Collected Short Fiction, page 357
He fell silent. As at last they rounded the curve of the Earth, and approached the brilliant hazy convexity of its sunward face, a voiceless tensity of expectation held them all. What had nearly two centuries done to Utopia?
Cartwright traced the cloud-spotted outline of North America.
“It looks just the same,” he whispered.
“It will probably look pretty much the same,” said Martin Worth, “after it has passed through the nebula—after the fiery hail of meteors has destroyed all life on it.”
Pat Wayland stood peering out at the long green-tinged shadow of the nebula. Her face was stiff with an overwhelming dread, her blue eyes huge with fear. From her slack lips came a weary whisper:
“What can men do, against—that?” she sighed. “There can be no escape.” Suddenly, desperately, Cartwright wanted to take her in his arms. He wanted to kiss away the terror in her eyes, and make her smile again. He shrugged, and tried to send his thoughts back to the fate of the Earth.
He knew there was no use dreaming of Pat Wayland.
“We’ll land at Star City,” he announced, “and see what’s going on at the great observatory there.”
“If,” added Martin Worth, “there is still an observatory there.”
The convex planet flatted beneath them. Star City spread out, flung like a jeweled tapestry from the mountains to the city. Wheeling the little ship above its lofty, far-spaced towers, its wide roads and vast airports and well-kept parks, Cartwright felt relief.
“We saw no cities like this, before,” he said. “Progress must have carried on. Perhaps, after all, they have found a way to escape eternal destruction.”
“Perhaps,” said the cynical Worth.
The observatory stood upon a truncated mountain between the city and the desert. Long rows of laboratory buildings marched across the leveled summit, commanded by the mighty white dome.
Cartwright dropped the Pioneer into a grassy, tree-dotted court. Deep-cut letters in the architrave of a splendid building at the end of it read: HALL OF ATOMICS.
A squirrel chittered on the grass as they climbed out of the ship. Fallen leaves scattered the walks. The wind sighed faintly in the fragrant pines.
“It’s so quiet!” A faint apprehension dropped Cartwright’s voice. “So queerly still.”
“An observatory,” Worth suggested, “might be busier at night.”
HASTENED by a tense anxiety Cartwright hurried along the walk to the Hall of Atomics. A heavy door yielded to his hand. He entered. A heavy silence met him. The air was dead, heavy with stale chemical odors.
He went along the great central corridor, peering into the doors that opened from it. Huge, well-lit laboratory rooms were filled with apparatus that was mostly unfamiliar. All of it was covered with a heavy film of dusk. He went solemnly back to the others, who were waiting at the door.
“There’s nobody—anywhere.” Something made him whisper. “It has all been abandoned. For years.” He led the way back toward the Pioneer. “We had better go down to the city, and find out what is the matter.”
“Perhaps,” said Captain Drumm, hopefully, “they have advanced so far they don’t need laboratories any more.”
Mart Worth grinned sardonically. “Perhaps!”
They were climbing aboard the little ship when suddenly Pat Wayland caught her breath and pointed. Thrumming softly, the long tapered spindle of a geoflexor flier came gliding down above the deserted buildings.
The gaily painted craft landed a hundred yards away, beside a dancing fountain. A little crowd of men and women trooped out, laughing. They were oddly and brightly clad, in stuff that looked like silk. One of them strummed a musical instrument, carelessly, while the others spread gay cloths under the trees, and brought baskets from the flier.
“Picnicking, in the shadow of death,” murmured Martin Worth. “They have forgotten the danger of the nebula.”
But Cartwright fancied a keenness almost of hysteria in their laughter. He caught anxious glances toward the northward sky—where the day’s serene blue hid the black cloud of the nebula.
“Let’s speak to them.”
He called. The picnickers discovered the Pioneer, with the four standing about the steps. For a moment there was an astounded, incredulous silence. Then a wild shout:
“The Four! It is the Four—returned to save us from the Holocaust!”
Dropping the baskets, they came running to make an awed little ring about the Pioneer. Their faces were eagerly smiling. They reached out trembling, doubtful hands to touch the metal of the little ship.
“You really are the Four?” The speaker was an alert, gray-haired man. His eyes were burning with a tortured anxiety. “Tell us—have you really come to save us?”
“We are the Four,” Cartwright admitted. “But there was never anything that we could do about the Holocaust. We only hoped that our efforts would enable men to save themselves.”
He searched the Utopian’s taut face and asked:
“Have we failed?”
The Utopian slowly shook his gray head, and the brightness of hope upon his face gave way to a weary despair.
“I’m afraid,” he whispered, “that we have all failed.” He made a tired gesture, to include the laboratory buildings, and the mighty dome of the observatory. “Once I worked here,” he said, “before the laboratory was closed. I was an assistant to Essendee, the great atomic physicist. Once, I remember, he told me he had seen a ray of hope. But—”
The Utopian made a weary little shrug of defeat.
“WHAT was the matter?” Cartwright demanded. “What made you fail?”
“Our philosophers still argue over that,” said the Utopian. “But I believe the truth is simple enough. In the first two centuries very little was done—merely because men who expected to die before he arrival of the Holocaust felt little interest in it. It was difficult for men to assume responsibility for posterity. And the failure of the Four to return, as you had promised, was a discouraging factor.”
Cartwright nodded.
“We didn’t disappoint you intentionally. But go on.”
“Thirty or forty years ago,” the Utopian said, “when men began to realize that the Holocaust would arrive within their own lifetimes, there was a sudden spurt of advancement. A hundred outstanding scientists appeared. Too late.
“You understand the appalling difficulty of the problem of averting the nebula collision. From whatever angle it is attacked, the obstacles are stupendous. And—so it has always seemed to me—the Utopian temperament was poorly fitted to cope with them.”
“How do you mean?” asked Cartwright.
The gray Utopian made a gesture in the direction of the unseen metropolis below.
“You saw Star City? All the cities of Utopia are like that. They are beautiful. All ugliness, all pain, all strife, have been eliminated. All men work together, for the good of all.
“That, I believe, is the plan that the Four made for Utopia. It was a good plan, good in itself. But sometimes our philosophers have suspected that it left out something, made life too automatic, too easy. I don’t wish to criticize—”
“That’s all right,” Cartwright said.
“What you say may be quite true.”
The gray man nodded, soberly.
“I know it is. Since we abandoned the laboratories, I have made a garden. There I have seen how cultivated plants breed out. They become weak, easy prey for drouth and blights. Ever and again we must start anew, with a hybrid strain crossed from plants that have been toughened by a harder struggle to survive.”
“You say,” Cartwright demanded, “that you abandoned the laboratories? Why?”
Dread stiffened the Utopian’s face.
“That was nearly twenty years ago,” he whispered. “Until then, we had hope. Essendee believed that he had found a way.” He stared at the great silent buildings, and shook his head. “We might have beaten the Holo.”
“Well?” insisted Cartwright. “What stopped you?”
“The Vanishings,” said the Utopian.
CHAPTER XVII
Terror by Night
CARTWRIGHT peered in astonishment at the gray Utopian. “Vanishings?” he echoed. “What do you mean?”
The Utopian shook his head.
“The Vanishings are a mystery that we have never solved,” he said. “About twenty years ago, the best of our scientists began to disappear from their laboratories. Apparatus, books, and notes were taken, too.
“The Vanishings always happened at night. They kept on happening, in spite of all we could do. Scientists were taken from under the noses mi armed guards, and out of locked rooms. We set various scientific traps, with invisible rays and such, in vain.
“Queerly, the scientists who were taken were almost invariably those working on the problem of escaping the Holocaust. Essendee himself escaped, after a battle with an unidentified midnight intruder in this very observatory. But practically every other man who had accomplished anything at all toward saving the Earth, was abducted.”
Cartwright was staring at him.
“A very strange story,” he muttered.
“It was incredible to us, at first,” said the Utopian. “For there had been no crime in Utopia. Every person has his own secure place in the community, and all his education is directed to make him fit that place. There is no need for crime.
“We had no police organization, here in Star City, until the Vanishings began. Then we organized a force. They did their best, first to protect the scientists and then to find what had become of them. But all efforts failed. And at last our observatories and laboratories were all abandoned, just for the want of able men to carry on.”
“Queer,” muttered Cartwright. “Very queer!”
“Now,” said the Utopian—whose name, he told them, was Arro Fournine—“will you come down into Star City? We must tell Utopia that the Four have returned. Your presence will give people courage to await the Holocaust.”
Assenting, Cartwright brought the Utopian aboard the Pioneer. At his direction, they landed the little ship upon a great pillar in one of the city’s vast parks.
“This is the Pier of the Four,” said Arro Fournine. “It was made ready for you, one hundred and fifty years ago.”
Above the platform towered a huge stone likeness of the Pioneer, a hundred feet in diameter. Their statues stood in a colossal group beside it, giants towering forty feet tall.
A gay-clad, joyously shouting throng was pouring into the park. Cheers rolled, wave on wave of sound, against the great pillar. At last the thousands grew silent, waiting for the Four to speak.
Cartwright made a halting and uncomfortable little talk. He regretted the failure of the Four to return when they had promised. He was sorry that the Utopians had failed to do anything about the Holocaust. The time was now very short. He was not hopeful. But the Four would see what, if anything. could be done.
Silent now, the Utopians began to disperse.
“Trying to start a panic?” inquired Captain Drumm, standing beside the Pioneer.
“IT’S time they faced the facts,” Cartwright said. “Doesn’t it seem to you that they are sort of childlike and naive? Their world has been too perfect for their own good. Life has been too easy for them. They have never learned to face realities. When this supreme danger comes along, they haven’t been trained to meet it. They just give up, appalled at their own helplessness.”
He looked at the tense faces of Drumm and Worth and Pat Wayland.
“Is there anything that we can do—anything at all?”
The girl shook her platinum head.
“I don’t know of anything.”
Cartwright turned to Worth.
“Would any sort of ark be possible, to carry men to some planet of another star?”
The little astronomer tugged at his pointed black beard.
“That is probably our only possible chance,” he said. “And it is fantastically slender. It would be very difficult to build any sort of interstellar ship, in the few months of time now left to us, and even if we had the best ship we can design, ready to take off today, the chances are that it would itself be overtaken by the nebula before it could build up sufficient velocity to escape.”
“But,” insisted Cartwright, “is it possible?”
“Barely possible,” admitted Mart Worth. “But, even if men did escape in an ark of space, where would they go? Probably only one star in a hundred thousand has any planets at all. Perhaps one planet in a hundred thousand happens to meet the conditions for human life.”
He shrugged, hopelessly.
“What ship could visit a hundred thousand stars?”
“Still,” persisted Cartwright, “we’ve simply got to go on and try something.”
“Before we plan anything definite,” said Martin Worth, “I want to study the nebula from the observatory here. A great deal of it, you remember, was below the horizon from the citadel.”
He called to the gray-haired Utopian, who was standing at a little distance, and asked:
“Will you help us use the great observatory tonight?”
The thin face of Arro Fournine turned pale, and he made an anxious gesture of protest.
“I told you about the Vanishings. We don’t use the observatory any more. It is safe enough by day. But, at night—”
His voice trailed off, huskily, and his fingers twisted nervously.
“I must make the observations,” Worth insisted, “to find out how long we have. And, as for any mysterious haunters—”
All the V’s of his face sharpened to the old cynical grin.
“After all,” Captain Drumm told the frightened Utopian, “we are the Four. I think we can take care of ourselves. But we need you, to show us the way about.”
They were staring at the Utopian.
“I’ll go with you,” he said at last. “For the sake of Utopia.” He shrugged, unhappily. “I can see that you are skeptical of what I have told you. I only hope that your skepticism is not rudely shattered.”
THE red sun was setting when the Pioneer dropped them again amid the majestic buildings upon the leveled mountain top. They came off into the silent, neglected grounds. Pat Wayland shivered to the chill of evening in the air. Worth pointed, solemnly, at the sunset-red upon the huge white dome.
“The first warning,” he said softly. “What do you mean?” asked Cartwright.
“The first tenuous wisp of the nebula must have already touched us,” said Martin Worth. “There is a slow accumulation of microscopic dust motes in the upper atmosphere. They absorb the violet end of the spectrum. Today, a red sunset.” His voice dropped to an ominous whisper. “Tomorrow, a rain of fire.”
Arro Fournine kept anxiously close to them, as they entered the great dusky buildings. The air was heavy, musty. Dust lay thick. The silence became terrible to Cartwright. It became as appalling as the dead stillness of the Moon. He started to tiny mocking echoes.
They came at last into the huge dome that covered the main telescope. Arro Fournine, in a dry nervous voice, explained the few novel features of the equipment to Martin Worth.
Electric motors opened the slit in the dome. As it turned slowly toward the north, the red of sunset gave way to the dim shadow of the nebula.
Cartwright touched Worth’s arm.
“An odd thing,” he commented. “There was dust everywhere in the halls. But you notice there is none in here.”
The little astronomer nodded, tugging in a puzzled way at his pointed beard.
“So I noticed,” he whispered, “It is odd, too, that the telescope operates perfectly. The oil is not gummed in the motors, there is no rust, the mirror still has an excellent polish.”
His whisper sank lower still.
“You would almost believe,” he added, “that the observatory has been in constant use!” His dark hollow eyes shot an uneasy glance at Arro Fournine. “We shall see what we shall see.”
Worth climbed to the observer’s seat at the side of the great tube. The Utopian took his place at the switchboard from which lights and motors were controlled. Armed with the little paralysis guns, Pat Wayland and Captain Drumm and Cartwright moved watchfully about the vast floor.
Night fell without. The ominous red afterglow faded at last. The baleful darkness of the nebula thickened against the northward constellations, touched eerily here and there with green.
As the hours passed, Cartwright could not protect himself from a mounting fear. He tried not to believe the Utopian’s queer story about the vanishings. It seemed quite incredible. The truth, he tried to tell himself, was that these oddly childlike people were hysterical with terror. Probably some of their scientists had merely abandoned a task that looked hopeless, had run away to escape responsibility. And the story had grown with twenty years.
He shook his head, in the thick gloom that filled the observatory. Even that didn’t fit. Nothing did. There was some missing factor, whose absence made the whole thing seem a little insane.
HE wanted to whistle, to break that terrible silence. He paced the stone floor of the great dome restlessly, peering vainly into its vast dark spaces. Then silence abruptly became mad confusion.
Pat Wayland made a little gasping cry. Captain Drumm bellowed a shout, and his paralysis gun began to ping. The Utopian screamed. The lights went out. Yellow flame spurted against the darkness, and gunshots reverberated against the dome.
Cartwright heard a dry rustling near him. He thought he glimpsed a gray shapeless shadow moving. He flung up the paralysis gun. But, before he could fire, a dazzling blue light flashed in his eyes, and left him blind.
“Jay!” Terror edged Pat’s warning cry. “Behind you!”
He spun. His ears caught some little slither of sound, and he swung his fist at it. The blow met nothing. Flung forward by the force of it, he tripped over something small. His head struck the floor, dazingly.
“Jay—Mart—Cap!” Pat Wayland’s muffled voice became a scream. “They’ve got—”
It ceased, abruptly.
