Collected Short Fiction, page 347
The applause seemed to falter.
“Zay do not understan’,” little Delorme told him. “What zay want eez heroism, courage, death.” He waved a strutting farewell. “Off—to zee moon!”
He followed Cartwright up the flimsy metal ladder, into the cramped pilot compartment. They buckled their harness, tested the reaction tubes, and waited for the dignitaries to scuttle for safety below.
CARTWRIGHT watched the chronometer’s creeping needle. It reached the second, and he lifted his hand. The jets made a cushion of blue fire beneath, and the whole rocket screamed with a terrific vibration.
It moved, savagely. The straps cut into Cartwright’s lean body. The breath was crushed out of him. And a spinning darkness pressed upon him, as acceleration-pressure drove the blood from his brain.
Cartwright fought the darkness and fought for breath and fought that ruthless pressure. Elation bubbled in him, for they were safely off!
Frantically he labored to keep up with his thousand practised tasks, setting and reading instruments, watching a hundred dials, making swift calculations. The bellow of the jets annihilated all other sound, and he passed the figures to Delorme scrawled on bits of paper.
A needle quivered, and he felt the whole rocket shudder. He scrawled a question mark. Delorme’s face was white. He held up three fingers, and pointed anxiously down toward the rocket compartments. Then his hand came with a clutching movement toward his throat, and his small body slumped limp in the harness.
Cartwright seized the dual controls. It was a two-man job, to watch the banks of instruments, make all the computations, and balance the thundering jets to hold the rocket on its course. But he tried to carry on alone.
That needle flickered again, back to zero. And the rocket flung sidewise as if some gigantic hand had struck it. Three equalized tubes drove the rocket; their hundred-ton thrusts had to be kept in perfect balance.
With the steering jets, in the nose, he brought the rocket back upon the course, and battled to keep it there. And the minutes, under the terrific tension of a six-gravity acceleration, stretched into hours.
Every muscle and tendon in his battered body ached. A thin unnoticed stain of blood was hardening on his upper lip. His head throbbed to the roaring of the jets, until almost he envied Delorme’s oblivion.
Watching the schedule pasted to the steel wall, he gratefully cut the acceleration as the radio-altimeter pointed off the hundreds of miles. To five gravities, four, and three, and two.
When Number Three Tube cut out again, it was easier to hold the course with the steering jets—but, with each successive failure, the tube was cut out longer. At this rate, the steering tubes would be burned out long before they reached the Moon.
They were eight hundred miles from Earth when he cut the acceleration to one gravity. He stretched himself thankfully in the harness. And little Delorme lifted his head, mopping at a stain of blood where his brow had struck a key.
“Mon Dieu!” His thin voice was audible above the lessened shrieking of the jets. “Speak of going over your Niagara Falls in a barrel—that is a couch of eiderdown!”
The rocket lurched aside again.
“Parbleu! It is Number Three—probably a leaking valve on zee potassium vapor element. I theenk I can feex it.”
He unbuckled his harness. Swaying weakly, he let himself through the bulkhead valve and climbed down the ladder toward the rocket compartment. The automatic valve closed behind him. Five minutes later the little telegraph disk clattered to “Emergency” and then to “Power Off.”
Cartwright snatched for the firing levers.
THEN it was that the Moon-Expedition, begun with such confidence and pomp, came to its sudden, premature, and obscure end!
There was a stunning concussion. The bulkhead warped upward. Deafened, Cartwright saw the flare of incandescent vapor outside the ports. Bruised, half-stunned, he wound up the little hand-powered emergency transmitter, to send the rocket’s last signal back to Earth:
“Explosion! Main tubes wrecked and Delorme killed. Falling. Will try to use steering jets—”
In what seemed like only a time-tick, the Earth’s shadow, from which they had escaped, once again embraced them. They dropped into Earth’s atmosphere and into night. Desperately Cartwright tried to turn the dizzy fall into a glide—
Crack-up!
Cartwright lived, his left arm broken, not knowing where he was, and unable to communicate with the outside world because the little emergency transmitter was hopelessly smashed. It took him two days to build an oxygen torch, and with it he cut his way out of the wreckage.
He looked about him and his heart sank. The rocket had fallen in a tropical rain-forest. The ants were already at work on Delorme’s body. He buried it and sought water.
The rain-forest was a nightmarish dream in his subsequent wanderings. Mighty branchless boles towered into it like the pillars of some dark cathedral. Gigantic lianas, writhing like snakes in the gloom, tripped and impeded him. Reeking swamps sucked him down into quaking black ooze. Mosquitoes were humming clouds of torture.
He grew ill. Fever parched his skin, dried his mouth, fogged his brain. He lost the supplies he had brought from the wreck. He was staggering in delirium when he came through the terrible marshes, to the bend of a mighty river.
There he built a raft. A tottering yellow skeleton, fever-maddened, starved, one arm slung, he flogged himself day after day to the task. The day the raft was done, the river fell six inches. The raft was immovable.
Exhausted with the effort to pry it free, he flung himself down upon his useless pile of wood. He was too far spent to curse or to sob. Back in the jungle, he heard a soft and now familiar susuration. He saw a rodent scamper past. He knew that it was fleeing from the army ants. But he was too far gone to care.
Then, with all hope gone, had come the rescue. It had a fantastic dreamlike quality. It was like a part of his delirium. The machine that settled, with a soft deep thrumming sound, beside his raft upon the sand bar, was like nothing he had ever seen.
It was wingless. There were no propellors or projecting cathion tubes. It resembled a huge silver egg. There were two shining greenish disks at the ends. Painted on the side of it was the outline of an antique clay lamp, lettered, Utopia, Inc. Larger characters, beneath, spelled: Pioneer.
NURSING his throbbing arm, Cartwright managed to sit up on the raft. He shook his unkempt, fever-buzzing head. He could not credit his senses, believing that his sick brain was fashioning visions as a mental barrier against the whispering horror of the ants.
But an oval door was opening in the side of that white metal egg. Metal steps rattled down, and a tall man descended them. Cartwright’s hollow, fever-glazed eyes blinked. The vision was real!
The stranger was bronzed and erect. He glittered magnificently in an unfamiliar uniform of crimson silk, stiff with gold braid. A string of polished medals shimmered across his chest. He came with a brisk military stride to the raft.
“Cartwright, I presume?” He had a deep, crisp voice. “I am Captain Drumm. Captain Norman Drumm, once of the army engineering corps. Please accept my condolences for the failure of your lunar flight. And may I offer you transportation back to New York, with the compliments of Utopia, Incorporated?”
“Thanks,” Cartwright gasped. “Utopia—what—”
He didn’t hear the answer, because, at that instant, a wave of dizziness overcame him and he toppled off the raft. Dimly, he felt this strangely uniformed captain lift him, carry him without effort. A booming rhythm, as the queer ship lifted. And then nothing at all.
Nothing—until those first disordered snatches of awareness, when he lay on a narrow bed, too weak to turn himself, staring at the green-and-ivory ceiling of his room in New York’s Tropical Hospital.
The illness had been graver than he had suspected. He remembered the weak misery of his fever-parched body, the endless throb of his bursting head, the blurred endless procession of nurses, doctors, examinations, treatments—
And then the joyous wonder of returning health.
“Young man, don’t thank me,” little Dr. Corken told him. “You owe your life to three people connected with this mysterious Utopia Corporation.”
“Utopia—” Cartwright groped into dim memory. “What is it?”
“Some sort of scientific club, apparently,” the little doctor told him. “It was their astronomer, Martin Worth, who figured out by mathematics that your rocket would fall near the Negro River in Brazil—after the Fleet had been ordered to search the North Atlantic. It was their Captain Drumm, who found you with his plane—”
“If that was an airplane, I must have been out of my mind!” Cartwright said.
“You were,” Corken assured him. “Somewhere in the swamps, you picked up a brand-new type of encephalitis. We had given you up, here at the hospital, when Dr. Wayland sent for a specimen of the virus and made a successful serum. Pat Wayland is also connected with the Utopia Corporation.”
“If you can get in touch with any of them,” Cartwright said, “I want to thank them—materially. Utopia, Incorporated sounds like a humanitarian enterprise. And a hundred and forty millions is quite a responsibility, doctor. Especially since I only inherited it. I want to invest it where it will do the most good to mankind.”
PRESENTLY the letter came to him at the hospital. Above a Manhattan address was that odd symbol of the burning lamp. The puzzling message ran:
Dr. Corken has communicated with us. We thank you for your offer of aid. And we need it desperately. For our world lives today in the shadow of unsuspected danger.
If you are grateful for your life, please come to us. Let us show you the scientific evidences of this approaching disaster. Let us beg your aid for our plan. For that is the world’s only chance to survive the Holocaust.
Lyman Galt, Director Utopia, Incorporated.
The next day he was discharged as cured.
Now, as the elevator flung him upward toward the top of the city’s tallest building, that singular letter was crushed in Cartwright’s perspiring hand. What was the Utopia Corporation? The approaching “Holocaust?” The Plan that might save mankind? He was on his way to find out.
CHAPTER II
The Dead Pocket
CARTWRIGHT opened a door that bore the now familiar emblem of the flaming antique lamp. Somehow, the mystery surrounding Utopia, Incorporated, had made him expect modernistic glass-and-chromium luxury. But the reception room in which he found himself was simple and plain.
A girl was busy at the desk, removing fragile pieces of laboratory glassware from a carton, and checking them off a list. She was absorbed in her task and did not look up.
Cartwright’s eyes passed her, then came back. He stared—with good reason. The girl was exquisite. A light tan warmed her flawless skin. Her hair was shining platinum. Her face had a smooth, doll-like perfection.
Jay Cartwright had been so diligently pursued by certain female seekers of that hundred and forty millions, that he had come to avoid feminine society. But there had been none like the girl before him. He wondered how she came to be working in an office.
He had forgotten to speak. When at last she did look up at him, he saw that her eyes were a soft clear blue. Altogether, she almost took his breath. In a sugar-sweet, quiet voice, she remarked innocently:
“After all, this isn’t the waxworks.”
Cartwright turned red and gulped. He fumbled awkwardly for Galt’s letter, and told her his name.
“Oh!” The girl stared at him with widened blue eyes. He had an odd impression that her baby-face was deliberately vacant. “Lyman’s is the second door.”
The platinum splendor of her head bent again. Cartwright was puzzled by a momentary sparkle of interest he had seen in her eyes.
“You would almost think,” he told himself, “that she was conscious!”
BEYOND the second door, he found himself in a larger office. The windows overlooked the ragged canyons of Manhattan. This room, too, looked simple, utilitarian, worn. Sitting behind a cluttered desk was a big, tired-looking man.
“You’re Cartwright!” He rose, smiling. “I came to see you at the Tropical. I’m Lyman Galt.”
He looked forty. Dark hair was retreating from his temples. His unpressed suit was yielding to the muscular mass of his body, his collar was open to show a powerful neck. His wide brown face was criss-crossed with wrinkles of fatigue, and his dark tired eyes looked very solemn.
“I got your letter.” Cartwright smoothed the crumpled envelope in his fingers. “It had a mighty serious sound.” He searched that broad worried face. “About this—Holocaust?”
“Very serious indeed.”
Something in the deep timbre of Galt’s voice sent a queer little shudder through Cartwright. He caught his breath, and sat waiting.
“I should tell you,” rang that solemn voice, “that we exerted our efforts to save your life in order that we might be justified in calling on you for aid. Yet we can’t ask you to join us out of gratitude alone—the thing is too big for that.”
“Well?” Cartwright moved impatiently in his chair. “Just what is this menace? And what is it that your mysterious Utopia Corporation plans to do about it?”
Galt sat impassively behind the big desk.
“First,” he said, “I must tell you something about my associates—the three who jointly saved your life. But you have already met Pat Wayland, who made the serum—” Cartwright shook his head.
“No. But I’m anxious to thank him.”
Galt smiled solemnly, and his dark unkempt head moved a little toward the reception room.
“Pat,” he said, “is for Patricia.”
“Eh!” Cartwright gulped. “I thought—”
“Others have been deceived,” Galt told him gravely. “That is an eccentricity of Pat’s. She isn’t easy to understand.”
He stared for a moment, silently, at the door. “She is a beautiful woman and a splendid scientist,” he said slowly. “It is better to forget that she is a woman. Just remember that she is a biologist who ranks with Mendel and Darwin, a psychologist who is the peer of Watson and Pavlov.” With a faint and somewhat bitter smile, Galt shrugged.
“Pat’s brilliant discoveries,” he said, “form the very heart of our Plan.”
“And,” Cartwright prompted him impatiently, “—the Plan?”
It seemed to Cartwright that a film of odd reticence obscured the frankness of Galt’s dark eyes. They looked away, evasively. Galt’s big fingers drummed nervously on the desk. He started to speak, checked himself.
“Well?” Cartwright said. “You asked me here, to tell me about some approaching danger to the world, and a plan to avoid it. I’m listening.”
Galt nodded.
“First, before we go into any details of the Plan, I want you to see for yourself the scientific evidence of the approaching Holocaust. It is a thing so tremendous that I could not ask you to accept it on my word alone. Dr. Worth and Captain Drumm will be here at dusk, to take you to our observatory. You met Drumm, of course, in the jungle. Worth is our astronomer. It was he who discovered the menace of the Holocaust.”
“Drumm?” Cartwright made a bewildered gesture. “The memory is sort of mixed up with my delirium,” he said. “I remember him—a big man in a queer uniform. I erroneously thought he came in a machine shaped like an egg.”
“He did,” said Galt. “That was our geoflexor, the Pioneer.”
Cartwright’s blue eyes blinked.
“Worth discovered the principle of geodesic inflection twelve years ago,” Galt told him. “It offers a means of direct reaction against the structure of space itself. Drumm helped design the Pioneer. It is an ellipsoid, propelled by the space-warp created by the two terminal geodes—”
Cartwright got slowly and unsteadily to his feet. Supporting himself with his hands, he leaned over the desk. He had a peculiar, uncomfortable feeling of tiny cold feet chasing up and down his spine.
“We were trying to fly a rocket to the Moon,” he whispered, “when you had—that?”
“That’s it,” Galt said. “We first reached the Moon eleven years ago. Worth’s observatory was finished the same year—it’s on the central peak of Arzachel, between Ptolemy and Tycho. Drumm himself has also been to Mars and Venus, but the desperate urgency of the situation has left no time for any idle explorations.”
CARTWRIGHT gazed, unbelievingly, at the small simple office, with its neat rows of filing cabinets along the wall. He saw a long panel of framed photographs, and blinked at them.
“My few visitors,” Galt said, “usually take them to be imaginative drawings.”
Cartwright rubbed at his forehead. “Eleven years—that long?” he whispered. “Captain Drumm has been out exploring space—while the world was wallowing through the Depression!” He gave a short, mirthless little laugh.
“So, even if we had made it, we wouldn’t have been the first. Poor little Delorme—he died for nothing!”
“Why say that?” Galt asked solemnly. “Utopia, Incorporated, will keep its secrets intact. The world will never know what we have done.”
“But what is the reason for your secrecy?” Cartwright demanded in bewilderment.
“You will understand,” Galt promised, “when you learn the Plan. Meantime, I’ll summarize the reason as a deep mistrust of contemporary civilization-so-called.”
His voice went on hollowly:
“Could we give the geoflexor to the world—knowing that its chief use would be to rain bombs on cities?” He shrugged, and rose. “You’ve a couple of hours, before dusk. Would you care to look at Drumm’s Martian notes and photographs?”
When two men entered the office at this point, Cartwright recognized the big adventurer at once. Tall, broad-shouldered, Drumm was magnificent in the crimson-and-gold of his fantastic uniform. He had crisp reddish hair. Earnest blue eyes shone from the tanned stern simplicity of his face.
