Collected Short Fiction, page 359
When he woke again, clutching out in frantic alarm, the bunk had dropped away from him. The blanket cushioned his impact against the top of the hull, but he was sick with the vertigo of an endless fall.
The reek of burning insulation somehow cleared his dizzy brain. This was a dead pocket. The pilotless ship had plunged into the heart of it. Now the geodes were burning up with their unspent power.
He snatched at a handrail, pulled himself desperately forward. The ship spun about him. Now and then the fields seemed to mesh unevenly for an instant, setting it to whirling in a new direction.
But he reached the controls. Cut the power. Waited for the heated coils to cool, for momentum to help carry the ship out of danger. Then carefully he returned the coils, inched the power open as the ship crossed the pocket.
At last the geodes were thrumming again, with a full strong note. The ship was off her course, plunging straight into the nebula’s green-shot heart. He pulled it back toward the tawny fleck of Saturn.
After a few minutes, sure that the dead pocket was safely behind, he opened the little cabinet that served as a galley, and poured steaming coffee from a thermos jug. His hands still trembled. Evidently, the flight was going to be no picnic.
HE had not anticipated much trouble from the dead pockets. Worth’s latest theory connected them with sun-spots, and he believed that they occurred only in the vicinity of strong gravitational fields.
Perhaps, he began to suspect, the approach of the nebula had some connection with them. For, as the days went by, their appalling interruptions became more and more frequent.
He had to sleep. Yet he could never leave the controls without the haunting fear that the geodes would be burned out, while the ship spun helpless in some dead pocket, before he could shut off the power.
That would be the end. Not only for himself alone, but for Martin Worth and Captain Drumm and the ark of space—the end for all. He thought of Pat Wayland.
At last the Pioneer came to rest, nearly half a billion miles from Earth. Preparing to expose the plates in the big star-camera, Cartwright was appalled at sight of the nebula.
It had spread to hide all the northern constellations. Lurid green shone beyond the black masses of it, like sinister lightning. The spiral arms of it reached out like hideous limbs, groping for the stars.
But he saw a pale reddish speck, in the midst of its green-black clouds, and voiced a hoarse little cry of elation. For that speck was Vega, shining through the nebula! It was a beacon, in the passage that Worth had hoped he would discover.
Whistling happily against the resonance of the hull, he finished exposing the plates, and turned the Pioneer back toward the tiny, red-veiled Sun. His tune was interrupted by an appalling, deafening crash.
As the reverberation of the hull died away, he listened with ringing ears for the fatal hiss of air escaping. There was none. But that meteor, as he soon discovered, had been but one of the swarms that had strayed ahead of the nebula.
Ever and again, as he drove the Pioneer back toward the Earth, the hull rang alarmingly. Standing hour by hour at the curving control board, it was difficult to keep his mind from a grim mathematics of life and death.
For the velocity of the ship was increasing, at full acceleration. That meant the same thing, as regards the probability of collision, as a vast increase in its length—besides making every collision far more dangerous.
The dead pockets, too, were ever more frequent. Ever and again, dozing over the controls, he woke-to find himself being tossed about the madly spinning ship, the air reeking with smoke from the hot coils.
At last he reached the midpoint of the return, and gratefully began deceleration.
The nebula was all about him, now. The Sun still burned feebly through it, a dull, blood-red disk. But all the stars, even in the south, were blotted out. And he began to be tormented by a fear that even the Sun would be hidden—that he would be lost in the nebula, without any familiar point of reference.
He was thin and jumpy with fatigue. His yellow hair was unkempt. A new stubble of straw-colored beard covered his hollow face. His eyes were red and sunken. He began to feel that he would gladly give all his chance to escape the nebula, just for a peaceful sleep.
AS the dim Sun grew back to normal size, however, a fierce elation mounted in him. He was coming through, with the precious plates. He had found the path of safety. He had done his job.
He found the Earth. To Sunward of him, its thin half-circle was dim in the haze of the nebula. It was red with an appalling light. Crescent of crimson fire. He couldn’t help a shudder, staring at it. For it was doomed.
Yes, whatever happened the Earth was doomed. Even if the ark of space, by some miracle of good fortune, carried its little colony to some other habitable planet, there could be only a half-life waiting for them.
For man was part of Earth. For millions upon millions of years, life had been shaped and patterned to the days and the seasons, the winds and the tides, to every smallest aspect of this planet that was home. Man, Cartwright knew, would fit no other.
He was staring, in a kind of bleak apathy, at that dim red crescent below the nearer crescent of the Moon. He tried to rouse himself, to recover his lost elation. Only half a million miles to go. Only five hours—
Then the meteor struck.
The concussion was something beyond description as sound. It struck Cartwright like a dazing blow. Reeling from it, he saw a glare of incandescence. He felt pain where a droplet of molten steel struck his face.
For an instant the reek of his own burnt flesh was in his nostrils, and then it was gone. He heard no rush of escaping air, because his ringing ears were deaf. But he saw the flutter of a star-chart—
Saw it vanish through a ragged hole behind him.
For a moment he stared, paralyzed, at the nebula’s dull green. He felt a stabbing pain in his ears, a roaring pressure in his head, the swift involuntary expiration. Then his lungs strove for breath, and found only the agony of asphyxiation.
For the air was gone from the ship.
CHAPTER XX
The Final Night
THE pressure in Cartwright’s head became a bursting agony. It was popping out his blinded eyes. He felt the hot spurt of blood in ears and nostrils. But still, in the vacuum that had conquered the ship, he lived.
He would live for seconds, perhaps for even a minute, until the stored oxygen in his blood was exhausted.
He stumbled first toward the gaping hole in the top of the hull. But it was three feet long, larger by far than any of the emergency patches in the rack. There was only one chance—
He reached the air-lock. Blindly fumbling, he caught the inner valve, swung it open. Weak, reeling, swaying, he tumbled into the cramped little space of it. He tried to close the valve.
But a cold prickling had come over his body. Now it ceased. But it left a dead numbness. His limbs were remote dead things, that refused to obey his brain. He tried to cough the strangling blood out of his throat. But, in a vacuum, a man cannot cough.
The metal vibrated to the closing valve, but he heard no sound. He turned the seal-valve. A cold weight of darkness was plunging down upon him. He strove against it. His dead fingers found the air valves.
And at last the oxyhelium breathing mixture hissed into the lock. Gulping it, in great painful gasps, he slumped down into a dim half-consciousness. Desperately he hungered for rest, for peace, for oblivion. But a second emergency came swift on the heels of the first.
The throb of the geodes ceased. The ship lurched and dropped. He knew that it was in another dead pocket—and that the overheating coils would soon be ruined, unless he reached the controls.
He snatched his pressure-suit off its hook. Still trembling, his aching lungs gasping, he climbed into it and closed the zippers and pumped the pneumatic seal.
The blood still streaming from his nostrils spattered the face-plate of the helmet, half-blinding him. But he opened the valve again, and stumbled to the controls.
His thick-gloved fingers trembling clumsily on the levers, he worked the ship out of the dead pocket. The geodes drummed out again, apparently uninjured. Peering through the red-splattered plate, he found the dim red orb of the Sun again.
For an endless terrible minute, he thought that Earth and Moon had been lost in the thickening clouds of the nebula. But at last he discovered their dim red crescents, and set a fresh course for Earth.
The main air-tank on his suit was presently exhausted. But it was easy to replace it with a spare from the racks. At last, triumphantly, he brought the Pioneer down toward that bare granite ridge amid the glaciers of Antarctica. Eagerly he followed it, seeking the ark of space.
The lights were out. That was the first alarming thing he saw. He had left the mighty cylinder bathed in a thousand searchlights. Now they were dead. Without their guidance, he searched for a long time across the dimly green-lit desert of ice.
At last he discovered the mighty, mile-long hull, standing high upon its shoring. Stiffened with a strange apprehension, he dropped the mote of the Pioneer beside it. No man was alive there to greet him.
TOOLS lay scattered on the ice.
The great dock, beneath the gangways, was stacked with crated and bagged and barreled supplies, with walls of gold ingots. And snow was drifted everywhere.
Snow banked the golden walls. It half covered the abandoned tools. It whitened the mountains of supplies. An antarctic blizzard had raged here, he knew, since the ark had been abandoned. It must have been many days ago.
He tried to reconstruct the scene, to find some meaning in the mute icebound clues about him. His mind saw the picture as it must have been, before that mysterious tragedy.
The ark of space, looming splendid above the barren glaciers—the last hope of mankind. The swarming workmen, dwarfed to insects by its tremendous bulk, busy with a thousand final details. Stevedores loading the last cargo of Earth. Animals driven up the gangways, two by two. The selected passengers crowding aboard with their goods, hastening toward the promise of a new world and a new life. Armed guards, doubtless, holding back hysterical relatives and friends, the frantic mob of the doomed. Then, suddenly—what?
Cartwright grappled with enigma. The ark had been suddenly abandoned. There were signs of a battle. The supplies and the billions of dollars in gold had not been disturbed. The people—Captain Drumm and Mart Worth and the thousands of their Utopian followers—were simply gone. The thing was as utterly and numbingly mysterious as the vanishing of Pat Wayland.
Perhaps, he thought, the same unknown agency had been to blame. In his first account of the Vanishings, Arro Fournine had said that all those taken had been working on the problem of escape from the Holocaust. Was there some veiled scientific power, which had decreed that men should not survive the nebula?
Things began to look that way, to Cartwright.
Now—what next?
There was nothing, so far as he could see. It was now obviously too late for the ark to be completed, even if work on it could be resumed. Its building had been the final effort, and that had failed. There was nothing else.
For a long time Cartwright stood gazing hopelessly out through the ports of the Pioneer, at the unfinished hulk of the ark and the twilit desert of ice beyond. His weary mind groped for some course of action. But there was none.
He came back, at last, to the needs of his own body. He was trembling, exhausted. For all those weeks of the flight, he had not slept sufficiently, or eaten properly, or been able to relax. He had not recovered from his ordeal in the vacuum.
Mechanically, he opened the faceplate of his helmet and cleaned the dried blood from it. He attached a fresh oxyhelium tank to the pressure suit. At last, wearily, he lifted the Pioneer once more to the citadel on the Moon.
That was a refuge, beyond the reach, he supposed, of whatever had taken all his companions and the men from the ark. He could sleep, there. He could rest. And there was nothing else that mattered, any more. For the world was lost.
The Moon was queerly transformed, in the dim crimson twilight. But he found high-walled Arzachel, and brought the Pioneer down toward the central peak. The white citadel was unchanged. He anchored the Pioneer against a valve, and let himself into the curving corridor. He dragged himself out of the heavy suit—and fell asleep beside it on the floor.
HE woke with a start, and stretched his aching body. Moving heavily, still weary, he bathed, and shaved the yellow stubble from his face, and stumbled at last into the wide white-tiled kitchen where he had so often sat with Worth and Drumm and Pat.
Blackness hung outside the small round ports.
At first, as he listlessly put water and coffee into a percolator and looked in the refrigerator for a slice of frozen ham, there seemed nothing strange about the blackness. Then he realized that the Sun should have been shining.
Icy dread spurred him to a port. Shading its reflecting surface from the lights within, he could see a dying glow of red without. Faintly, it outlined the ragged peaks of Arzachel. He looked for the Earth and the Sun beyond. But he could see only a wall of dull red haze, faintly touched, here and there, with the nebula’s own ominous green.
This, he knew, was the final night. He tried to shrug, and limped back to his bubbling coffee. It didn’t matter. The end might as well come today as tomorrow. For there was no longer any hope for earth and man.
Cartwright had thought that he was hungry. But the frying ham spent its aroma unnoticed. It crackled and sputtered, as he stood staring at the chair that had been Pat Way land’s. At last, before he moved, the grease burst into flame.
He discovered it, suddenly, and poured water into the blazing pan, and moved automatically about the business of cooking another piece. And a sort of courage came back to him as he ate.
It was not hope. For there was no longer any hope. It was merely the rising up in him of something stronger than himself. It was the primal drive of race-preservation.
The thing he must do was obvious. The purpose came to him of itself. He examined it with a curious detachment. He saw that the odds were a million to one against it. But even that realization did not stay him.
In one of the shops in the citadel, he found welding equipment. He put on the pressure-suit again, and went out into the thickening darkness that had fallen upon the Moon.
His first task was to remove the outer valve of one of the air-locks from its hinges. The Earth-weight of the massive steel door was five hundred pounds. But, heaving and pushing and straining, he got it in place at last, on top of the Pioneer, over that ragged hole.
It took him several hours to weld it in place. Even then it was a ragged and unsightly job. But it would hold air, he knew—until the next meteor struck. At last it was done. He made another hasty meal, and took off again for Earth.
The stark simplicity of his purpose almost appalled him.
The Pioneer itself must be the ark of space.
WITH two or three persons aboard, he thought, it might reach that rift in the nebula were Vega had been visible, and so come to safety. To whatever safety, at least, that might exist for the survivors of a lost world, wandering without hope or destination.
He would first land again in Antarctica, beside the abandoned ark of space. He would load the Pioneer from the supplies and the stacks of golden fuel there. Then he would look for a son and a daughter of Utopia—
His fevered thoughts went back again to Pat Wayland. If some miracle should discover her, her platinumhaired loveliness beside him would turn this from a bitterly hopeless task into a splendid adventure.
He shrugged, and pushed away the dream. After all, he had no hope of finding Pat. And, even if he did, she would have something to say about becoming the mother of futurity. He could hear the malicious sweetness of her voice.
“So noble of you, Jay. But let’s play anagrams.”
The Earth had been invisible, lost in the nebula, when he took off from the Moon. He set his course by making observations on the receding Moon. For so short a crossing that should be accurate enough—unless he ran into another dead pocket, and lost his orientation.
Presently the dull crimson disk of the Moon vanished behind him. The Sun made only a dull, indefinite blur. And still the Earth had not appeared. Suddenly the geodes faltered, and a cold numbness seized him.
But, with deft quick hands on the controls, he brought the ship safely past, before the erratic forces of the dead pocket had disturbed the instruments. He set it back upon the course. And at last the Earth came into view.
An Earth queerly changed!
Somehow, it had taken on a strange pearly lusture. The atmosphere seemed covered with a strange shining envelope. The continents and the white blots of cloud were hidden everywhere save at the center of the disk, where he could faintly distinguish the outline of Africa.
A cold dread gripped him. Was that queer film some condensation in the atmosphere from the gases of the nebula? Was it perhaps a toxic vapor that already had annihilated the luckless race?
Another amazing change took place as he watched. Two tufts of flame burst out from the poles of that opalescent globe. A bright, living green—a hue that was oddly familiar—they sprayed out like the lines of force from the poles of a bar magnet.
The milky envelope had been frightening. This was the sheer incredible. Before he could make even an effort to comprehend it, he saw the great meteor.
A vast rock, ragged and dark, came plunging through the greenish-black streamers of the nebula. A dazzling trail of pale-blue luminescence was left behind it.
For an instant, Cartwright thought that it would strike the Pioneer. One hand tensed on the pilot rod, in a desperate effort to fling the little ship aside. The other came up in an automatic useless gesture, to shield his face.
IN an instant, however, he realized his mistake. That hurtling mass was far larger and more distant than had been his first dazed impression—otherwise its terrific velocity would have made it quite invisible.
