Collected Short Fiction, page 396
Jeremy sought the Earth, a cosmic particle that had lived for an instant, danced its brief life-dance about the mother Sun, and now was flung away to perish.
He steered the flying mole back into the Blot’s eerie tentacles. The stars flickered, swam into fantastic new patterns, and were smothered once more in the Blot. Jeremy steered by instruments alone. The silently screaming reactor drove him through utter darkness. Icy fingers of fear clutched at his throat.
IF he happened to approach the wrong side of Earth, he would not see the beacon. He would have no warning, until at the very last moment, when he would crash into the black planet. Perhaps that was the doom that had claimed Ferrand.
Smarting with fatigue, Jeremy’s eyes searched the blank void ahead. It was forty hours, the chronometer told him, since he left the Station. Invincible sleep crept upon him, numbed his fingers, paralyzed his mind tugged at his eyelids.
Grimly he fought it. In a few minutes, an hour, he might glimpse the beacon. He must find it, soon.
For the fuel meter told him that the converter’s solar element was near exhaustion.
Soon the tiny blue sun would flicker out. The motor tube would fail. The heater coils would fade and blacken. The ventilator would stop. The little world of the ship would grow cold and die—as would the underground world of men, when the last power tube failed.
But his weary eyes found only darkness. Rigid at the controls, Jeremy slept—and dreamed. The Blot had passed him, and he was back among the diamond stars. He was a giant, now, striding through their polished splendor. He had no ship or pressure suit or clothing, nor need of any. For he walked amid the suns, and his whole being was vibrant with a supernal power.
He discovered the tiny Earth, dark and alone, blanketed with its frozen atmosphere. He peered into the deep burrows of mankind, and saw the huddled, fearful survivors.
He saw his mother, bent over a tiny red-glowing coil, heating a cup of synthetic tea. He saw Gay Ferrand in her kitchen laboratory, lovely in her white apron, yet cold and afraid. He saw all mankind, and rejoiced in his new power to aid them.
CHAPTER V
Dream of Destiny
IN his dream, Jeremy reached out the might of his arm. He caught the black mass of the Blot, which was creeping away like some bit of formless, unpleasant protoplasm among the stars. He stripped dark tentacles from it, and molded them into a new sphere. He breathed upon the sphere, and it shone with a clear white splendor.
So, in his dream, he made a Sun.
He set the new luminary beside the dark atom of the Earth, and drew his hands away. He watched its rays lift the frozen atmosphere, thaw the incredibly deep white armor from the continents, free the ice-locked seas. The black soil lay nakedly revealed again.
And then a new garment of green swiftly began to cover it.
He looked once more into the deep, crowded refuges of mankind. His mothers thin face rose to his, radiantly transformed by a smile. He saw Gay’s laboratory. She turned, and her dark eyes were joyous. She opened her white arms to him—
And the dream changed. Jeremy woke abruptly.
The chill of the Fault had seeped into the insulated cab, for the heater coils were dim. He started convulsively, rubbed at his eyes, peered through the massive ports. The world was a wall of dead blackness. All the brief elation of his dream turned to bitter despair.
He was no god, striding from star to star, shaping suns with his hands and kindling them with his breath. He was only a man, lost in space. It was unlikely that he would even see the Earth again.
Rubbing his numb hands, he scanned the dials again. The voltage of the converter was falling. The power isotope in the solar element was near exhaustion. Its finish, along with his own, lay close at hand.
He peered out again. Blackness, blank darkness, and he knew the telescope could show nothing more. The smothering clouds of the Blot sprawled too widely, too thickly.
But there—A star!
A wink of white. A ghostly shimmer of red and green. Another wink.
It was the beacon, far aside. He had nearly missed it. He might have crashed on the planet’s dark limb, or gone beyond to perish somewhere in the far reaches of the Blot.
The converter was swiftly failing. He cut off the heater and the ventilator, to conserve all the power for the reactor. Numb and groggy, he brought the mole down at last beside the ice-armored dome.
In his pressure suit, Jeremy managed to get out of the mole. He slipped down into a powdery drift of frozen nitrogen, and found he could not rise again.
BUT a roving searchlight found him.
Parker and Kruger came out through the valve in the side of the dome. Awkward in their suits, they carried him into the Station.
Jeremy gulped hot crow soup, and slept twenty hours. Then he telephoned Mark Drake.
When they returned to New Chicago, he brought with him nothing but his terrible news and his hopeless dream.
The hall of the Regents was a long chamber of gray durite, now grown dingy and old-fashioned. Twelve battered desks occupied the floor. On this solemn day, the public was excluded from the high gallery across the back of the auditorium.
Leland Drake had come from the laboratory to take his place on the rostrum. Stooped with years, he was embittered by his inevitable failure to find a substitute for the power isotope. But he still gripped all the power that was his as First Regent.
Each of the twelve had been selected by Drake to represent some special group or interest. Mark was Regent of Power. Against her will. Gay Ferrand represented the vital, if joked-about, Chemical Research Organization.
In a voice cracked by defeated old age, Leland Drake called the emergency session to order. A hush filled the chamber when Jeremy rose to reveal his awesome discovery. He stood silent for a moment, looking at Mark Drake’s pink, confident face, then at pale, eager, dark-eyed Gay Ferrand.
“Yes,” he began at last, “I’ve found what it was that Paul Ferrand feared. And what he feared has happened.” He paused, gulped. “It is a simple thing. Now it looks quite obvious, though the effects of the Fault have been unpredictable. Ferrand couldn’t have been certain, without actual observation. And he died in the attempt. The Sun is lost—forever!”
The silence of the chamber became a strained, tangible entity. Gay’s tense face turned whiter. Mark Drake smiled a slow, meaningless, automatic smile.
“The Blot is passing, as Ferrand foresaw that it would,” Jeremy said. “I know, because I have been outside it. I have seen the Sun. Now it is no more than a distant yellow star.”
“What—” Leland Drake had to pause and swallow weakly. “What has happened to the Sun?”
“It’s simple when you think about it,” Jeremy replied. “The Earth used to revolve around the Sun like a stone on a string. It moved about half a billion miles a year. The Fault cut the Sun’s gravitation as a knife would cut the string. The Earth moved on. Half a billion miles a year—in a straight line. And the Sun has traveled its own path. In thirty years Earth has moved almost a light year from what was once the solar system. We are alone in space.”
“Oh, Jeremy!” Gay Ferrand stumbled blindly to her feet. “What can we do?”
STARING at her white, stricken face, Jeremy forgot that he stood before the Regents. She looked just as she had appeared in his strange dream.
“I don’t know, Gay,” he said, hardly above a whisper. “I had a queer dream, before I found the Earth again. I dreamed that I had made a new Sun—” Abruptly he looked about the hall, reddened. “If only that were possible! If we could make another Sun!” He shrugged helplessly and sat down. Leland Drake stood up. Never before had the old engineer appeared so crushed. His age-yellowed eyes were dull. For a little time he stood silent, nervously twisting his hands. At last he cleared his throat, and spoke in a weak, broken voice.
“We have lived thirty years in these tunnels. It is not necessary to remind you of what men have suffered. But it is only hope that made us endure our miserable lives—hope of the Sun’s return.”
His bent head quivered beyond control. “It seems to me that this is the end.” Tears gleamed in his sunken eyes. “For thirty years I have labored to release subatomic energy from some material other than the cereum isotope. I have failed.”
His voice quavered, broke completely. It was a long moment of painful silence before he could go on.
“Mr. Cord has dreamed of making a new Sun. But men can’t make Suns . . . I await any suggestion as to what action the Regents can take.”
Mark Drake instantly leaped to his feet. His lean, pink face was lit with its habitual smile. His voice was as easy and confident, as if he were making some routine report.
“Mr. Chairman. As Power Regent, I am familiar with our reserves of the isotope. The situation is indeed serious. Even with extreme economies, the supply will keep the millions of mankind alive for no more than five months. What will happen then, if even extreme rationing cannot prolong our supplies. But, fellow Regents, I have a solution to offer!”
Excitement stirred the chamber. The Regents and their clerks leaned forward eagerly. Mark was the son of his indomitable father—and the Drakes were invincible!
“A simple solution,” Mark Drake continued. “Had you considered that our reserves of the power element would keep a small colony alive for hundreds of years? Perhaps even thousands of years!”
A BREATHLESS hush dropped upon the intent chamber of Regents.
“Take about two hundred men and women,” Mark Drake stated. “Selected, gifted individuals—the cream of humanity. They will perpetuate our kind. Working over an enormously extended period of time, they can’t help but discover a new source of power.”
Gay Ferrand rose abruptly, her expression cold and accusing.
“Mark, what will happen to the others, to all the millions in the refuges?”
The confident smile sobered on Mark Drake’s face.
“They must perish eventually.” He shrugged. “It’s unfortunate, but a few months will make no difference if they’re going to die soon, anyhow. My plan is simply to cut off the power—from everywhere except the level upon which we gather our selected group. And the sooner we do so, the more power will remain for the remaining colony.”
Jeremy felt a chill of silent, bitter protest in the chamber.
“I have been planning this for some time,” Mark Drake added. “I have taken precautions against the danger of revolt. Machine guns are mounted on the bulkheads. There are tanks of poison gas, ready to be turned into the ventilators.”
He smiled again, handsomely.
“I know that you are shocked,” he said. “But think! Think how it is going to feel to die in the dark, of damp creeping cold, and hunger, and slow suffocation. Think of your loved ones dying that way.” His keen eyes rested on Gay Ferrand. “My plan will save the Regents and the scores of those we shall select—and our children.”
Jeremy saw the faces change. He saw outrage giving way to grudging approval. The shock of anger he had felt stormed high in him. He caught his breath, sprang up to claim Leland Drake’s recognition.
“Mr. Chairman! I don’t know how to make a Sun. But it’s too soon to give up the fight.” His blue eyes glittered murderously at Mark Drake. “It’s too soon to select a few, and murder the rest of humanity. There’s still another chance!”
The hollow eyes of Leland Drake blinked at him.
“What chance, Mr. Cord?” the old, defeated voice asked hopelessly.
“Our moles haven’t completely explored the Earth’s crust,” Jeremy said. “There were vast gaps left, especially beneath Antarctica. Perhaps we can yet discover another deposit of the isotope, or something else equally useful.”
MARK DRAKE was still standing. Disregarding parliamentary procedure, he broke in rudely.
“Better stick to making Suns, Jerry. It takes time to explore solid rock. You know how much power we have left. If we have failed for thirty years, what can we hope to do in six months?”
Jeremy Cord held up a thick envelope.
“It won’t take so much time as it has taken,” he snapped. “Or so much power. I have plans here for a new-type mole. For three years I spent every moment off duty to work on it, before I took the Station job.” His voice grew desperately earnest.
“The Silver Mole will be smaller, lighter. The cutting wheel has a new design, with more teeth and higher speed. The new machine will make four times the speed of the old ones. Just give it a chance!”
Grave with warning, Mark Drake looked back at the Regents.
“Do you dare to play with fire? We have never announced Mr. Cord’s discouraging findings. The people still hope for the Sun’s return. But the truth is likely to leak out at any moment. Do you realize what that will mean?” His gray eyes challenged them. “Despair. Violence. We’ll have madmen to deal with. One whisper of the plan I have put to you, and it would fail. The resulting riots would probably mean the death of the human race. The choice, fellow Regents, is yours. Shall it be life or death?”
Gay Ferrand came to her feet again, to support Jeremy.
“Gentlemen, put yourselves in the place of those millions of men, women and children that the Power Regent would have you mercilessly gas to death in their homes.” With regret, rather than anger, she turned her dark eyes toward Mark Drake. “I move that the Regents support Mr. Cord’s plan of exploration.”
Leland Drake looked from the whitefaced girl to his tall son. His bent head shook sadly. At last he straightened himself, and his broken voice quavered with outraged decision.
“So long as I am First Regent, I shall stand for no such cowardly scheme as my son has advanced. I deplore his action. We shall vote on Mr. Cord’s plan.”
The vote was seven to five, to support Jeremy’s program of exploration, using the new moles of his own design. When Leland Drake ruled that the motion had carried, Mark strode smiling to grip Jeremy’s hand.
“You win, Jerry,” he said heartily. “And here’s hoping you find your new Sun, readymade!”
CHAPTER VI
Weird Discovery
THE tiny cab of the Silver Mole rang and quivered to the great wheel’s power. For all the frost-white refrigerator tubes, the air within was always hot, always strong with the reek of acrid fumes from the atomic furnace.
The new mole moved eight miles a day. A novel automatic spectrograph recorded a complete analysis of the rocks it traversed. The debris was fused into durite to wall the tunnel. Any valuable metals it encountered were refined and left stacked behind in bright ingots.
For three strenuous months, Jeremy had seldom left the cab. The controls were almost completely automatic. He was the entire crew, sleeping in snatches on a little folding bunk. He had driven the new tunnel seven hundred miles southward, beneath Antarctica.
Still the films from the spectrograph showed no trace of cereum number 148. In all, a score of the new moles were boring south. And all, Jeremy knew from his brief telephone talks with Mark Drake, had failed.
Jeremy had grown thinner, haggard with fatigue. He was streaked with grease and smoke and rock-dust, dark-tanned by the actinic rays of the purring converter. The endless, mighty drumming of the great wheel had become a part of his very life.
He was sleeping when it happened—dreaming again.
Gay was with him, in the dream, laughing beside him at the controls of the Silver Mole. They turned the machine upward and came out upon the surface. And there they found the new Sun that he had made.
It was shining from a serene blue sky, a sky neither had ever seen, for it held no shadow of the Blot. The gentle hills about them were already bright with new grass. After the long mind-wearing roar of the cutting wheel, the silence of that bright never-known day of spring was joyous, caressing—
Jeremy woke with a convulsive start. The wheel was really silent!
The stillness was shattered, an instant later, by the bellow of the cave-detector siren. Jeremy rolled off the narrow bunk, dived for the controls, reversed the caterpillar drive.
The Silver Mole lurched backward from the cave the wheel had blindly cut into. And then it trembled under the violence of an earthquake shock. Quakes were frequent in the shifting gravity-fields of the Fault. Accustomed to feeling them a dozen times a day, Jeremy was not alarmed—until the mole fell!
DROPPING rocks thundered on it as the mole pitched forward, out of its tunnel. It rolled down some unknown black slope. Boulders smashed deafeningly against the armor. The lights went out.
Jeremy gripped the hand-rails, to save his body from crashing against the projecting instruments. A rending shock tore him away, hammered the breath out of him. Fear caught him in its paralyzing grip. There was no durite above him!
The Silver Mole, as Mark Drake had warned, had a lowered safety factor. A few tons of stone would crush both the machine and the operator. Jeremy didn’t have to be told that. Almost as if he could feel its crushing weight, he thought of the two miles of Earth’s crust above him.
At last, however, the excavator rolled down, turned right side up, and lay still. The roar of falling stone had ceased. Jeremy discovered that, except for a bruised shoulder, he was not damaged. He fumbled in the dark until the dim battery lights came on. But the converter tube was dead.
Cold talons of a new alarm seized his heart.
A quick inspection told him that repair was hopeless. A heavy transformer, shaken from its mount, had smashed the tube. Only good fortune, and heavy safety-field coils, had saved him from a terrific explosion of the solar element. Nothing less than a new tube would move the mole again.
There was a faint chance, he thought, that he could find the end of the tunnel. If it was still uncovered, he could walk back to meet the supply truck. But, if he couldn’t find the tunnel—
He fought to control the panic that shook him.
Hastily he fitted on an oxygen mask. He knew that breathable air was seldom found at such depths. When he found a flashlight, he clambered through the air-lock, out upon a dark slope of shattered stone.
