Collected Short Fiction, page 36
Spies succeeded in reaching the island, and brought back the news that eight space fliers were in course of construction there.
When the news was made public, the greatest excitement reigned. Men were loyal to the corporations with a real loyalty. Men loved Metals or Tranco with an affection as deep as that which their ancestors had had for England or America. Soldiers were willing to fight for their corporation not only for pay, but because they believed in it, loved it, because their homes and their lives depended upon its defense.
My father was as patriotic as any man; at the first threat of war he hastened to volunteer to enter the forces of Metals Corporation, even though it meant indefinite postponement of his plans for emigration.
I remember very clearly the day when he came home, at an unusual hour in the afternoon, with tears in his eyes, to tell mother and Valence and me that he had entered the army, that he had to go away that night. For long hours we sat in our little drawing-room in the great hotel. Father held me in his lap. They talked of our plans, and how they had failed. Then father kissed us all and went away. I saw the hopefulness and forced cheer of the parting; the fear and the tragedy of it I did not understand until long after.
The next day the great city was oddly still, and a fleet of space ships floated like silver bubbles in the air above it. Those who had not been called to war gathered in little groups and talked, usually in tones unconsciously lowered, though sometimes there was shouting and hysterical laughter. Metals and Tranco were at each other’s throats, in a struggle that had flared up, almost overnight.
WE saw none of the fighting in Pittsburgh. But there was much hand-to-hand conflict, with heavy loss of life, in localities where men of both corporations were living side by side. New York, Galveston, London, Tokio, and Perth—great seaports owned by Tranco—had been swept by “D-rays” from the space fliers of the Metals Corporation, and by way of retaliation, the air fleets of Tranco dealt considerable damage by dropping bombs on the territory of Metals that was not protected by fleets of space fliers.
Before the end of the day, a treaty of peace had been concluded. Such a war was too deadly to last for long without the ruin of the earth. Tranco was compelled to yield the victory, since the floating island, with all the unfinished ships upon it, had been destroyed by a fleet of Metals’s space fliers.
The rediscoverer of the atomic blast, one Dr. Vardon, had perished on the island, it became known. It was said that he had a family, a wife and baby daughter, who had been left in America. But no trace of them was found by agents of Metals.
Tranco had to acknowledge defeat, since it seemed that everyone to whom Vardon had revealed his discovery had died with him.
It was several weeks before we heard from my father. Mother must have been in the most acute anxiety under the fear that he had been killed, but heroic woman that she was, she let Valence and me know nothing of it. It was long years later that she told me of the horror of her days of waiting, of the dreams of her restless nights. To us she was always gay and smiling, with the promise that father would soon be back.
At last she heard that he was on a hospital island off Borneo, convalescing from the effects of exposure to the D-ray. This ray, beyond its deadly range, produces severe burns, resembling those of the X-ray or of radium, coupled with temporary blindness and a curious nervous disorder.
Father was among the hundreds of wounded men picked up from the crew of a space flier that had been sent down in the last attack on the fortified floating island. His vessel had carried on after the side of it had been cut away by the disintegrator rays, and been the first to break through the screen-ray defense. Picked up with his dead and wounded fellows from the floating wreck of the ship, he had lain for many days unconscious and unidentified. At last he had come to, on the hospital island, and had been able to give his name. He was immediately put in telephone communication with my mother, and we heard his dear voice coming over the wires. All the time mother had told us that he was well—I wondered why she laughed and cried so much, by turns, when we heard.
There were more long weeks of waiting, before he was able to leave the island. Mother thought of going to be with him, but he would hear nothing of it, insisting that she stay with us children.
I remember very well the day he came back, a tall, slim young man, his face strangely drawn and pain-furrowed, not smooth and tanned as it had been. But still he could laugh. He brought me a wonderful toy he had found somewhere in the shops of the East; and his return was a splendid holiday.
It was several months before he was able to be up very much—his convalescence was alarmingly slow. As the time for the sailing of the Venus drew near, his gaiety grew more forced, and even a child as I was, I realized that something was the matter.
But still my parents let me have the pleasure of packing and repacking my toys, for the trip to the moon. They did not tell me that the greatest specialists of the day were doubtful of father’s complete recovery, that they thought he would never be able to stand the hardships of the long voyage to the satellite.
One splendid evening, he came down from the landing platforms with a triumphant smile on his tired face. He told mother of an examination by a great radiotherapathist, who had given him a new treatment, and promised complete recovery. He might even be able to start on the Venus, as we had planned.
At last came the month of August, and the week and the day of sailing. I remember very clearly my impatience, my delight when the doctors said father could go, the thrills of packing my baggage. My dearest possession, the little helicopter, had to be left behind, because it would be too heavy to fly in the thin air of the moon. But in the thrill of setting out, I was reconciled even to that loss.
We left the little bare room, that looked so strange with the familiar articles of furniture taken away, and ascended to the landing platforms. From there we went by air to the great landing place for the space ships, beyond the city. All the vast, strange space-port, with its whisper of machines and hum of human voices, its platforms laden with the bright metal ingots and the strangely scented bales of costly drugs from the moon, and stacked with the wooden crates of food and luxuries and machinery consigned to the lunar cities—the picturesque confusion of it all was a little terrifying to me, and I held mother’s hand, while father carried little Fay.
Father showed our tickets at the gate, and as we went through I remember worrying about why we didn’t carry our baggage along with us. We walked out on the vast, high-walled field, with the colossal, white ships scattered over it like titanic balls of polished silver.
A freighter was just coming in from the moon. The spidery steel framework of the landing platform was extended, a great slender tower in the center of the field, a mile away from us, supporting the great cradle five hundred feet in the air. With the others, I watched the morning sky above. A white speck, tiny and bright, drifted into the blue abyss. For a time it seemed to hang still in the sky, growing larger and brighter. At last I could see it as a tiny white ball, lit on the east by the morning sunshine until it looked like a little crescent moon, and veiled in the weirdly colored mists of the atomic blast which was checking its fall. Amazingly, it grew vast, dropping toward the platform. The two hundred-foot globe struck the cradle, which swung down as the tower folded into its foundation, yielding to the momentum of the mighty ship of space, catching it as a skilled player does a ball.
It takes a skilful pilot, indeed, to bring a space flier down on the ground, or on the rocky surface of the moon, without a wreck. But there is one class of men, the pirates and smugglers of the space-lanes, who, because they never have the use of elaborate landing towers, are perforce experts at it.
Now the cradle, on its great rollers, was moved off the platform, which had sunk level with the field, carrying the silver ship to the warehouses at the edge of the wide enclosure. And another cradle, with a vast argent sphere upon it, was moved to the platform top.
“That is the Venus,” father said. “That is the ship that will carry us to the moon.”
CHAPTER IV
The Voyage to the Moon
ODDLY enough, though it was all the most thrilling experience of my early life, I have no clear memory of our going aboard. I have but one or two pictures. One of the vastness of the mirror-like surface of the ship that bulged out above us as we stood at the base of the steps which reached up to the circular opening. Another, of the inside of the vessel, of huge, strange, naked machines, of great bare girders, of uncovered metal plates with rows of rivet heads, of sharp, bright lights blazing here and there in a gloomy confusion of exposed metal things. It was somehow like a forbidden glimpse of the vitals of some huge monster. And it all had a curiously topsy-turvy aspect—floors tilted or inverted, hand rails and ladders everywhere.
Then I remember the bare little room in the rim of the great wheel that formed the core of the ship. It was an amazing place to my young mind, with its two floors—one now a wall—with its beds, table, and electric stove fastened in place, yet ingeniously contrived to be tilted over for use when that vertical wall became the floor.
But soon the novelty wore off. We had but the single little room, reached by a sort of ladder from the elevator tube that was the axis of the ship. There were no windows—I could not see beyond the white walls lit by our single light. And it was very still.
I remember sitting there a long time, after we had come aboard, dangling my feet from the edge of one of the bunks, and watching my shadow on the unbroken wall. Father had gone out, and Valence had tagged along behind him. Mother was holding Fay in her arms, crooning to her. The strangeness and the stillness grew terrible.
When father and Valence returned, I learned that we had not left the earth. They had hardly entered from the ladder when a brisk metallic voice shouted from a little black disk on the wall.
“The Venus ascends in three minutes. Passengers are advised to prepare for the shock.”
Father made us all lie down on the beds. Suddenly I felt immensely heavy, as the folding tower raised the cradle, catapulting the ship into the air. For many minutes the sensation of excess weight continued, as the atomic blast projectors were building up our speed to the velocity of seven miles per second, necessary to escape the gravitation of the earth.
Then came again the harsh, metallic voice from the wall.
“Warning! Acceleration is about to cease. The centrifugal wheel will be set in rotation. Passengers will prepare for the change.”
Strangely, I felt myself grow lighter and lighter, until I almost floated off the bed. The sensation was strangely terrifying—I felt that I was falling headlong, that all about me was falling too. There was a peculiarly unpleasant sensation in my stomach.
Then presently I felt another force, that was pulling me out against the side of the room that had seemed a wall a moment before. Now, suddenly, it seemed to be down, and the other floor was vertical. Now I could see the need of the ladder that came down into our room from the center of the ship. The great wheel had begun to turn; centrifugal force was drawing us toward its rim.
In a few moments we were standing on that new floor. The force due to the wheel’s rotation was only about one-sixth that of gravity (or about the same as the pull of the moon). It was intended not only to make it possible to walk naturally, to sit or to lie down, to eat and to handle liquids, but to guard against that form of space-sickness which is caused by the reduced pull of gravity on the brain and the fluids of the semicircular canals in the ear.
I tried to walk and made an amazing discovery. I sailed half across the little room, and fell sprawling on the floor, yet so softly that I was not hurt. When I had mastered my balance, I found that I could perform the wildest feats of jumping—I could float to the ceiling and sail down very easily.
But in half an hour, space-sickness began to come upon me, hastened perhaps, by my activity. I felt sickness and nausea, a horrible sensation of headlong falling, and a dull, intolerable ache in the head. I was too sick to eat—or even sit up—when a steward brought us food in a great vacuum container.
The ship’s doctor came in. He was a fat, kindly man, with crossed eyes and a little red mustache. He laughed and joked with my father, and talked to me while he was taking my temperature. Then he gave me a dose of something bitter that had to be washed down with a glass of water, and told me to go to sleep, which I presently did, feeling utterly miserable because I was too sick to listen to his talk.
When I woke I felt a little better, though I had a leaden, throbbing ache in the head for many days, until my brain was accustomed to the lessened pressure of gravity. I found father and mother both sitting up, and mother was holding little Fay, who was crying fretfully. Valence had opened a trunk to get some pictures and bits of bric-a-brac to adorn the bare walls of the little room.
LONG days went by, measured only by father’s watch, and by the time we slept, and by the coming of the man with the vacuum tubes of food. In a day or two, our bodies were largely adjusted to the lightened gravity; but another kind of space-sickness came upon us.
It was that due to the lack of vitamine J, which is found in natural air, but not in the artificial air of the space ships. It is thought to be formed by the action of certain unidentified bacteria working in green plants, and all efforts to synthetize it have been in vain.
The symptoms of this form of space-sickness are more severe and more alarming than those of the other. They include anemia, rapid breathing and palpitation of the heart, and a greenish hue of the complexion. Unless oxygen is administered, death is almost certain. And in spite of the best the doctors could do, fully one in twelve of the passengers to the moon at that time died of the malady.
Some have a higher natural resistance to it than others. My parents and Valence and I were only slightly affected, and the kindly old doctor assured us of our safety. But the case of little Fay was more serious. He shook his head doubtfully when we asked him about her.
Several times the good fellow stayed with the sick child and sent the four of us to the deck for exercise. We climbed the ladder to the hollow axle of the great wheel, and then—utterly free of weight—we drew ourselves along it to a great metal floor at the top of the globe. All about the edge were tiny windows.
I remember looking out into space—deepest midnight flecked with flashing stars, an abyss of utter blackness, in which the many-colored stars swam cold and motionless and very bright. Father pointed out the earth. It was a huge globe of misty green, splotched with patches of startling white. I asked to see the sun, was told that it was so bright that it would blind me to look upon it.
I believe that it was on our fourth day out that a strange ship was sighted. The sunlight, gleaming on the polished shell of a space ship, makes it visible telescopically for hundreds of miles; and we passed far around the stranger. It seemed to be hanging still, as though waiting; and the officers feared that it was a pirate of space.
It did not pursue us, but our change in course was probably responsible for the accident that did take place. The men at the telescopes were watching the strange ship and a meteorite struck the ship.
I remember the thundering crash of the collision, and the sickening lurch of the ship. Then there was a thin, whistling scream, the sound of our precious air hissing out into space. For a moment that was the only sound; then I heard a medley of shouts of alarm and screams of terror from the passenger quarters about us in the rim, and the stern commands of the ship’s officers.
Fortunately, the inner shell of the ship had not been seriously torn, and soon the break was repaired. Mechanics in space-suits went out through the air-locks and replaced the reflector surface which had been ripped off by the glancing blow of the hurtling stone.
The worst effect of the accident was the psychological one. The blow had been very sudden. No man knew when another iron wanderer of space might come tearing into the ship. The nervous strain grew intolerable. Many of the passengers grew hysterical under the strain, and there were two suicides.
I remember meeting the family in the next compartment. They were poor people—farmers who had left the great Iowa plantations of the Food Corporation. The father, two grown sons, and a daughter had bound themselves to work long periods for the Metals Corporation, to pay for the passage of the family. They were honest, cheerful people, and some degree of friendship sprang up between our families.
But in these long, lonely days in the crowded, uncomfortable compartments, when every passenger was suffering somewhat from space-sickness, and from the ever-present fear of meteoric collision, there was little room for social pleasures.
The earth seemed very remote; one felt almost as if it had ceased to exist. All the world of men, that once had been of such vital concern, was gone. The life that we had known seemed a fading page of half-forgotten history. The cramped ship, with all its discomforts and terrors, was the only real thing. It was almost as if we were dead and in the tomb.
Hope—the Mecca of the Moon—was all that made it endurable.
My little sister, Fay, was still sick. For long weeks we cared for her, hoping that she would last until the end of the voyage would bring a chance for recovery. But on the nineteenth day, when we were but three days from the satellite, she died.
In the two years that she had lived, I had come to love her very dearly, and her death—when at last I understood what it meant—left a dull, restless pain in my heart. All the night after, mother sat crying, and father walked up and down the room, with a strange drawn look on his face. But after that, they showed little outward signs of grief.
There was another funeral—there had been many of them during the voyage. With the few friends we had on board, we gathered about the little wrapped body on the great metal deck above the rotating centrifugal wheel. The captain of the vessel, a lean, hard-faced man, read a short service. Then men in oxygen helmets and space suits took up the tiny coffin, and carried it through the air lock, and tossed it outside. Watching it through the thick windows, we saw it explode violently as it shot out into the vacuum of space.
