Collected Short Fiction, page 348
“Cartwright!” His voice was a hearty boom. “So you’re to see the Moon, after all?”
He introduced Martin Worth. The astronomer was a small thin man. His skin was very white. His retreating hair, heavy sloping brows, and small pointed beard, made a series of black V’s upon it. His dark eyes had a cynical twinkle, and his nearly fleshless face bore an expression of perpetual sardonic amusement.
Moving with the effortless gliding grace of a professional dancer, Worth came to Cartwright and shook his hand. All his motions were silent, quick, deft.
“Cartwright, I recall you as part of a very interesting mathematical problem.” His voice had a hushed, almost whispering quality. “I understand that Galt has chosen you to share our distressing discovery—if you will come with us to the Moon.”
On a walled terrace outside, beneath a striped awning, they found the Pioneer. Cartwright thought it looked oddly tiny, to be a ship of space.
AN egg of silvered metal, twelve feet in diameter and eighteen long. Criss-crossed with riveted seams, pierced with small round ports. Tipped, at each end, with a massive disk of red copper alloy.
Folding steps led them through the heavy oval door, up through a tiny lock-chamber. They emerged upon a flat deck which divided the interior, a little below the center. Long seats and compact cabinets were built against the curve of the dome.
An intricate-looking control board curved across one end, with larger observation panels of thick fused quartz set in the steel hull above it. Striding toward it, Drumm paused to touch the curving metal overhead.
“Two inches of a special nickel-chrome steel,” he said. “Laminated, welded, and riveted—forty tons of it. There are automatic shutters of the same for all the ports.”
Little Martin Worth smiled his sardonic smile.
“And still,” he said softly, “a forty-gram meteor would smash quite a hole in it.”
Drumm’s laugh rang loud under the dome.
“Your viewing with alarm won’t scare Cartwright,” he said. “He has been to space in something worse than this.” He spun a bright wheel, and the heavy door clanged behind them. “The valve is sealed,” he said, “with five hundred pounds of pressure in a flexible hydraulic duct.”
A motor beneath the deck hummed in a rising crescendo. Then abruptly the deck quivered to a mighty, muffled drumming reverberation. Cartwright felt an odd little lurch, and wondered why the ship didn’t rise. He stepped toward one of the ports.
“I thought—”
His voice became a sob of dismay. He grasped frantically at the sliding emergency shutter. For he could see the bright-lit familiar panorama beneath him—and it was tilting crazily!
A giddy faintness seized him, as the surface of the planet seemed to spin from beneath. The Earth was beside them. Beneath there was only a bottomless and terrible abyss of stars.
“Better look back inside,” Worth’s suave voice advised.
Cartwright did so, and his vertiginous terror vanished.
“I felt just as if the Earth was sliding out from under us,” he whispered.
“A natural illusion,” the little astronomer told him. “The entire ship is included in the propulsive field of the main terminal geodes—those copper disks at the ends of the hull. Since each atom of the ship and our bodies is accelerated equally by the geoflexion reaction, there is no sense of motion.
“But, for our comfort and convenience aboard, we have a secondary set of geodes installed below the deck. Our bodies are included in their field, while the hull is not. The result is a sense of force, which we adjust to an approximation of Earth-gravity.”
Cartwright sank upon one of the long seats.
“And I thought our cathion rocket was something modern!”
“The Pioneer isn’t any rocking chair.” Worth’s thin face was twisted with his sardonic grin. “A meteor the size of your hat could smash us into a ring around the Moon. And just wait till you’ve been in a dead pocket!”
SMILING, Captain Drumm swung back from the controls.
“Don’t let him get your goat, Cartwright,” he boomed. “Mart sees the dark side—he was made that way. But we’ve been in dead pockets before, and got out again.”
Cartwright looked uneasily at Worth’s satanic face.
“What is a dead pocket?”
“There are areas,” said the little astronomer, “usually in the vicinity of strong gravitational fields, where the geoflexor drive doesn’t work. The field simply doesn’t mesh. And there is a resistance in the coils that heats them dangerously. If we happen to hit anything while the geodes are dead, or if a coil burns out—”
He shrugged, and all the V’s grew sharper and more sinister on his face.
“Don’t listen,” called the hearty voice of Captain Drumm. “Mart’s just a black pessimist. He can’t cross the street without expecting a taxi to get him.”
But Cartwright remained uneasy. The rush of air grew to a scream about them, and faded. Cartwright went back to the port, and conquered that vertigo. He found the lights of the metropolis, a contracting star on the field of darkness behind.
“We’re already out of the atmosphere,” he said, and it was more like a question. “What’s the power?”
The little astronomer lifted a hatch cover set flush in the deck. That drumming reverberation welled louder from below.
“The power tubes.” Kneeling to point, Worth raised his voice. In the dark cramped space beneath the deck, a row of tall transparent cylinders shone dimly. “The silver cathode is at the focal point of an intense geodic field. The atomic fields are warped, and there is a swift emission of electrons. They are collected by the grid-element above. The potential is four hundred volts, the out-put of each tube about two thousand kilowatts.”
Cartwright swayed again to his feet. “Atomic power!” he gasped. “And you had this back in 1927!”
Then he groped at one of the long brass hand rails, for the ship had lurched sickeningly. It seemed to drop, hang, and drop again. He looked faintly at Martin Worth.
“A dead pocket?”
The little astronomer grinned sardonically.
“Not yet—we’re just feeling the edge of one.”
Cartwright clung to the seat. He watched the broad red back of Captain Drumm. The big space pilot had risen off his seat. He was leaning over the controls. Gold braid flashed as his hands moved with a lightning skill.
“Chin up, Cartwright,” he boomed. “We’ll come through!”
Cartwright looked uncertainly at the thin, somewhat diabolical smile of Martin Worth. He was glad that he Was a good sailor. Then he began to have a disquieting doubt that he was so good, after all.
Then the ship dropped—and didn’t stop dropping.
A gong clattered on the instrument panel, and there was a sudden reek of burned insulation. Drumm was desperately busy at the controls. There was a deafening, head-splintering crash. And Cartwright’s world turned black.
CHAPTER III
The Holocaust to Come
JAY CARTWRIGHT was definitely surprised later to find himself lying unharmed on one of the long, bunk-like seats. The machinery of the Pioneer was drumming evenly again. He saw Martin Worth’s sardonic grin.
“Never mind, Cartwright!”
Blue eyes smiling out of his deep-bronzed face, Captain Drumm looked back from the controls.
“A meteor the size of a good particle of dust always sounds like the end of the world,” he said. “And that feeling of weightlessness when the gravity-coils are dead is a thing the body has got to get adjusted to. Just take it easy and we’ll soon be on the Moon!”
Cartwright stared in fascination at the bright mystery of the Moon’s approaching face, which he and Delorme had striven so vainly to reach. He found the vast cragged ring of Arzachel—it was hard to think that any human work would be waiting for them there.
Captain Drumm set the Pioneer down gently upon the central peak. The throb of the geodes was suddenly still.
“Hold on,” warned Drumm. “I’m cutting the gravity field.”
Cartwright understood that caution when the reaction of unaccustomed muscles flung him painfully up against the metal dome. He rubbed his head. Something about weighing twenty-five pounds made him feel queerly giddy. His stomach was uneasy.
Through a port, he glimpsed the stark moonscape. It was all highlights and blackness. He forgot all his discomfort in a voiceless awe at its stern splendor.
Worth had flung open the inner door of the little air-lock. Off their hooks he was dragging bulky suits of stiff, white-painted fabric. He thrust one of them at Cartwright.
“My size ought to fit you,” he said. “It goes on like oldtime underwear.”
Captain Drumm helped him into it. There was a double zipper, up the front, and the seam was sealed with air pressure in a flexible tube.
“The breathing mixture—oxygen and helium—is in this shoulder tank,” Drumm informed him. “Adjust the valve until you can breathe comfortably. The main tank is good for three hours. The emergency, two more.”
The tiny air-lock let them out, one at a time. Cartwright lost his balance as he stepped down upon the Moon, soared up again in an involuntary leap. Drumm caught him. For a moment he was breathless, gasping.
“You’ve forgotten your valve.”
Drumm turned it, for Cartwright was lost in wonder.
The silver of it blinding in the westering Sun, the Pioneer lay upon a rugged, irregular summit, many acres in extent. A full mile below—so far that its convexity was instantly visible—lay the crater floor.
A cruel and lifeless desert, burning gray-white under the Sun. Riven with ragged cracks, pitted with thousands of circular craterlets.
Thirty miles and more away, the walls of Arzachel thrust up. The jagged peaks beneath the Sun were etched in a fantastic dead-black silhouette, and they flung an ink-black ragged shadow far across the plain of hell.
The eastward rim raised pinnacles of fire against the appalling blackness of the star-hazed sky. All colors were sombre, dull-red, brown, smoky yellow.
CARTWRIGHT flung back his head, in the stiff helmet, and found the Earth. It was northward from the zenith, a huge broad crescent, mistily blue-green.
“Come.” Worth had touched his inflated sleeve, and the sound vibrations were transmitted faintly. “The observatory.”
Waddling in the huge, white-painted suit, he made a fantastic figure. Cartwright followed him. They rounded the silver egg of the ship, and climbed a narrow trail. Seeking to adjust his muscles to one-sixth their usual burden, Cartwright lurched, stumbled. Suddenly he lost his balance, toppled off the trail.
Spinning downward, into a chasm of awesome night, he screamed—and knew there was no air to carry his cry. He plunged down for an endless time, picturing the sharp fangs of rock that waited down on the crater floor.
Then a lasso settled around him.
“I ran away to the west when I was thirteen.” Captain Drumm buckled the coiled lariat back to his belt. “And, remember, you fall only about two feet the first second, here.”
“Thanks,” gasped Cartwright.
At the top of the trail, on the highest ragged peak, a silvered dome flung off blinding lances of the sun. Worth a flimsy-seeming section of bright metal, to reveal a powerful telescope.
“Only a twenty-four-inch mirror,” Worth said. “But the perfect seeing here makes it more effective than the largest instrument on Earth. And we have a new fine-grain emulsion with sixty times the speed of anything used on Earth, which alone makes it the equivalent of the new two-hundred inch reflector they are building in California.”
His whispering voice was suddenly grave.
“But this is what we came to show you.”
The great tube swung toward the northward horizon, the floor-platform lifted them. Worth made Cartwright seat himself at the eyepiece. At first he saw only a circle of utter black, scattered with a few tiny hard atoms of light.
Worth touched his arm, and sound came:
“Notice the visibility—any astronomer would give half his life for one night here! This is in Perseus, three degrees from the double cluster. Look at the stars at the top of the field. Notice anything?
“Fainter, maybe.”
Worth’s whisper was solemn. “Don’t you see that their light is diffused?”
“They’re misty,” Cartwright agreed. “They seem to have little halos.”
“Exactly,” said the astronomer. “Because they are shining through the edges of a cloud. And there are other stars that have been blotted out completely, because they are behind cloud.”
“What sort of cloud?”
“To the eye, even with telescope, it is no more than a shadow on the stars. But here is a plate we took with the fast emulsion, and a twenty-hour exposure.”
Worth snapped a switch. In a large square cabinet, a light went on. Transmitted rays illuminated a large photographic plate. The same pattern of stars burned out, brilliantly. And across them was a black and ominous cloud.
The astronomer’s arm went tense. “There it is—a dark nebula.”
THE center of it was a black globular mass. That was flattened into a disk. And long vague spiral arms were flying from the edges of the disk.
Staring, Cartwright repressed a faint shudder. There was something appalling about that cloud of darkness. The spiral arms of it looked somehow like the groping tentacles of some unpleasant monster.
“I give up.” Fighting that shuddery feeling, he tried to grin. “What is it?”
Worth’s dark eyes, beyond the round face-plate in his helmet, looked so grave that Cartwright hastily erased the grin.
“A stellar nebula,” said the little astronomer. “A cloud of gas and dust and meteoric debris, loosely held in its own gravitational field.
“It is the sort of condensation, according to cosmogony, that should have formed a star. Perhaps its mass was a little too small, or its angular moment a little too great. Perhaps, billions of years from now, it will yet give birth to a star.”
The bulky white suit made a little shrugging gesture.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Well?” demanded Cartwright. “What is it that does?”
“The fact that the nebula is approaching the Earth,” said Worth’s suave whisper. “My analysis of its spectral shift shows a relative radial velocity of nearly seventy miles a second. And it has no perceptible proper motion. That means that it is moving to intersect the path of the Sun and the planets, in Lyra. Collision is inevitable.”
“Collision!” Cartwright shook his head, peered. “And what will happen?”
“To the solar system, very little,” said the astronomer. “The nebula is quite diffuse. Its matter is scattered through a disk sixty billion miles across. Its mean density is what we should call a fairly hard vacuum. The Sun will surely pass through unharmed. I think none of the planets will be lost—although the orbits of the asteroids and some of the smaller moons are apt to be affected by meteoric collisions. But, for men, the outlook is less cheerful.”
In the chill darkness beneath that metal dome upon the Moon, Cartwright shuddered as if the deadly shadow of that stellar cloud had already fallen upon him. He clutched at Worth’s stiff-clad arm.
“What”—His voice was a croak—
“what will happen to mankind?”
Worth’s big helmet nodded at the telescope.
WT HE picture is quite clear,” came JH. his whispering voice. “The first thing streamers of dust will absorb the sunlight, first the ultra-violet, finally even the red. The Sun will turn crimson, and then fade out.
“That unnatural night will be a warning of the end. For several months, perhaps, the planet will be gripped in its bitter cold. Atmospheric moisture will fall as snow. Probably even the seas will freeze over.
“But then, as the Earth drives into the denser clouds, there will be heat again—and light. That last day will be more terrible than the night. For its light will come from rains of meteors.
“And that will be the end—a hail of fire. The meteors, falling ever faster, will burn the oxygen out of the atmosphere. They will beat down on an asphyxiated, world. Their heat will vaporize the seas. Finally it will probably fuse even the smoking deserts that will then cover all the planet.”
Worth stared out of the dome for a moment, toward that invisible speck in the silver-dusted splendor of Perseus.
“After a few years,” he said at last, “the Sun will emerge unchanged beyond the cloud. The planets will still attend it. But no spark of life will survive to repopulate them—unless our Plan succeeds.”
“What can men do?” Cartwright shuddered. “What can they do, against—that?”
“We have a Plan,” Worth assured him. “Galt organized the Utopia Corporation to carry it through. We have been working on it ten years. With your help, we have a chance—just a good chance.”
“One thing,” Cartwright said abrutly. “How long have we?”
The astronomer seemed to hesitate. Peering into the darkness of his helmet, Cartwright was unable to see his face. His suave voice, when at last it came faintly through the contact of the suits, seemed curiously evasive: “My computations are not yet complete. And the boundaries of the nebula, as you can see for yourself, are rather indefinite.”
“But you have an idea,” Cartwright insisted. “Is it two years? Five? Ten?”
“I can promise that there will be time to carry out the Plan,” said Worth. “But very little to spare.”
“Then how long will your Plan take?”
“Galt will tell you,” the astronomer said, “when you get back to Earth.”
CHAPTER IV
The Fortress on the Moon
LITTLE MARTIN WORTH announced that he was going to remain on the Moon, to continue his observations of the approaching nebula. He showed Cartwright a twelve-foot ball of white-painted metal, half buried in the rock below the observatory.
