gone to the moon and made a go of things there.”
“Yeah! A hell of a ‘go’ ! You’ve got to get out in the hills with the wild moon calves and work like the devil for half what you’d get in an office right here. Out in the craters all day, living on a little canned stuff and roasting in the sun—then racing back to one of the shabby little towns to keep from freezing in those endless nights. John, you better think that proposition over again——”
“That’s settled, Kieling,” father said briefly. “I’m having nothing whatever to do with it, no matter how safe your lawyers say it is.”
“Dammit, John, I hope Boss Varney gets you—or I would if it weren’t for your wife.”
THEN the conversation turned to Varney and those other famous pirates of space. Tales of them always enthralled me. They were bloody and desperate men, no doubt. But the peril and romance of their calling cast a peculiar lure upon it, and I think most boys of the time dreamed of the day when they might run away to space.
Varney was perhaps the most noted of them all. The tales of his exploits were legion. He had robbed a dozen rich ships. Once he had fought and destroyed a fleet of three space patrol cruisers in full view of New York City. A few years later he had captured the President of the Chemicals Corporation and his daughter, taking them from a liner he had run down on the space-lanes to the moon. He had treated them very hospitably until he could land them at a little village on the California coast. He was variously reported to have had his base of operations in the interior of Greenland, in the jungles of Brazil, in the Himalayas, and behind the moon. In the past thirty years a score of expeditions have been fitted out to search for his buried treasures. But, so far as I know, Varney’s gold still lies wherever he may have hidden it; though I suspect that his lawless crews must have gambled and drunk a good deal of it away in the cities in Mexico, in the Orient and on the moon, in any place that was wild enough to tolerate them.
Kieling’s remarks about conditions on the space fliers had some justification. They might have been better, but the Metals Corporation maintained a monopoly on trade with the moon and its warships of space ruthlessly rammed every other vessel caught in the lunar space-lanes. The construction and operation of space fliers were expensive, and the ships were crowded with those who could barely afford to pay the passage. Their comfort occasioned the officials of the line little concern.
As the fellow had said, meteorites were dangerous. During the hundred and fifty years of communication with the moon a thousand ships had been destroyed by collision with these iron wanderers in space. No system of telescopes, searchlights, or radio beam detectors proved a complete safeguard against them. And again and again ships reached the space-ports wrecked and leaking the vital air, with the crews forced to wear oxygen helmets and the passengers dying in their quarters.
Even when the emigrant had been landed in one of the three great cities on the moon, his troubles were far from over. There were the pain and hardship of the physiological changes necessary to fit one for the lighter air and lesser gravity of the satellite. Long days in bed in a compression chamber, with the air pressure gradually lowered. Torturing pains in the lungs. A dull ache in the head for many weeks as the brain became accustomed to less pressure of gravity.
When Colon reached the moon there had been only a trace of air detectable. Since the mass of the satellite is only about one-eightieth that of the Earth and its diameter about one-fourth, the force of gravity at its surface is only about one-sixth of the terrestrial value.
Owing to that, the velocity of escape for the moon is only about one and one-half miles per second, as compared to seven miles for the earth. Consequently the satellite had lost most of her air in ages past; the kinetic theory demonstrates that molecules of air even attain the velocity of seven miles per second required to carry them free of the earth’s pull.
Colon and the other early explorers had relied on air-pressure suits, with heating pads and oxygen helmets; and the first mining operations had been in shafts capped with air-tight domes, in which could be maintained a normal atmosphere of artificial air. But as the mining industry increased, such methods were hardly satisfactory, and the officials of Metals sought for something better.
Cardigan, one of the first trained mining engineers to go to the moon, encountered and solved the question of artificial atmosphere. The native rocks of the earth (and of the moon) are composed nearly to the extent of 50 per cent of the vital element, oxygen, held in combination. Cardigan developed a rapid process of liberating it from silicon dioxide and other abundant compounds; and with the limitless sources of atomic power available, his plants were soon turning out huge volumes of the gas. Nitrogen, the other chief constituent of terrestrial air, is much less abundant in nature; but helium, which is one of the natural products of disintegrating atoms, was plentifully available, along with limited amounts of the other inert gases of its group, and was known to be vastly superior to nitrogen for diluting oxygen for breathing purposes, having been used for many centuries in preparing artificial air for divers in the oceans of Earth. It is less soluble in the blood than nitrogen and does not give the trouble called “the bends.”
Cardigan also developed an efficient process for the synthesis of water from hydrogen and oxygen, to provide the requisite humidity for his new atmosphere. His great plants were kept going a quarter of a century before a sufficient atmosphere had been provided, and even now the artificial humidity freezes in the two weeks of the lunar night, though men go abroad during the long day, breathing comfortably.
Even after the emigrant became accustomed to the new conditions of gravitation and barometric pressure, there was a pioneer’s rough life to face in the mines or the crater farms. One must start at the beginning, with an iron will to learn the ways of a new planet and fit himself to them. There was no place for the coward or the shirker.
Discomforts and perils were many. During the two weeks of the lunar day, the sunlight is intensely hot and blindingly bright. One swelters in white garments, sun helmet, and tinted glasses. And during the long night it is bitterly cold—so cold that the air grows solid, and falls in a crystal snow upon the rugged lunar mountains. During that terrible period of cold and darkness, the colonists were shut up in their sealed cities, and in the cheerless underground passages of the mines.
Outlawry was flourishing. Bandits had hidden retreats in the wild lunar deserts; smugglers of space regularly matched their wits against those of the commanders of the Metals warships; pirates of space—like Varney—relied for their livelihood upon their daring and their skill in the use of stolen disintegrator tubes.
The Selenites were another peril. Those native inhabitants of the moon were intelligent, savage beings, whose budding civilization had been ruthlessly crushed by the first adventurers on the moon. The more highly civilized and better-natured tribes had been worked to death in the mines. Those that had escaped slavery were, for the most part, bloodthirsty beings, roaming the lunar craters and deserts beyond the outlying human settlements, sometimes descending in bloody raids upon the miners and farmers, massacring whole settlements. There was constant bitter warfare between the settlers and these savage tribes of Selenites.
Such was life on the moon, as it appeared to the friends and associates of my father. His superior in the laboratories talked to him of his plans, outlined these disadvantages, and offered him a better position and higher pay immediately, if he would remain.
THERE were other things to think of. Mother was a slight, frail woman, for all the iron strength of spirit that shone in her deep blue eyes. She was willing enough to try life on the new planet, but father was afraid that the hardships of it would be too much for her health. Certainly she would be without the thousand luxuries that a mechanical civilization had given the world, until they seemed necessities.
The children were considered. I was five years old; my older sister, Valence, was twelve; and there was a baby girl, little Fay, aged two. Our parents feared that we would not survive the hardships of the voyage. And if we did, what of our education, our future? As we grew up, would we be willing to go without the opportunities of earth, to be pioneers?
Father and mother talked to us of their plans, though of course I was too young to take much part in the discussion. The matter of emigration was under consideration for some time, and I believe an adventure of my own had a good deal to do with the final decision.
I had a little helicopter flier that father had given me on the Christmas before. Its propellers were operated, I think, from a compact storage battery. The talk of emigration had turned my mind to thoughts of travel, and one day I left the great community-hotel in Pittsburgh, in which we lived, and flew out over the country. I had been told not to leave the park about the building, but that mattered little against the call of adventure. And the little machine had a safety device that was supposed to bring it down after a flight of two minutes; but I have always had a mechanical turn of mind, and I had been able to incapacitate that with a screw-driver.
With the urge for adventure strong in me, I flew out into the hills for a score of miles or so, before the battery ran down. Even at this period modern methods of communication and the Zaner processes for the artificial manufacture of crude carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, had largely ended the day of farming. Then, as now, the population was concentrated in the cities, and the countryside was a lonely and deserted waste.
I do not remember all the details of the incident, but it was two days before father found me. Fortunately, it was summer. I had found a briar patch, and made several meals on blackberries. My handkerchief was hung up on a pole to guide the searchers I expected. When father came, I had just managed, after a score of fruitless attempts, to kill a cottontail rabbit with a rock. I was industriously rubbing two sticks together with the idea of making a fire to cook it, having heard that savages used such a method. I was taken home, spanked, and cried over by my mother.
I believe that incident, with its display of self-reliance and hardihood, is what determined my father to undertake the emigration. At any rate, the next thing I knew, it was agreed that we were to start—much to my delight.
I remember a trip out to the great space-port, with mother. I can still see the great landing platforms be-, fore the hangars, with the cradles on their tracks in front of them. With childish eagerness, I looked forward to the time, when one of those great silver globes would carry me into the mystery of the sky.
It was agreed that we should emigrate to the moon. But before we got off, a very serious difficulty arose—a difficulty connected with the complex and highly artificial social organization of the world, with the relations of the great corporations that ruled the earth. Not only were our plans disarranged, but father very nearly lost his life.
CHAPTER II
A Lecture on Lunar History
ONE evening, when he came home from the laboratory, father called Valence and me to him, and took brown-haired little Fay on his knee.
“I have a new record for the magnetic phonograph,” he said, slipping a little spool of thin steel wire out of its case. “It tells about the moon, who found it, and how men are able to live there. Do you want to hear about the world we are going to in the big space flier, Johnnie?”
“Yes, Father. I’ll try hard to understand.”
Valence ran to get the little instrument, and adjust the spool in place. She pressed the switch, and set it on the table. A few bars of swift music came from the diaphragm, and then the suave voice of the announcer:
“An address on the history of the moon, covering events from the first attempts at interplanetary navigation to the present time, delivered by Professor Avery Smithton, of the Pan-American University.”
A moment later the professor’s words began, in a rich, lively voice, well in harmony with the mysterious appeal of his subject. I listened in rapt attention, to learn more of the wonderful world to which we were going.
“Crossing the gulf of space has always been one of the great dreams of man. In the great age of scientific progress, that began about five hundred years ago, a great deal of thought was given to the question. A French romancer, Jules Verne, brought considerable attention to the subject with a plausible tale of a voyage around the moon in a great projectile fired from an immense gun. A few years later, an English novelist, Wells, wrote his great classic, ‘The First Men in the Moon.’ Like an older writer, Jonathan Swift, with his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ Wells was satirizing humanity; and, like Swift’s, his satire has been forgotten for the interest of his story. Though science has never duplicated his marvelous cavorite, his book is still read for its marvelously accurate pictures of the moon.
“These novels must have been a great spur to inventors working on the problems of space navigation.
“It was late in 1989 that Smith and Orloff made the great discovery that led to the building of the first space ship. Scientists had long held that the atoms of other heavy metals might be caused to break up like the radium atom, thus making available limitless sources of power. Those two great physicists, working together, found that a block of thorium, alloyed with small quantities of certain other elements, had its radioactivity vastly increased when a beam of electromagnetic radiation of a frequency only slightly above that of the Cosmic Ray was turned upon it.
“Within a short time, intra-atomic energy had replaced the old steam and internal combustion engines, and even the wind and tide power plants. Three years later, these scientists succeeded in breaking down the atoms of platinum, osmium, and iridium. Then, indeed, man was ruler of his world.
“Ordinarily, power is drawn from the atomic engines in the form of heat; but, in the winter of 1994, Orloff, continuing his work, discovered that certain alloys of platinum and iridium suffered atomic disintegration under the ray in such a manner as to throw off atomic particles at almost the speed of light. The alpha ray of radium consists of charged helium atoms thrown off at about one-tenth the speed of light; the ‘atomic blast’ is a phenomenon of the same order, but vastly more powerful.
“The discovery resulted in a laboratory cataclysm. The fiery stream of atoms, bursting out of the tube, demolished the laboratory wall, while its reaction against the block of metal wrecked the apparatus. Orloff was seriously injured, his left arm having been cut off by the blast. He died a few months later, but not until he had revealed to his colleague the conditions of the experiment.
“Smith, then a young man, seems to have turned his attention to financial affairs. It was not until 2085, when he had become immensely wealthy by commercializing the atomotor, that he first undertook to propel a vessel by the reaction of the Orloff atomic blast. He used a rocket car of the Goddard type, with the repulsion units attached to the rear. His first model ascended successfully, though without a living passenger, and the old man lived to see his ships regularly engaged in round-the-world express and passenger service.
“He seems to have become infatuated with the possibilities of interplanetary travel opened by the device—one wonders how much he was influenced by those old romances I have mentioned. Two projectiles, containing various scientific instruments, were shot at the moon in 2041; and several observatories reported a flash of light on the disk of the satellite, supposed to have been the light of the magnesium charge with its detonator carried by one of them, exploding upon impact. In 2043 Smith left the earth in a larger projectile, built in the Andes. It is believed that this first space ship was struck by a meteorite, as the explorer was never heard from after he had passed the Heaviside layer.”
