Collected Short Fiction, page 429
The Child was dead.
CHAPTER IX
SHIVERING with the night wind of the jaramos, Lundoon crouched down in a furrow of the flat dead hand. At last the cold dawn came, and the sun gilded the colossal statue of gray iron that stood on the edge of the bleak plateau.
Soon a small white-winged plane soared over the peaks from the direction of Quito. With a reckless daring that ignored the perils of altitude and blustering wind, it was landed upon the too-small space of the level palm.
Gina Arneth ran eagerly to meet Lundoon.
“I was so afraid, Wendy!” She clung to him, against a rough blast of the wind. “Afraid the giant would fall on you—”
Stiffly, dully, he pushed her away from him.
“Listen, Wendy—please!” Her hurt voice was half swept away on the wind. “Everything’s all right. I told Cotterstone you’d accepted, stayed behind just to keep the giant from suspecting. So the money’s waiting—a hundred million a year!”
She tugged at his arm.
“Come on—before the plane blows away. They sent a special radio. All the world is waiting for you to tell how you destroyed the giant. And Mr. Cotterstone—”
“Get away,” he said faintly.
She saw the bleak agony on his face.
“Wendy!” Her voice was sharp with concern. “Darling, are you ill?”
“Blood money!” He staggered before the wind, toward the iron hand’s edge. The girl dragged him back, herself white with fear of the gulf below. “A better price,” he muttered, “than Judas got.”
“Come on,” she begged him.
“I’m going to jump.” His voice was dead. “After Andy and Dr. Kallent and the Child.”
“No, Wendy—no!” Her tone was thin with dread. “You can’t do that—not now.” She pulled, against the wind.
Lundoon looked at her, bleakly.
“No, Gina, I won’t. I’ve got to go on living. All of them left me their jobs. Now I’ve got the Child’s. I’ll have to carry on with that—as far as a human can.” He nodded soberly. “To begin with, there’s the cold antivirus—”
He lifted a hand toward that gray colossal head, and his lips smiled faintly. Then he followed Gina Arneth to the tiny plane, which, even in the hollow of the palm, was shuddering before the wind. Gina Arneth gave him the microphone.
“Hello, Cotter stone—”
His voice was hoarse and choked.
“Yes, the Child of Science is dead.
A god, he died so that men might live. You killed him, Cotterstone—and that is a murder that even you can hardly forget. But I am to blame, for letting the weapon reach your hands. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to do the Child’s work. And this will serve notice that I’m not going to touch the murder-money.”
HE dropped the microphone, and looked at the breathless girl. “Drop me, somewhere, Gina,” he said faintly. “On some beach or highway. Because this has got to be the end of Lundoon. He has too much to live down—and Cotterstone would never let him rest, with the azoic ray. But somebody else can go on—somewhere.”
“Drop me and leave me.” His trembling hand closed desperately on the gun in his pocket. “Then you can go back—” His voice was a tired bitter rasp. “Back to Cotterstone and his bloody millions—”
She sat rigid, stricken, in the air-coupe beside him.
“Don’t—Wendy!” Agony sobbed in her voice. “Please—don’t rub it in.” Wide and black and dry, her eyes looked into his face. “I see now that I have done a dreadful thing.” Her voice was quiet and low. “I know that it can’t ever be forgiven or undone. It will be a burden on me, always. But may I go with you, Wendy—-and try to do the little that I can.”
For a long time Lundoon sat as rigid as the gray iron form of the Child. The wind shook and lifted the plane on the great open palm. Lundoon looked up through the glass at the majestic still features of the child, and the stern bitterness melted slowly from his eyes. He put his arm around the weeping girl.
“I forgive you, Gina,” he whispered. “I think the Child would want me to.” The Child’s frozen body was decreed public property by the government of Ecuador. Peru, however, made a counter-claim, since it stood upon disputed territory. Both nations armed for war.
The quarrel was finally arbitrated, however, and both parties sold their claims to meet munitions bills. The buyer turned out to be a subsidiary of World Chemical and Steel—which had sold the armament.
It proved a shrewd investment. Besides the almost worthless iron, the Child’s body contained enough radium, platinum, osmium, and other valuable metals to yield a net return of eighty dollars a ton. The net profit to the Cotterstone interests was estimated at more than two billion dollars.
One fragment, however, was preserved from the furnace. Anonymously purchased from Mr. Cotterstone, the metal was cut into a massive twenty-foot pillar, and erected upon the spot where the Child had died. Into its rustless gray metal was cut:
IN MEMORY OF THE CHILD OF SCIENCE—A MAN WHO DIED THAT MEN MIGHT LIVE
A landing field was leveled on the bleak plateau beside the gray pillar. Among the visitors who came one day was a certain Dr. Smith—who, if he had been less self-effacing, might have been recognized as the conqueror of the common cold. He was accompanied by his lovely flame-haired wife, and their son.
Staring across at the mysterious remains of those colossal black machines, whose adamantine material had defied Cotterstone’s salvage crews, the blue eyed boy listened eagerly to their stories of the Child.
“Dad!” he cried. “Mom, when I grow up, I want to be like the Child was—strong and wonderful and good.” Dr. Smith and Gina smiled.
Gateway to Paradise
AMERICA BECOMES THE LAST OASIS IN A DESERT WORLD THAT RIVALS THE PLANET MARS!
CHAPTER I
Wall Around America
BARRY SHANE first saw the Ring on the summer before he was nine. It was like a gigantic glass bowl turned upside-down over America.
Barry had come alone on the monorail to visit his grandfather. It was a thrilling thing to have his own compartment in the big teardrop that skimmed so fast and silently along the high, thin rail.
Grandfather Barry lived in a little, blue plastoid cottage on the shore of California Corporation, not a mile from where the Ring cut in from the sea. He was a lean, spry, cheerful man, with a bright Ring Guard medal on his breast.
“Can I go to the Ring?” Barry demanded at once.
The invisible wall had fascinated the youngster from his first glimpse of it at the monorail station. Inside it, his grandfather’s spotted cow was grazing in the green meadow. The sea below the cliffs was alive with dancing waves. But on the other side of the wall, the hills were brown and dead. Outside, there was no sea.
“Better keep inside the fence,” warned the old man in a cracked, kindly voice. “There are thing Outside a little boy shouldn’t see. Besides, you’ll get in trouble with the Guard.”
“Why, Grampa?” Barry wanted to know.
“The Guard has to protect the Ring,” the lean old Guardsman explained. “If anything happened to it, you see, all our air might explode into the vacuum outside. That would kill everybody in America. Once a man named Brock was experimenting with a machine to cut a door in the vibration wall. Something went wrong. The hole must have been larger than he intended, because the air started rushing out in a terrible wind. Dr. Brock, along with several hundred other people, was swept Outside to die.”
“Oh, Mother told me!” cried Barry. “You stopped Brock’s machine. That’s how you got your medal.”
The old Guardsman smiled and nodded.
“I managed to crash my patrol plane into the machine. That stopped the interfering radiation and the hole in the Ring closed itself.” He sighed. “That was fifty years ago.”
Barry’s face glowed with eager determination.
“When I grow up,” he declared, “I’m going to be a Guardsman.”
“Your father will have something to say about that.” Grandfather Barry’s kind eyes looked sad. “He’ll want you to be a director of Chicago Corporation and president of Uranatomic Central, like himself. I’d want to see you become a Guard, Barry. Maybe your mother would. But Patterson Shane will never let you give up his millions for anything so foolish as the Guard.”
BARRY puzzled over that statement. It didn’t make sense to his young mind.
“Can anybody go Outside?” he asked. “Ever?”
“Brock wasn’t the first to try, or the last. They’ve all been killed. The disasters they caused killed several thousand others, but they seem to keep trying, in spite of the Guard. Perhaps some day a safe way out will be found, a way that will cause no harm.”
“I want to go Outside,” Barry stated. “I’ll find a way.”
Next day, playing with his kite, he went toward the strange wall, for the forbidden mystery of it drew him like a magnet. Fifty yards within that great, invisible curve, the fields stopped. On a tall wire fence hung signs that read:
KEEP OUT
Order of the Ring Guard
Beyond the fence was a dusty road, still within the Ring. Waiting on the hill, he watched a silent electric patrol car come to the end of the road above the cliffs and turn back. When it was out of sight, he slipped under the fence and ran across the road.
Beyond the road was a strip of weeds. The weeds were ended by the Ring. He crouched in them, close to the barrier, staring at it.
The Ring was clearer than glass, absolutely invisible. There wasn’t even a speck of dust on it. It felt harder and more slippery than any glass, and neither hot nor cold. It turned the point of his pocket-knife, though he could see that it had no thickness.
Horrible things lay close Outside. They were brown and dry and dead, sprawled on the bleached, dead grass. Packs and bundles lay beside them—cooking things and tattered blankets. He recognized the skeletons of men and women, babies and donkeys. One brown, mummied hand clutched a torn newspaper.
With his face pressed against that hard, invisible wall, Barry tried to spell out a headline. La Stella Negra. It must be Spanish. These people must have come up out of Mexico to seek the Ring’s shelter, only they had been too late.
Suddenly he felt ill. He looked away toward the Pacific. Inside the Ring, blue water glinted in the Sun. Far away he could see the white, tiny sails of fishing boats. But Outside, beyond the cliffs and the sea-worn beach, were only a strange and terrible desert, dark, treeless hills and tawny plains of baked, dark-fissured sea mud.
The sky was queerly black Outside, because there was no air to make a proper sky. Every shadow was harsh and cold and solid. The dead lands slanted down and down forever into the dry, mysterious chasm where the vanished ocean once had flowed.
What was at the bottom of that forbidden pit? One day, Barry Shane promised himself, he would find out.
IT startled him to discover his grandfather standing beyond the fence behind him. Grinning sheepishly, he got up out of the weeds and went back across the road. He looked anxiously into the old man’s face.
“Are you angry with me, Grampa?” he asked.
The seamed face looked almost stern.
“You didn’t meant any harm, but the Guard has to keep people away from the Ring. The life of America depends on it.” The old Guardsman smiled suddenly. “I was a boy once, so I know how you feel. But you better get back on this side of the fence before a patrol comes along.”
Barry slipped under the fence and gratefully took the thin, gnarled hand.
“Tell me, Grampa, what was it like, really—I mean before there was a Ring? And what happened then? Mother and my teachers told me a little, but I never saw the Ring. It’s hard to think how things could be so different.”
As they stood there on the green hill, looking through the wonderful transparent wall that was their only shelter from the changeless death that held everything Outside, the veteran told him the Ring’s amazing story.
“It happened nearly two hundred years ago, back in nineteen forty-four. Before that there was air everywhere. The seas were filled with water and men could live on all the continents. Even America was different then. There was more wind and the tides rose many feet instead of inches. Sometimes there were great storms and in the winter cold waves came down from the polar regions. But there was more rain and the population was twice our sixty-eight millions.
“Victor Barry had invented the new science of ultra-electronics. In nineteen forty-two he built his ultradyne-drive space ship. Vic Barry was my great-great-great-grandfather.” The wrinkled face beamed proudly. “And you were named for him.”
“Mother told me that,” agreed Barry Shane.
Automatically the old Guardsman’s gnarled hands began to fill his battered pipe.
“With the astronomer Tyne, Vic Barry reached the Moon—”
In a puzzled voice, the boy interrupted:
“Tell me about the Moon.”
“That’s another thing the Earth lost, along with her atmosphere and her seas,” the old man said. “The Moon was another, smaller world. It used to circle around the Earth, a quarter of a million miles away. Barry and Tyne found that it was mostly ice—which the Cosmic Ice Theory had already suggested—around just a core of rock. They set up a telescope on the Moon. The seeing was better there, because it had no air. Soon Tyne discovered the Dwarf—”
“What was the Dwarf, Grampa?”
“It was a small, heavy, dark world, a dead sun of the degenerate matter called neutronium. It was smaller than the Moon, but heavier than Jupiter. The two men got safely back with their warning. Tyne predicted that the Dwarf would miss the Earth. It wouldn’t even change the Earth’s orbit greatly. But its terrific tidal pull would peel off the Earth’s atmosphere and its seas, as Tyne put it, like the skin of an orange.”
BARRY SHANE peered breathlessly down into that stark, bare abyss, which once the sea had filled. It was difficult to think of America without the Ring, of a world with no Outside. Waiting anxiously for the old man to light the pipe, he made no sound.
“Vic Barry found a way to protect America,” the veteran went on. “He invented a new kind of ultradyne tube that created a static wall of ultra-electronic vibration. A globe-shaped warp in space is the thing we call the Ring.” Those words sounded bewildering and difficult. The boy looked with worried eyes toward the invisible line that divided the peaceful life of the meadows and the sea from the brown, dead Outside. The words were hard to understand, but the Ring itself was real enough.
“It’s transparent to light and gravity and radio waves,” the old man went on. “But it’s stronger than anything material like pressure—because the space warp, the engineers say, just turns pressure back against itself. Vic Barry designed an ultradyne tube big enough to protect all America. He installed it in the Ring Cylinder, in what is now Midwest Corporation. It was completed just a few weeks before the Dwarf came.
“Of course the gravitation of the Dwarf reached through the Ring. There were tidal waves inside and terrible storms and quakes. But it stopped the great wave, which swept the rest of the Earth and it kept our air from escaping. Most of the coastal cities were destroyed, but America lived on.”
Barry Shane looked back toward the brown, dead things Outside, that were now mercifully screened by the strip of weeds. He tried not to shudder.
“What about the other people Outside?” he whispered.
“They all perished. Vic Berry tried to save them. He built plenty of ultradyne tubes and sent one to every continent, with engineers to install it. But a war was going on. Some of the tubes were sunk by submarines and some of them were dive-bombed later. Finally, after the armistice, all the countries were too crippled to complete the installations in time.
“Of course some refugees reached America. Vic Barry kept the Ring open till the last moment.” He nodded gravely at the things beyond the weeds. “They came too late.”
The boy turned away from the things Outside. The old man took his hand and they started back across the meadows toward the little blue cottage.
“Go on, Grampa,” Barry urged.
“The Dwarf passed,” the Guardsman resumed. “All the Earth Outside was swept clean of seas and air. Even the polar ice was broken up and floated away. The Moon was captured by the Dwarf and followed it away into space. The Age of the Ring began. You’ll be studying about it in your history books. America had suffered. Millions were dead. The coastal cities were ruined. Chicago, where your father lives, became the greatest city.
“You’ll study about the Reconstruction. How America tried to adjust herself to real isolation. How science struggled to find substitutes for raw materials cut off by the Ring. How the forty-eight states were replaced with a dozen new Corporations, planned to give all the people the most liberty and security.
“You’ll learn how Uranatomic Central Power was organized—and how your father got control of it thirty years ago. How the monorail system was built. And how the Ring Guard was formed, after a reckless experimenter had made the first disastrous hole in the Ring.”
YOUNG Barry Shane looked back toward that tawny abyss of hostile mystery, where once the sea had flowed.
“One day,” he said, “I’m going Outside.”
Grandfather Barry shook his weary head.
“Many men have wanted to. We need the mineral wealth Outside—metals and oil and coal, uranium for your father’s company. But there’s a terrible danger.”
His solemn eyes looked down at the boy.
“Remember, the invisible wall of the Ring is all that keeps America from being like Outside. The air is pressing out against it, fifteen pounds on every square inch, here at sea-level. If that pressure ever escapes, America will die. Nobody has ever found a safe way through the Ring. You can’t burrow under it. The force goes down several miles.
